Kwakkelde Kwak

Your suggestion to overcome the issue was valid yes, it would have solved the issue. It is not a very "clean" way of building though as I explained. Ok, let me explain the small item issue then, it's potentially a huge issue:) Any small object, even a single triangle, has a landimpact of 0.5 due to the server weight. If you make a mesh with let's say 10 seperate planks (to use your example), that is already bad news. the landimpact will at best be 10 x 0.5 = 5. If you had linked the planks before uploading, making it a single set of 10 planks, chances are the landimpact is 1 (ofcourse this depends on a good number of things). Imagine each plank has its own physics prim on top of that, the minimum landimpact of those 20 items combined would be no less than 20 x 0.5 = 10, where I'm pretty sure the 10 planks with a physical shape would still be just 1 at any usable size. On top of this you have the potential issue of even double that LI if you want to add a script. server weight will be 1.0 for even the smallest of objects. 20 prims for 10 planks is in no way justifyable I think. Yes I ment one physical shape that covers the physics for several objects. This means you can keep the physical load down and break up your visible build into pieces if you want a lower LI. A win-win situation I would say.

Alisha Matova wrote: There is nothing wrong with linkIng a simpler physics mesh to a complicated visual mesh. It's no different than linking a prim to a mesh. And a good physics shape will be a fraction of a LI anyway and not add to the overall LI. The only 'loss' would be the object now acting as a linkset and not being able to scale on one axis. I'd like to call that a pretty big loss to begin with. What you call "a good physics shape" might be a very simple one for the objects you make, what about full buildings for example? What about very small or simple objects, where the server weight determines the landimpact? You can end up with a landimpact twice as big as with an integrated physics model because of the extra server load, which is ofcourse a disadvantage by itself.. What about linksets with multiple mesh objects? When you want to edit those and need to unlink the set, you'll end up with a heap of misery, half of the unlinked objects will be invisible physics models you will need to relink to their visible counterpart. Or if you want to unlink one piece, you could have a very hard time unlinking the two pieces you need. A very small disadvantage.... upload costs will be higher. For merchant this shouldn't be an issue, sell one and you covered the extra costs, but lots of people just play around with their money tree or dancing jobs lindens. I really see a lot of downsides, some pretty serious, what are the benefits? I can think of one possible advantage. That is when one physics model covers a number of visible models. I can't predict how this will affect the landimpact or physics load under various circumstances, but I have a feeling this could work.

Drongle McMahon wrote: The physics mesh materials bug was fixed ages ago. I'm on the very latest one that installed automatically, somewhere in februari. I guess I didn't bother to look at the release notes..thanks for pointing that out. EDIT... I just reread your post and see you are on a beta viewer. That's beta, I like to use the official releases. So does the latest official release include this new/old feature? I think I'm not as "fast" as you are if you say "ages ago" btw:)...that is unless the latest 2 official releases don't need the materials anylonger.

Yes and adding to it, if you want to call it nonsense in the first place. If people are only interested int he notice, it's the very first post and it will be on top of the thread forever. This is a forum, not a newspaper or messageboard. Forum means discussion. I think I've picked up as many things here in posts not about the original subject of the thread as I did in posts on the subject. Now if it derails a thread it can be very annoying, I agree, but this thread was just a message.

Josh Susanto wrote: I assume that's the main reason people are still buying my sculpts, but I could be wrong. Possibly, although I think is has got more to do with your type of sculpts having little to no competition, like a lot of sculpts. They've been around since 2007 if I'm not mistaken, so it will take a while before all that content is replaced by mesh that looks just as good or better for lower costs or even much lower costs...and probably all the nonsense rumours about mesh, like "this would cost 8 times as much in mesh" (just kidding on that one).

If it's all nonsense on the forum besides the first post...why answer at all? Things came up, people responded..etc... It's not bothering anyone is it?

Yes and the dumb thing is it's not needed for the system to work. The early mesh viewers would let you upload with just a single material from the model assigned to the physics. I think LL had a good reason to do it, but the triangle count for the physics goes up yes. Whether that affects LI in a lot of cases..I don't think it will, but at 3 verts per material I can imagine it will in some cases..like yours .

If you have two materials in your model, they will both have an ID, you shouldn't worry about those probably, just try this first: Assign both materials you assigned to your model to the physics aswell.

I'd strongly advice against that, you do need to make sure, unlike before, that all materials and their IDs are assigned to the physics shape as if it was just another LoD model.

