Kwakkelde Kwak

Medhue Simoni wrote: I don't really use blender, but I'm not totally sure why you are that worried about LODs. I'm pretty sure that rigged meshes, or even worn meshes don't switch LODs like they normally do. Personally, I'd just make the shoes and let the uploader generate the LODs. You have some control over how many verts they are, and you are definitely not going to have a material problem. Hmmm, a strange answer from someone who is so keen on the efficiency aspects of mesh. Rigged mesh most definately switches LOD. In fact it's the worn items where mesh can either excel or fail miserably. Custom LODs tend to give me better numbers by more or less a factor 2 over the autoLoD, with prettier results ofcourse. I've passed on buying some fantastic looking hair because the draw weight was too high. That number seems to vary between viewers, but when rezzed that hair had a landimpact of 170 or so. Maybe that's a lot better than most sculpted hair, but after looking around I found some hair worth about 15 prims, looking and behaving just as well. Even this hair had plenty of room for improvement with a fully modelled inside, hidden by the skull. AutoLoD on a shoe will probably work better than on hair, but that doesn't change the principle. The material issue is easily solved by the autoLoD, but it's also easily solved by adding a single triangle with the high LoD material to the lower LoD models.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: They already are charging heavy LI charges on rezzing the mesh but then also discourages mesh development by penalizing builders from creating mesh with the highest upload fees of all import fess. When are you going to stop spreading this lie? Just because you are getting a higher landimpact, doesn't mean that's the case for all objects. It's not even the case for most objects. In plenty of cases (if not most) a L$ 30 mesh can replace more than 4 sculpties so it is actually cheaper to upload or rezz. I agree on the upload charge, for "embracement" reasons it should be free, even if it is for only a limited time. I don't know the algorithm for the upload charge, but again, it's not rocket science. The less geometry and UV maps and whatnot you use, the lower the costs will be. Strangely enough never under L$ 11. They could simplify this and give polygon limits or vertex limits in blocks of L$10.

I guess that last post wasn't directly ment for me... Anyway, we agree that mesh is the better building block, given an exception here and there. You see more than I do, probably because of the different objects we usually encounter. The change taking a long time is not an issue I think. Embracement takes a long time, especially when people are used to something, sculpts in this case. RL and SL are no different regarding that. We still build with bricks, how medieval is that? It might be best for everyone if SL eases into mesh, but that doesn't mean we don't need enthusiastic mesh builders. Any tree makers around? There are some holes in the mesh implementation, but did you write a jira or did you just complain to the people making good use of the new possibilities?

Yes top one if I'm not mistaken..don't forget to change back to agni when you actually want to upload something:) Also take in mind there's a 24 hour sweep, so if you're working on a big project, you need to copy it on a daily basis or better yet, take it back to inv before logging off.

It depends on what viewer you use how to get in there, I think the normal LL viewer has the option for different grids by default on the logon page. It is certainly not a single sim with a ton of people on it, I occasionally see someone, no idea how many people are on it or how many sims it is, but there's always plenty of room. All you have to do is log into it.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: the other aspect of this learning process is how costly it is getting to experiment. Unlike Textures where you can upload a FREE Temp texture... sadly it seems this in not the case for mesh objects. I have already spent a lot in uload fees to get my test models into SL - only to end up throwing them away. The model uploader preview screen is horrible in and you cant really get a good impression of how the model looks like on the grid from this preview. If you want to save on upload costs...use the aditi grid where everything is free.

