Kwakkelde Kwak

Sephy McCaw wrote: 5400rpm is standard for laptops... but you would expect for such a gaming laptop like that it would have an SSD included... Exactly, that's what I thought, especially at that price. and you must remember that laptop version are lower voltage then there desktop counterparts so they can run of the battery, so nothing is overkill when it comes to them. I'd say the opposite. Since you need to run of a battery, two high end cards (even if not as powerful as their desktop counterparts) will drain the battery quite fast, without much benefit in SL performance.

Toragon Arado wrote: It can happen soon after log in to SL, so it's not an overheating problem on the graphics card. I've had cooling issues in the past, on a desktop with a passively cooled card. The temp when running SL could litterally shoot up to 90C in under a minute. So unless "soon" means 5 seconds, it could very well be an overheating issue.

The second video card is overkill. SL doesn't understand SLI or crossfire as far as I know, so one of the two cards will be totally useless. Not that a single one can't handle SL just fine, if the drivers work that is. 24GB of RAM is overkill. Unless you run something like 3 3D applications and 5 games in the background. SL can't use more than 2GB. I have 16GB and can run a 3D and 2D application, a graphical one, two viewers, a webbrowser and have a 1GB RAMdisk without any issues. Most people won't use that much memory at once for another good couple of years. That i7 is overkill, an i5 (or even i3) will run SL just fine. That said, overkill is not a bad thing if money is no issue, this laptop should last quite a while. Only thing that looks a bit out of tune is the HD at 5400 rpm, or is that normal for a laptop?

I can only speak for myself, but am pretty sure Chosen and Drongle (and many others with more knowledge/experience/understanding than the average SL resident) also learn every day as well as any other person. I explicitly mentioned "not intended", I'm sure this exercise wasn't ment to find any loopholes in the system. But the exercise might be done the wrong way. If you had started out with the problem, "I need to go up and forward" and had taken into account the number one rule of realtime rendering (or real time physics calculation in this case) "don't use more than you need", you might have ended up with a single plane yourself. It has its pros and cons, reducing lag is just one of the factors. As shown in the picture, you can stand on a single step, which isn't possible on the sloped plane. So if the stairs are for example placed in a meeting area and people will stand on it rather than walk, this might actually be the "best" way to do it. As a sidenote, the physics shape doesn't have to be a simplification of the visible object. Recently I made some parts where the physical model had more geometry than the visible model. This was to get rid of the bump bump bump I mentioned earlier.

Rya Nitely wrote: Oh, and using a sloped plane doesn't work for me. In the preview window it is always horizontal, and when uploaded it creates a barrier in front of the steps. Not sure why this happens to me. In Maya the plane is sloped perfectly to cover the steps. My best guess is you didn't delete history or whatsitcalled in Maya. The rotation of the plane before export should read 0,0,0. The result won't be as accurate visually as what you have now, but like I said before, the walk would be a lot smoother and it would be a lot easier on the physics engine. What you have now btw, without intention I think, is a way to cheat the physics weight calculation. The planes are big, but they act as small ones, the only parts you'll ever touch are pretty small. Small means lots of collisions to the physics weight calculation, so that means a high landimpact. Making the planes bigger doesn't change the actual behaviour/load in any way, but it does lower the landimpact. Instead of cheating you could call that being clever, that's up to you. I call it cheating:) Either way, the low landimpact is not a good representation of the actual load on the physics engine.

I think you left out the most basic and probably best option for stairs physics. Just use a single sloped plane. For balls rolling down a stair it won't be the best representation, but for walking avatars it will be. No bump bump bump walking up the stairs and almost no load on the physics engine. A low landimpact isn't the only thing to aim for.

Spibe wrote: Skin Wrap can actually be imported without a problem in SL though? Skin wrap is a modifier, you can't import a modifier, just like you can't import a "bend" or "twist". You can export the resulting model, which I assume is what you ment. Just add the modifier to your clothing, pick the avatar pieces and it will move with your skeleton. Then for finetuning, which is most likely needed as well, add a skin modifier so you can paint in or type in some corrections. You can upload the result to SL, in my personal experience without a problem. DAE export and SL import details can be found on the Wiki page I posted earlier. If you have no intentions to ever rig anything besides SL models, you could be better off using Blender. You said it yourself, there are a lot more residents using Blender and there are a lot more tutorials on the subject. 3ds Max is the industry standard for games though, so if you consider broadening your market past SL, that might be the better choice and time invested will pay itself off.

Spibe wrote: Blender has an addon script that allows you to copy the weights from the SL model that you modeled off of. As far as I'm aware, I don't think 3ds Max has one. Of course any serious 3d program has such a function. 3ds Max has it by default, it's called skin wrap.