Ok, my two cents on the mesh version of Josh's grate.... The profile of the grate is different, but the shape as close as I could get it to Josh's. I think we can all agree all grates like this look just as good, so it's the rest we need to look at. I uploaded this one with full geometry for LoD high and medium and a 4 triangle imposter for LoD low and lowest. As the picture shows it will have a LI of 1 up to 5,5 meters. Physical shape on an object like this can be convex hull. If you want bigger sizes for an impact of 1, set LoD medium to the imposter aswell. At the bigger sizes it won't show very soon. With that setup the size for a LI of 1 can be 21 meters. Bigger than that should also be possible, although then you'd have to split the object into two halves. The only disadvantage of a mesh over a sculpt with these objects is the mesh will need different objects for different sizes. The sculpt will be worth a single prim no matter what.

The way it was described doesn't works for me, nor do I think it will for anyone.... It would be the right place from a "common sense" point of view, but V2/3 seems to lack a good deal of that. Anyway.... what does work for me is opening the "Me" menu on top of the screen, then not go to your "profile" but to your "picks" directly. There you remove and edit and everything by right clicking the "More". by clicking the little "+" on the bottom you can add picks or classifieds.

In windows 7 you can find the log file in: C:\Users\[uSERNAME]\Appdata\Roaming\SecondLife\logs for other operating systems: Second Life Log File Location

Triple Peccable wrote: You should be able to download a stress test program that will quickly let you know if that is the problem or not. ...or monitor the temperarures while running SL. Download Speedfan It's free, it's small, it's wise with a program like SL to run it. SL killed one of my graphics cards in the past and was on the way of killing its replacement when I found out the card was running far too hot. I'm sure there are other programs out there for free, this is just the one I use.

I think the high CPU usage isn't the issue, but a result of something else. It's trying to do something and it's not getting it done, so it keeps trying....something like that.... Did you have real clean installs? I mean did you remove all the application data and local settings from your computer after uninstalling? (the result of this should be you being recognised as a noob by the viewer, with all the tips etc when you click a button or buy or sell something) Did you try the VBO setting as mentioned above? Did you try the bandwidth as mentioned above? It's really hard to pinpoint the issue, especially since, as in most cases of problems in SL, it doesn't affect everyone. Looks like we can rule out the GPU, since the person in the post above me has a similair card to mine, but quite a bit faster. Since someone said they have the issue on some sims and not on others, can we rule out the grid or part of it having issues? I did notice very bad sim performance every now and then around the time the new viewer was released. It was temporary though and probably a coincidence.

No issues for me, if it's the Feb 9 (?) release we're talking about, no pinkness, no slowness, no full CPU usage. I'm on an Nvidia card... It's just a wild guess, but especially since the issues seem to affect other viewers aswell, it might be or include a cache issue. My suggestion would be to remove all viewers and all associated files that are left after uninstall, then try a fresh viewer...

My Blender car is in top notch condition, passed the yearly test two weeks ago with zero fails... And actually your mesh is better since it has less visual load and less physics load and going by your numbers more shape on the cross section. I fully agree on the comment you made about Josh's sculpts btw..and building in general...it's not the tool or method, it's the creator that makes the biggest impact on how good it is.

Oh are we going to play the "we can build you a mesh that is better than your sculpt " game again? hehe Well anyway that is what I had in mind.. well I think Josh's sculpt has 288 visible faces, all squares as cross section. Oh and I drive a car that cost me as much as Blender actually and there are no issues with it whatsoever, it's a 30something year old well maintained classic! @josh..I said virtually flat, not flat, what drongle built is what I ment. One could play around with the LoDs maybe, the geometry is pretty much as it is...

So since I had no issues with the latest viewer at all... does that qualify my grandma of a computer as class 1? I'd like to think it won't even qualify as class 2, rather class 3. It has a decent gpu, but nothing fancy. To add to the 3000 and 1500 dollar comment of Peggy, I think you can get something similair to my computer for under 200 bucks these days...yes time for an upgrade, but it does run SL as it should.

Syle Devin wrote: is there a good way of going about naming object in blender? I mean a way that is faster than clicking on each object and changing the name, a list of sorts even? I've never been one to name my objects in blender, I have never needed to before, so I haven't learned much of a good way to name them. Can't answer your wuestion directly, but I can tell you it's an absolute must to name all your items in a 3D scene. There are tons of reasons for it, especially when the scene is big, but the thing you just encoutered is another good reason. In general you can say it's needed to be able to identify the objects, whether it's by you, a modifier of the 3D application or an exporter.

Josh Susanto wrote: My grates are the same number of triangles as the other sculpts I earlier began to load through blender and into SL's mesh uploads process just to see what happens, so they would cost 8 times as much to load unless I could cut out some number of triangles, but that would be a lot fewer than half of them. Yes if you upload your sculpt as a mesh and don't bother to make custom LoDs, you'll get a high landimpact. Something virtually flat, like your grates, can use imposters or billboards for probably Lod medium to lowest, which means 4 triangles. A while back someone posted a similair object, a near flat billboard or scaffolding thing. It was one sculpt and the creator was sure that was impossible with mesh. A lot of people dove into it with various techniques and the landimpact was indeed 1 for mesh. I got it low enough to be able to link two together for a single prim even. For that grate I'm 100% sure it will be the same. You'll lose the shiny on the lower LoDs, but that won't be very noticable at a distance. EDIT... Yes both maya and max will cost as much as a nice second hander, but you can use a free 3D tool to make these meshes aswell.