A sculpty IS a mesh, just a limited one. Even the "normal prims" are mesh. There is no rocket science. Use less data, get less costs. Can it be more simple? All people need to figure out (and I'm confident they will) is how to make something look good using less data. I really don't see how you vision the old "a-prim-is-a-prim" rule applied to mesh. This would involve getting rid of custom LoD, getting rid of the ability to use up to 65k vertices, getting rid of multiple faces. What do you have left then? a sculpt.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: I do agree with you that Mesh is an ADDITIONAL technology and will always be. I could have been a sculpty replacement technology in the years to come but that wont be the case. Yes, backwards compatibility. There is no need to ban sculpts from SL, just a need to ban the use of them in places where they don't make sense. nobody will lag out because of 2048 faces you see in the distance as a mountainscape. People will get poor performance from 200 sculpted prim boots using a sculpt for every metal lacing ring and every other lace and every metal stud. It will take time, even most builders aren't that well informed, maybe LL should address that some more, although handing over the tool is usually how SL works and I think it works well. If even a lot of builders are ignorant about the new possibilities and limitations, you can't expect customers embracing it right away. Right away that is, eventually they will.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: So if Mesh is such an amazing technology (which I totally agree it is) then why would LL impose an ariticial economic penalty on a technology that if quickly adopted onto the grid - could displace all those EVIL SCULPTIES that Medhue and others hate so much? Please Medhue - dont post now telling us all that you dont hate sculpties with a passion - your past posts and Drongles too in this thread makes your opinions on Sculpties clear. If I were LL and I wanted to displace an old resource hogging / sim lagging technology with a new much more efficient and more flexible mesh technology... the last thing on my mind would be to impose an economic penalty on this technology. Yes and what if the new restrictions are one of the main reasons mesh is more efficient? You kind of overlooked that it seems. If you put no restrictions on mesh, people will treat them with the same ignorance as they treat sculpts and textures. The motto there seems to be "the more the better". Where when you put some restrictions on the tool, less becomes more. It's not the mesh itself that's so superefficient, it's the fact meshbuilding allows people to build efficiently. Carte blanche will degrade the mesh to just another spawning pit of lag. Toysoldier Thor wrote: Is this academcically wrong? YES. But the world in SL is not perfect as it is not in RL. Prims put loads on a sim. Lag exists. But LL should be doing everything to promote the technology that best reduces that load - not penalize it. If they take of the "penalty", it won't reduce the load... it's not rocket science...

Mymy, for some people the glass is always half empty. If LL had made mesh available the way sculpts and normal prims are treated, we wouldn't have been able to move, which in sculpt infested regions is already pretty much the case. Framerates of 4 per second are no exception to me in those visual lagpits. Even with the "penalty" mesh is superior to the sculpt on so many levels including primcount. This is not the case for your sculpts. Your sculpts. I have made objects at their 64 meter limit that cost less than a similair sculpt build and at the fraction of the rendercost. Easier to texture. Faster to load. Easier to build. Taking less prims. Using smaller textures. Better performance. Better LoD behaviour. Did I forget something? probably. So you continue making sculpts, LL isn't going to abandon them. You simply found a field of creation where the sculpt is preferred. Nothing more, nothing less. Mesh is an addition, a very very good addition to the grid. It might take a little longer than Q2 before it's fully embraced as the building tool of the future. Maybe that will never happen, even then it's still a nice addition. I've seen and made things impossible to build with anything besides mesh. I've seen people making your claim that "mesh costs more" and I and lots of other people have proven them wrong in about all cases. You as a sculpt builder for some reason want mesh to replace everything, I wonder why.