Spibe wrote: Or even better find a 3ds max equivalent of a simple way to rig. Rigging in 3ds Max for SL is the same as rigging in 3ds Max for any other purpose. You can't use the full biped rig, which has more bones than the SL avatar, but it will work with "normal" bones. What exactly is the problem? Everything you need to know to create a rigged mesh can be found in the Wiki.

I suspect the sculpt itself. To make sure it's not just you, the simple thing to do is ask someone else if they see the same. (Make sure that other peron doesn't have the RenderVolumeLODFactor at 8)

Ngozi Faith wrote: Anyone had issues installing 3ds 2012/2013? I'll continue searching for a solution. No idea where you'd get the 2012 version in a legal way. To my best knowledge Autodesk only offers the latest version and licenses normally aren't transferrable. If you are having problems installing 3ds Max 2013, contact Autodesk 3ds Max Services & Support, top of the screen.

Although I agree the statement by jj is probably nonsense, I've met enough ignorant people with too much money both in SL and RL. I was just pointing out why 2 690's are complete nonsense for SL. As long as SLI isn't supported,(and in the hypothetical situation where SL would use the entire potential of the GPU), a single 680 will perform better. Not sure about the memory on a 690 btw, whether that's shared or split by the 2 GPU's. If both GPU's in that "package" have 2 GB, the 680 with 4 GB will outperform it even more. (I assume the memory is shared, so one GPU can use all of it) I miss the folded in half avatars btw:)

Coventina Dalgleish wrote: As far as the guy running the 2 690's maybe he should check the SL specs since SL has no idea of what to do with the SLI setup Hey Cov, even worse with 690's since they are two slightly tuned down 680's in SLI boxed into one package. So that would be a 4way SLI. SL will only use one underclocked 680. So if the 690's are used primarily for SL, that means 1500+ bucks of unused graphical potential. I really can't think of many situations where two 690's make a difference. If used for games, the second card will generate the fps you will never see unless you have a 100Hz monitor. If used for professional purposes, a professional card (quadro) would probably be the better choice.

No textures loading? Some areas not available on login? Trouble uploading mesh? Not sure, but that has got "bad connection" written all over it. Could be on either end or anywhere in between. Did you already try resetting your router/modem? Just turn off the power and let it sit for a few minutes. Like mentioned before, bigger mesh means bigger chances of problems. How many poly's does your model have?

Phogue wrote: {...} because im not going to provide payinfo just to upload mesh. Then you will have to pass on mesh, it's as simple as that. No info = no upload.

Hitomi Tiponi wrote: Also 'detach all' and then try teleporting to see if that helps. That sounds like a good suggestion. @OP I'm not sure about this at all, but it is possible you have one or two "offending" items attached to your avatar. A mesh object can be very very big on the network, maybe you are wearing something that is simply too complicated. I've seen mesh objects so detailed and dense, the wireframe looks almost solid. Normally such an item will have a very high display cost (depending on the LoD models). Easiest way to check is by activating the avatar rendering cost (advanced menu -> performance tools -> Show draw weight for avatars). LL suggests a weight of 40 000 max. 100 000 shouldn't be an issue, but some avatars have a weight of several 100s of 1000s. If it is very high, try to find what object(s) is/are causing it by selecting them one by one. You can select rigged mesh by editing some non rigged mesh then clicking on the rigged mesh. In the edit menu click "more". I always look at this on a demo before buying and it has made me pass on several wonderful looking objects.

DracoTech wrote: I'm using 3DS Max to model. Its a student edition, but I don't think that would matter, its still the same. The student edition should act the same as the full version. I assume you're using 2013. I also assume, going by your issue, you're either using the OpenCollada exporter or Autodesk 2013.0 or 2013.1 FBX exporter. Both cause issues with UV mapping for SL. Download the 2013.2 or 2013.3 exporter from Autodesk and everything should work fine. (I use 2013.2, it's in the archive) There is a small catch, make sure you do not use any spaces in object, material or texture names. (So for example not "Box 001", but "Box001" or "Box_001")

Benski Trenkins wrote: After the replies I got here, and thinking back a little bit... I am starting to suspect the last restart? I have a hard time believing restarting simulators or upgrading simulator software has any affect on upload calculations. To me it makes little sense that each simulator has software for calculating uploads, this particular piece of software is probably on another server. To be honest I have no idea what does cause the difference. You could file a jira, with a dae file attached and links to the object inworld both before and after you noticed the change. They should be tagged with a date the moment you created them (or at least when they first became part of your inventory), which might give LL a clue. Btw, I totally agree it is very annoying to say the least you can't see the physics cost before upload.

