Kwakkelde Kwak

I can't tell you what's wrong with the information you give, but I can tell you it would help a lot if you looked in your logfile and post what it says after the error occurs. I also like to add the amount of vertices and faces used is nothing short of insane. 12k faces for the lowest LOD? No idea how far you need to be for the lowest LOD to pop, but my guess is you will have a couple of hundred if not thousand faces on a single pixel. A full avatar is around 7000 faces at the highest LOD I think, something in that region anyway.

The best way I think is make a simple representation of the column (that can be a bottom- and topless box or prism, or even two triangles placed at a 90 degree rotation around the z axis) and upload that with the mesh. Then in the edit window under features, change the physics shape to "prim". The bounding box of all LODs and the physics shape are all stretched to the highest LOD bounding box, so take that in mind when building the thing.

As I said, it is possible to build your prim designs in 3ds max and import them into SL without a whole lot of trouble. If you really want it, look for PrimComposer. The mesh way is just better and easier.

Blender or any other program will have the exact issues as 3ds max will..my adice would be to look into exporting as mesh, that will save you a lot of resources. But you can upload prim builds from max, using maxport or maxproxy, forgot which of the two. As far as I can remember they are part of primcomposer... I did it once or twice, pretty straight forward as I recall it.

"Uniform scaling"..those were the words I was looking for:)

Chosen Few wrote: You seem to have misunderstood me a little, Kwak. All I meant was that if the size of the average avatar happens to have more units in it than what the size of a RL person has in RL units, then the least problematic way to define the situation is simply that the virtual units are a little smaller than the RL ones. [...] The reason "cubit" can't work, if we assume the RL definition, is because it's not a fixed size. My cubit isn't the same as your cubit. If we were all existing in isolation, that would be fine. But since we're a community, we need a fixed standard. I did misunderstand you then yes, but your foot is different from mine, so is your thumb (that's how we call an inch here) yet they are fixed units, I figured the same was the case for the cubit. Anyway, I think we agreed on the fact a unit is a unit, nothing more nothing less. Chosen Few wrote: I'd argue that handheld items and giant cathedrals don't directly transfer either. Granted, it's a little harder to notice the discrepancy with those kinds of things, but it's still there. Then you misunderstood me here in return, I wasn't clear plus I mixed some things up. Handheld items and cathedrals opposed to normal houses can be the same shape as they can be in RL, bigger though, let's say the 10-15% you mentioned, so compared to the SL avatar it would be the same as in RL. This is not the case with normal houses, where the ratios between SL and RL ceilingheight, SL and RL floorspace, SL and RL doorways, SL and RL stairwidths etc are all different. It's simply not possible to scale a RL house and get a satisfying SL result. I hope that's clearer. Furniture can be scaled without any distortions, I wasn't right when I said otherwise. The ratio doesn't match any other it seems though.

Ok, even though you apparantly missed the point, I think the air has almost cleared..so I'll be brief. When I say: think in and build with triangles, that is because it's the shape your hard- and software thinks in and it will "fake" any shape possible, as long as you use enough of them. So the point I was making wasn't thinking in triangular shapes, but in surfaces built out of triangles. That ofcourse includes a square. And a square is something a human being can easily think in. The cubit? well I was merely passing the ball back to Chosen with that. I don't know if it would be a good or bad unit, as Chosen said, a unit is just a unit. It was just that IF you want the avatar to be the decisive factor in units, the unit should be based on the avatar ofcourse and the cubit is. So is a foot, or an inch, which would be fine if they could be used in a decimal system, but a system is not a unit. (and ofcourse a foot or inch used in a decimal system would create the biggest confusion) The only solution or patch is selling all your items modifyable, which is what I do in almost all cases. That way people can scale it up or down when neccecary to fit their surroundings. With mesh this can be tricky, since the bigger the object, the more landimpact it will have. And I completely agree on the shape issue, I know the fact I don't like the look of them doesn't mean others feel the same way. In surreal or science fiction scenes (which I don't prefer as my surroundings) they would probably not look out of place. I'm boring with that, give me a nice realistic looking scene and I'm happy.

The facial inimations embedded in the pose can be set in the upload window. I think they trigger every time the animation is started, so a single frame loop should always show it. If this is not the case, you have no other choice than to use a script. You can make a very simple one with llStartAnimation and a timer, you can wear that instead of using a poseball.