This is another fine example of why custom LoDs are so important. The mesh will get you a better result in pretty much all fields over a sculpt when built right. As far as I can see the model as you made it has 1520 faces, including the inside. First thing to simplify is the inside, scrap it for all LODs except the highest, that's hardly noticable. Next step is simplifying the geometry by using not a 20 sided sphere but a 12 sided sphere, that results into 288 faces for LOD high. 8 sided for LOD medium resulting in 96 faces and LOD Low nice and simple with 4 sided spheres and 40 faces. The landimpact at 0.5 meters high is 0.905, because of downloadweight (I made a very simple physics shape, staying under that number), upload cost L$11. Now does it look better or worse than a sculpt equivalent? Hard to show on the forums so I'll just post the numbers: AutoLoD CustomLoD Sculpty 1520(962) 1520(802) 2048(1056) 380(268) 288(161) 512(272) 94(94) 96(63) 128(72) 46(59) 40(30) 32(20) Note that the highest LoD mesh has 20 sides, the sculpt 16, high LoD 12 and 8. 32 sides won't allow an inside unless you reduce the curve of the hourglass shape to a point where it looks like cut glass. You will get s smoother hourglass figure with that sculpt, but it won't suit the circumference which is blocky. Note I used two texture faces on the mesh, no idea how much impact this has. Note The model I used for autoLoD was before UV mapping the object. Strangely enough that resulted in better numbers (0.852 LI) for the custom LoDs, with more vertices. The difference between mesh and sculpt is twofold. The higher LoDs really do not need as many vertices as the sculpt has to make a proper shape. The lower mesh LoDs have more vertices than the sculpt and everybody knows sculpts have terrible behaviour on the lower LoDs, especially with sizes as these. So... upload cost..a whole linden higher than a sculpt. Looks? similair or better. Landimpact? a fraction lower. LoD switching on the mesh? hardly visible.

Lear Cale wrote: Also, I haven't seen the memory usage stuff in the client yet. I'm running an older one and need to update, but don't get much SL time these days. I'll appreciate any tips or clues you think I should know about region/parcel/avatar memory usage. In V3 you can see the memory usage in the about land -> script info. It shows it the same way inworld items do, 16k for any LSO script and 64 for any mono script, unless it has a memory limit, then it will show that.

The myth is: mesh costs more than sculpts That doesn't mean there can't be cases where the mesh DOES cost more than sculpts. Toysoldier Thor wrote: Its not a myth .... if you are a builder of Landscape sculpty terrains... Build a sim mountain or waterfall for 1 prim. yes I will debate this "myth" since it is not a myth. It is a myth, but as I said in most cases, not all. The objects you build combine two cases where the sculpt has the upperhand as far as costs go. First is the size, with very large items the higher LODs start weighing heavily on the impact of a mesh (This is assuming your items are large, if they are not I doubt you are better off with sculpts in the first place). Secondly sculpts that use their full map (and need their full map) and are more or less uniform in vertex distribution (let's call it blobs). This is normally not the case for smaller items. These are exceptions though, even if some people will run into this issue on a daily basis. They should not have introduced it for Mesh until after it was adopted fully. Then addressed Rezzed Resourced Based costing as a whole... not just to penalize the one latest technology that would reduce lag if the technology could reduce the number of Sculpties on the grid. Doesn't something have to be introduced before it can be adopted? LL didn't penalise mesh, they just didn't implement the new, fair way of building costs on older items, that's not the same. You can't honestly tell me you would have been happy if all your landscaping items would have twice the impact they have now, or three times. LL always has backwards compatibility and preventing breaking content high on the agenda. It's a compromise and an understandable one. If you ask me, they should have capped the "old sculpts" though and implement the new rules to all newly uploaded sculpts. But even this would mean broken content, for example sculpty building kits. Mesh wins in most cases if cost was not a factor. I'd like to make that statement a bit stronger. Mesh "wins" in practically all cases, with some exceptions where sculpties looking almost as good cost far less to build and where the size exceeds 64 meters.

Jolney Cheri wrote: like i said i am relativaly new to building but in most cases its what price that most will look at will look at and a good builder can make sculpties as good as any mesh. Just mpre work in joiming them I already said the price is in most cases in favour of the mesh, not the sculpt. Even if a meshupload costs you let's say L$30, chances are you need more than three sculpties to make the equivalent shape. And the shape won't be as good. Sculpties are very limited in shape, no matter how good the builder is. You have a 255x255x255 grid to work with, so subtle curves on a big object are impossible to make. With mesh you also work on a grid, but an exponential one and it's nearly impossible to notice, especially on a small scale like a 256x256 meter sim. It's not my category of building, but if you want to see the limitations of sculpts in smoothness, look at any sculpt car then compare it to a mesh one.