Linda Brynner wrote: SL needs monster specs i am affraid. I run SL on a now more than 4 year old computer and it performs pretty good, most settings maxed out and around 20 fps on average. AMD 3800+ NVidia 9600GT with 512 MB (this is younger than my computer, but not a high end card by any means these days) 3 GB of RAM (2,5 for windows, 0,5 for the graphics card) The only thing holding the OP back is the graphics card and possibly the connection speed. Since it's a laptop I can imagine the wireless causes potential issues, although I have a wireless connection myself. I do wonder what the OP means by "bad performance". You can't expect 50 fps (or anything in that region) like you get in a highly optimised video game. SL is made by the residents so it's amateur heaven, which is one of the big pluspoints really. You don't need these high framerates in SL for 99% of the activities anyway, if you want to race cars or do some shooting game, I think SL isn't the place to be.

That actually is very informative, not very helpful for anything, but I am one of those people that like to know it all:) I was however referring to the Collada files, not the obj ones...

Toysoldier Thor wrote: [...] and Collada is not industry wide supported by most 3D modeling tools, [...] Are you counting in number of programs around or in actual products (3D models) being created? The biggest 3D tools do have support. As has been said, the very biggest, by far, Autodesk, was even part on the development. Both 3ds max and Maya are owned by Autodesk now and as far as I know, those are the leading two platforms. Why do zbrush and all the other tools need 3rd party plugins or dont even have collada? Good question, you might want to ask that on the zbrush site. I think part of the reason is zbrush was never ment to be used on a big scale for the gaming industry. If the focus is on static models, obj files will do just fine. On top of that, as has become very apparant with Blender, it takes a good amount of efford to make and keep the dae export functional. Smaller companies don't have the manpower to support it I assume.

Syle Devin wrote: I have heard that objects in a mesh are not viewed as different objects. The problem I have is that in my .dae scene the different objects in that scene are viewed as different objects in the SL viewer. Correct. A scene is not a model, it's a collection of models. If you want several objects in Blender as a single object in SL, you need to do the opposite of what we said earlier. You need to link the objects in Blender. I don't know what button to click to do that, but I assume you do. One object in Blender is one object in SL. Ofcourse this means that besides LoD switch distance, LI will go up aswell. Will I have to upload each object in my building as a seperate mesh just so that each object can have it's own LoD options set? For ease I would hope I could upload it all as one, I know the limits of 8 textures and such, but it seems just for better control I should upload each object seperately. I think Drongle figured out how to make LoD scenes. I never tried it myself, neither did I read the post(s) on it very carefully. What I got out of it was the order of objects needs to be the same in each LoD scene, which makes sense, that way they will correspond in the dae file and SL can match them in the upload. If I was to upload each object seperately and create seperate LoD levels for each than would that be better? Could I essentially still create my LoDs using my whole scene even if it has seperate objects in it? Seperately will work, I don't know what will take longer though. Uploading all objects seperately or matching the objects in the diferent LoD scenes as described above. One thing I need to add is the LoD scenes from Blender won't show at the same time in SL, distance and size will always determine the LoD. With this in mind, it might be best to upload as seperate objects, especially when sizes vary from very small to very big. Either way you'll need to find the optimum for each single object. I am not new to SL or to blender but the issue of detail levels and view distances has crippled my brain. On top of that I have been having trouble with patience and would like answers now so I am sorry if I am asking questions that only I can answer with some testing on my own time. I don't want to ask to much of anyone here. Once I have this whole build process figured out for myself and working I would love to compile what I have learned so others may not have to spend time asking questions that I have. Thank you to those who have answered any questions since I have been askign quiet a few. I think I am finally, slowly, understanding what I will need to do. I hesitate only because it seems like it will be a very long process of uploading once I even have the mesh done in blender. Asking these questions is what the forums are for, don't be shy. The more you ask, the more you'll probably understand and the better your own findings will be when you post your "answers". Drongle made some graphs for LoD switch comparing size and switch distance I think. You might want to take a look at that for creating your models. They won't offer you the final answers, but could guide you in the right direction for each model.

Josh Susanto wrote: Mesh versions of such things will be charged at more then one prim for the sizes and LOD at which they are likely to be used anyway. Hmm, not going to restart the discussion on this:) But since you mention grates, I can guarantuee you a mesh grate at any usable size will probably be just one prim aswell, with a lot less geometry and a lot better behaviour on LoD.