I'm glad the desk issue is over. I'll post one final thing about it though, not to have the last word, but to show you one can make a desk which is just as functional as the two I made earlier, with 6 vertices and 8 faces, the amount of the tetrahedron desks Chosen made. Take in mind the connection to the floor looks like it should be a very strong one, but we ignored most of forces already. Different ways to look at the object. Modellingwise, it's the desk I made earlier, but with another 2 vertices welded together. Geometrically, it's a tetradedron and a pyramid upside down. You already said you understood the triangle is the object to work with so I don't mean to be annoying about it.... but this is an example of why that is the case. Modellingwise, you could construct this desk out of 3 tetrahedrons, then remove all inner geometry. Or one pyramid and a tetrahedron and remove the hidden faces. Or a box with some vertices welded together....or any other shape (with more vertices and faces than a box) with some of them welded together. That's why I hammer on you and any other builder to stop thinking in prims. So that covered "datapoints" I think. That still doesn't answer the question if this setup is the most renderfriendly one. From the camera angle used for the above picture, which is the most common one I'd say, only two faces are turned away from the cam, so six are showing. The two tetrahedrons desk has one less showing I think. I still prefer a "normal" desk. Even one with four "normal" legs and a "normal" top can easily be made with a landimpact of 1. And you'd only need 8 faces for each leg and 12 (or even 10 if you delete the bottom as Chosen suggested) for the top to make it look real. that's 44 faces opposed to 2048 for a sculpted one. We don't have to minimize everything. The graphics cards, servers, routers and all things involved can handle quite a bit these days. Couple of examples with tetrahedrons. I can think of a chair you can sit on quite comfortably. Or a boxlike wall with triangular doors you described earlier I think. I don't like the looks of either though:) Let's move on now:) @Chosen You said something quite contradictory. You said the base shouldn't be the unit, but the avatar, no matter what its size is. However you later say the cubit, based on a part of that very avatar is the poorest choice there is. I'd say it's the preferred one in that case, assuming most avatars are more or less similair in dimensions. I don't see any easy solution to the whole unit/scale/proportion issue in SL (or ANY solution altogether really), Btw I can perfectly live with the meter, like yourself. I can't argue on any other thing you had to say about camera and movement issues between RL and virtual life, SL especially. The only things that seem to transfer between the two are either very small objects, like handheld ones or huge ones, like cathedrals. Things like houses don't transfer at all, which makes it nearly impossible to make RL sized furniture aswell.

A mesh object works completely different than a sculpt. The UV map (which is really a template) and the shadow map are a starting point for textures other than the one in the package I think. The "samples" you have are the objects you will have to work with. In other words, your name will never be in the creators panel. If you want that, you need to buy DAE models.

I can't tell you what went wrong, but I can tell you where it possibly went wrong. It could be the sculpt exporter. The map shown in your edit window only has four colours, so you only get four points. I'm not that familiar with maya, let alone the possible exporters, but it might help if you post what you use for exporting your object. It might help to convert the plane to mesh before exporting, but I'm not sure about that.

Since we can move the vertices of a tetrahedron around and can apparantly forget about any forces besides gravity, a box could result in the left desk in the picture. I didn't calculate it, but if the desk shown would fall over it would be to the back I'd say, meaning there can be more legroom than is shown right now. We can even push two vertices together, resulting in the desk on the right. That would save one vertex and two faces. I prefer a normal desk really, but I'd prefer any of these two over any of the tetrahedron ones I've seen or came up with myself. EDIT the board facing your legs can be vertical when two identical prisms are pushed together, it would precisely be on the center of gravity. Make the backboard bigger than the top and you can even slope it the other way.

First of all, I'm glad it's solved. Secondly, I noticed you were logged into these forums yesterday when I posted the exact same thing, half a day earlier.

Josh, the thing that really bothers me is you assume things that aren't true then sticking by them with a stubbornness I rarely see. For some reason small things are spinning out of control for no reason, but that's not a one sided issue I think. I've spent hours on calculating and modelling writing ( and re re writing because of the forum issues I had) only to try and show you tetrahedrons aren't the preferred basic shape, neither is a cube, or one of the pyramids. The triangle is. You seem to grasp that concept, yet we're still going over and over it. Must be the both of us pushing eachothers buttons.(And ofcourse there's use for any of those geometrical volumes, I did not and will not ever deny that) Then there's the big issue of poor cummunication and that's mostly from your side. You state people can't visualise things in 3d space. I can tell you I can and I can show you things, in fact I do. Chosen does a superior job at this, by taking more time to actually model everything then post the result. You on the other hand never do. This leaves everybody guessing to what extent you actually understand things and to what extent you are guessing and assuming. These are the two things I ment by wasting time. Maybe I was out of line on the you not being willing to learn. But you don't seem to do a lot of trying out. I haven't seen a single thing you've built putting anything you may or may not have grasped into practice, all you do is talk about things. I have read most of this thread and you do seem to be picking up things here and there and are trying to. Maybe put more time into practice than into discussion. Will I resond to your posts? Hard to tell, I like to post, I won't deny that:) It's just our whole discussion that's spinning out of control and I'd rather help people than having to "defend" all my sentences, being torn out of context/proportion or not. No hard feelings at all...

leliel Mirihi wrote: Talking in riddles and leaving important details out doesn't make your posts more profound. I think I understand now why this thread is 10 pages of hot air. THANK YOU for this post, it was the little push I needed to stop answering Josh altogether. We have a clear case of a person that has no understanding of 3D modelling whatsoever, or objects in 3D space even. A complete lack of understanding what mesh or UV mapping is, let alone how to use it. All these things wouldn't matter if one was willing to learn and try things out. But this is clearly not the case. I've wasted enough time on this. I guess I failed my patience exam...