It takes a proper builder, but in most cases that I've seen, it's possible to get a mesh object to look better at a lower landimpact than any normal prim build or even sculpty equivalent. It's a myth mesh costs more and already a stubborn one it seems.

The way I see it it's possible to widen the range of the avatar height without breaking any content. We can slide from 0-100 now.... Let's say LL widens the range from -100 to 200..or -200 to 300, -300 to 400 etc, so 50 stays in the middle. Then we have a slider nobody understands. So LL can rescale those numbers, existing content would stay the same, but a different number would show up in the editor. If they make the range twice as large, an avatar which has a height of 25 now, will have a height of 38, an avatar with a height of 0 will have a height of 25, an avatar with 100 will be 75. All the exact same, but with extra room. This doesn't fix the arms issue, but for that slider they could do the exact same thing, or for any slider that won't offer enough length. I don't know how hard it is to make the code, but I'm sure it won't be all that difficult. Only real downside I see is the larger you make the scale to offer very small and very tall avatars, the bigger the steps are between two numbers. I don't know if the slider is lineair, if it is maybe it needs to be exponential in both directions from where the "extra length" is added.

There's one thing you can do, especially since you're an animator. Everybody knows the tiny avatars, elves, stuffed animals, cute things like that. They can be made with some weird animation hack as far as I know, stretching the bones (often called avatar deformation). The same can be done to make giant avatars. I couldn't find a link, but I've seen a giant viking, looking well over 3 meters tall and quite impressive at that height. The way I feel about it is a bit double. I never liked hacks, since they have no support and might be impossible to use due to LL changes in the code at any given time. Recently we've seen this with the invisiprim (which was more a glitch or bug than a hack, but still). On the other hand it is harder to make very small or very large avatars. This way when you actually do have one, it is likely it will be seen as very out of the ordinary, which is what you are after. I think if the slider allows 5 meter avatars, the average scale of them will go up quite quickly.

As far as I know 3dsmax (or its collada exporter) doesn't include textures. The 2011 collada exporter doesn't..and the 2012 exporter doesn't work, but the export to .fbx then convert to .dea workaround for that version doesn't include the textures either. I think it's the way autodesk makes the dae. For fbx you get the option to include textures, for dae you don't. I really don't know why.

Again, we're not building in a vaccuum here, we're building within SL's tools and limitations. Whether you build a chair (or a window frame) at 1=1 scale or double size it will be the same number of prims, easy. No one is arguing that so using it as an example is just silly. (Unless you build it in mesh where doubling the size could increase the land impact weight.) Two things you keep out of your posts. 1) Megaprims 2) The fact that (in my experience) the vast majority, and I mean rather 99% than 95%, of all the prims used aren't at their size limit. I won't deny that you will win a prim here and there, in fact I said that in one of my earlier posts. So indeed per sqm you have slightly more detail. With the 3/4 of the space that's won, you can do two things: abandon it or use it. (yes I know I am being "silly" again) Abandoning it will reduce your prims by a factor 4. Using it means you need to build somethng on it and that will probablty cost more than the handful you've saved. Then as I mentioned the reduced performance if you decide to let go of 75% of your land. I'm sure there are cases where the 1:1 is "better" than the 1:whatever, if you want to leave proportions out of the equasion. The thing that strikes me in your way of informing the crowd, is it sounds like your 1:1 method is the final cure for all the evil in SL. Sure there are plenty of benefits, but you seem to overlook or at least ignore a ton of downsides and you seem to be very selective in your answers. I call that tunnelvision. (which in some cases can result in spectacular things btw, so don't take offence please) I'm also not saying "smaller is always better" Hooray, it did sound that way. I know you didn't think so:) , I'm saying when you build to scale you're much closer to the "sweet spot" for SL's tools and limits in terms of detail and area. If you go much smaller than that, say half size, you begin to hit minimum prim size limits and the issue of not having enough prims to fill up all your area. Not having enough prims is a non argument in this sense. Sometimes I run out of prims long before I am done, then it's back to the drawing board, sometimes I have half of them left. (yes exaggerating again) It is highly dependant on what the simowner wants in use and looks. I'm not certain if some long gone Linden made things that way intentionally but the concept was lost on the other Lindens and buried under a growing pile of bad decisions or if it's just a happy accident, but that's how it works out. This is also why using extreme examples misses the point entirely. I haven't found any global sweetspots or any proof of their existance, sorry. The examples I provided were a full sim build, a quarter sim build, and a 2048sq.m. parcel. Yes so against what do I compare 1) the full sim 2) the quarter sim and 3) the 2048 parcel (which hasn't got any 64 meter prims btw I think) ?