There is a big physics bug it seems, Drongle is looking into it (or at least I hope he still is). No idea if that is recent or not though. Short version is that depending on the order of the verts/tris in the file the physics cost can vary from next to nothing to an insane amount for the exact same shape. SL will never tell you the cost of a triangular physics shape before/while uploading, Drongle already mentioned that.

If you hit analyze, the physics engine uses hulls instead of triangles, that's exactly what it does. So n/a makes perfect sense. Only if you do not hit that button you will get a number of triangles. As far as I know it has always been like that.

The uploader won't tell you the physics weight of your "physics prim". As far as I know it will tell you the convex hull weight.

Mayalily wrote: Anyhow, how do I rez this stupid cube? To rezz a basic cube, right click the ground, select "build", then when the magic wand appears, click the ground. You'll have a plywood cube, 0.5x0.5x0.5 meters big. You do need to make sure building is allowed on the land. If it's not, SL will give you a message. If the parcel is full, SL will also give you a message. Sometimes rezzing on a megaprim gives problems. If that's the case, try rezzing on the ground.

Chosen Few wrote: As for how to take a screenshot, let's talk a little PC usage 101. First, copy the active window to clipboard, by pressing alt-printscreen. Now, in any image editor, open a new document, and paste (ctrl-v). The screenshot will appear in the document. From there, save it wherever you want. So you know, Windows 7 works no differently from all other versions of Windows, in this respect. The basic keyboard s In windows 7 there's also the snipping tool. By default it's on top of the start menu I think. Just open it, drag a square around the part you want a screenshot of and save as image.

Jennifer Boyle wrote: Thanks, Cerise. I know how to make alpha masks. I was just curious about why the behavior changed. As far as I know it has always behaved like that. If it has been different at some point, that must have been a bug. Alpha on the skin making you invisible would ruin a lot of content. All cleavage, tatoos, make up, hairbases, nail polish etc worn as a skin layer would turn you partially invisible.

Medhue Simoni wrote: I think you are not taking alot of data into consideration. I just checked a snowman mesh that I made the other day. It's a total of 600 kbs. I assume that 600 is the size of your dae file. That is not the size of the internal SL file (which is probably smaller). The 600 doesn't include the physics shape, it doesn't include any LoD data. Just the textures alone, on a normal prim build would likely be more than that. On a mesh you still need textures. Nothing to be gained by using mesh. UV mapping saves a ton of data when compared to multiple textures on 1 build. Prims and sculpts have UV data just as mesh does. Since they are fixed, you'll have to fiddle with the repeat and offset to make good use of it. This is often possible. It's true that you can use textures more efficiently on mesh in a lot of cases, especially compared to sculpts, which often need a very large texture just to get detail on one small section. This can save a lot of data traffic. For normal prims this issue is much much smaller, since shape and UV are pretty much a perfect match. On the other hand, sculpt (and prims) have set UV maps, so this data doesn't have to be transferred over the network. All sculpts share their UV, so that data is in the viewer. All boxes share their UV, so that data is in the viewer, etc. Plus, when you consider that any detailed sculpty build uses many sculpts to create, sometimes dozens, especially avatars, you are talking a ton of data, and you still need textures for all those sculpts. A sculpt map holds all the data the viewer needs to build the shape. A lossless 64x64 jp2 file is only a couple of kb. (I'm looking at 4 kb file size and 8 kb size on disk here). All the other data for the shape is in the viewer. All the viewer needs to build a prim are the numbers and text you can see in the edit menu. This should fit in 1 or 2 kb. There will always be cases where a prim or sculpty build will be a little less data, but overall, the mesh will almost always win, when made right. A smart creator could save massive amounts data when making a mesh build properly. Less data to be processed by your computer, yes, less data to be sent over the network, I don't think so. Even the textures which are a huge load on the graphics cards (a 24 bit 1024x1024 uses 3MB) aren't all that big on the network. At 85% compression (15% loss) a simple photo (24 bit 1024x1024) is only 340 kb. At 75% this is 195 kb. It's very possible SL compresses even more than that. Just like the UV maps, all normal maps are set for all prims and sculpts. Again no network traffic needed. Plus, LODs save a ton of data, and don't add much to the overall total. The results of LODs for the veiwer is even greater, because the pc is not having to download all the full models in the distance. Mesh with LoD saves data compared to mesh without LoD. But at the 2 kb for a prim and 4 kb for a sculpt, I'm sure even the lowest mesh LoD will be bigger. As far as load on your system is concerned, it's pretty clear mesh is lightyears more friendly. For example, what you can build with 2048 faces (the amount of tris in a sculpt) in mesh is pretty stunning. I am talking entire buildings instead of a single column. Mesh doesn't need hidden faces, like pretty much all prim builds have. I can think of more pro's for mesh, but I was talking about one big downside. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for mesh, I'm just not sure how a full mesh sim would perform. Time will tell.