Well at least one of the builds shown had a waterfront and off shore building. Chances that's a mainland sim are very slim. Btw, my partner and I rent full regions or homesteads since 2004 or 2005 now. I can say I trust the landlord alright. Anyway it was just an alternative, with added benefits and added downsides, the fact you can't tell who those nasty laggy CPU neighbours are not being the smallest.

Penny Patton wrote: Both are mangling logic pretty harshly. You really baffle me. You say building twice as small returns better detail. I say building twice as small on a plot 4 times as small returns less detail, because you only have a quarter of the prims to work with. How is that anything but pure and simple logic, let alone mangling logic? You say you proved you can build more detailed and as proof you give one half of the comparison. What should I compare your builds with? Any random sim? One I built myself? Those aren't twice as big as yours(or small depending how you look at it) How is that mangling logic? I really really don't get it. EDIT, with mesh and scaling there's a whole new can-o-worms, since they would have to built differently at different sizes..this as a sidenote. If you want four times the space, you can also keep the double size and get a homestead. That way you even have more room since you have 4 borders for off sim building.

Well I didn't mean to be silly. First or second comment? or both?

Carbon Philter wrote: Major enough for issues which are not related specifically to avatar mesh though, such as the water surface, which is my grievance. And just out of interest - will wearing an alpha layer to hide body parts clash and cause the alpha sort shimmering glitch with any no-mod item which already contains an invisiprim to carry out the same function? Yes for certain individuals it will, I'll have some broken content myself, using that very same water trick. I ment for SL as a whole, that invisiglitch has primerely been used to hide bodyparts. And the alpha channel clothing layer shouldn't give problems, there's no texture that can chatter or flipflop or how do you want to call it? Nothing to sort is the best description I guess. But that's a SHOULD ...I haven't tested it.

So I guess you'd be satisfied if I built a two prim window, then build a 2 prim window with two bottles in the sill to show the second one has more detail? (edit) Oh wait, 6 bottles...ehhh You've provided half examples. Now if you would take those builds, double them in size and use four times the land and then be short on prims for whatever near impossible reason, then you've proven something. Now you haven't proven a thing.

Penny Patton wrote: And I will continue to deny it, because I'm right. I'll continue to back up my words in the only way that matters, by building larger, more detailed sims that people will continue to mistake for being done with more land than they are. I don't have to build anything to prove that copying one prim once results into two prims. I don't have to build anything to prove staircases 90 cm wide don't work, not even with your altered camera position. I don't have to build a normal living room fully furnished to prove you will have a terrible time trying to move around. If you don't take my word for it, you can build it yourself. Simple fact is if you use only a quarter of the sim, you will have 3 neighbours chipping away at the resources, why would I need to build a sim to make that clear? It's as obvious as the copied prim I mentioned. Simple fact is if you have more prims available you can build with more detail. I don't have to build that and make a picture, because it is so obvious. Yes, the more land you have the more prims you have at your disposal. No argument there. However, if two people have the same amount of land available, the person who builds to scale will be able to create an environment that is larger and more detailed than the person who insists on building to double scale. Larger and less detailed. How difficult is that to understand? Even if you have to quadruple the amount of prims by building twice as large, which is ofcourse the biggest nonsense ever, but possible, you would have the exact same detail.