Replying to myself here... the intersecting boxes don't have 51 apparant faces, but 48, I already thought this was an unusual number.... still, exactly twice as many as for two intersecting tetrahedrons. I uploaded a bunch to SL and I am getting strange figures on them. I'll have to take a look at the algorithm, but the displayweight according to SL is 314 for 8 tetrahedrons at 8 x 8 x 8 meters as bounding box and for cubes with the same setup 419. I uploaded with the full model for all LODs. I'll have to figure out what exactly it is I am looking for here:)

The thing you built is what I think Josh has in mind. It's standing on two points though. You need at least three to keep it balanced. I know SL has no gravity or other force unless you assign them by script, but following that logic one can also make a hovering box. Good luck explaining UV btw. I hope Josh and others read it carefully and pick up some things along the line,even if they don't fully grasp it.

Can I be superannoying and point out these two UV points aren't duplicated anywhere? (green arrows)

Ok, third try...sigh Josh Susanto wrote: Viewing constraints as challenges is creative thinking. Are you sure we really want to go there? I'm a designer, I wouldn't feel out of my element discussing creative thinking. To answer the question though...no, for the sake of the SL Building and texturing forums. I think igloos might be faster and easier. No you don't:) Sure. I can make a more functional desk with 2 tetras than with a box. The box offers a more regular top surface, but it also has no place to put my legs. As I double the supply of each of these parts, I continue getting a more consistent control return for data on the 2 tetras than from the box. I can only put each box in one position at one angle. Per data, the number of additional design options for the tetras increases exponentially as compared to those for the box. Adding or subtracting one tetra is also addition or subtraction by a smaller increment than with a box. Again, this is basically a math question, rather than a practical question. But since the desk with 2 tetras is already more practical than the desk with one box, there would have to be some kind of special black swan threshold to be passed in order to reverse the effect in spite of the math. When you find that black swan, please let me know. Two tetrahedrons won't build you a desk with anything but a triangular top. I'm starting to wonder if you understand what a tetrahedron is and what its possibilities and limits are. No room for your legs? Hang it from a wall, voila. Yes you can do the same with a single tetrahedron, but that still gives you a triangular top. Try to stop thinking in prims, but in 3D surfaces, I can't say this often enough. For some reason you take the freedom to move around the vertices on a tetrahedron if that suits your needs, yet you say a box is a box. You can move vertices on a box around aswell. It would no longer be a geometrical cube, but it would be the same as far as your graphics card is concerned, or the SL rendercost calculation, well almost anyway. Math? I think I covered that, at least superficially Practical desk? I think I hear wings flapping. And the bounding box matters because I need a 64 meter desk? A bounding box matter because most SL objects are square or squarish. So on the xy projection of the bounding box (which can be anything between 0.01 and 64 meters) any unused space is often lost. Boxes use the entire area, tetrahedrons only half. I can still get more desk area with 3 tetras than with a box and tetra, including the square area. More tetras and fewer boxes actually, eventually, means more total rectangular desk area even if we want it all to be rectangular. If we don't, boxes don't offer the counter-advantage of more greatly facilitating non-rectangular desk surfaces. A box will give you 100% desk area. How will one, two three or infinite tetrahedrons give you more than 100%? Again, why can you move around verts on a tetrahedron and not on a box? You can make trapezium shaped desks with a box. Bingo.... I think. Think again. combining two tetrahedrons into a four sided pyramid is the same as welding the top vertices of a box together. Stop thinking in prims for crying out loud:) I only suggest more tetras as a possible shortcut to needing less data, assuming people can figure out how to make that work as a shortcut. I'm confident that I can, and I'm confident that you also can at some point, if not immediately. Hmm, what shall I say? Ah..stop thinking in prims! If you want a good low data base shape for mesh construction, use a triangle, as many as you need. No more no less. You can make any shape with them, or fake one anyway, that's what polygon or mesh modelling is afterall. Understood. But they still have to hang on something, generally. Most of SL's walls micro walls have no framing of any kind, either. Such materials might be used commonly in the future, but on that same basis, I might again suggest tetras instead. Even if they are micro-thin, they can include their own framing by being pressurized with an inert gas mixture. Yes there always has to be some element that can take pressure rather than tension. But you can keep this to a minimum. Take a spoked wheel apart and you'll have yourself a bunch of very wobbly elements. A microthin tetrahedron is effectively a plane. How are you going to fill something that has no volume? (Not to mention why) If I recall correctly, I'm not actually the one who first brought up domes. I mentioned using tetrahedrons underwater and in space. I understand why domes are used there now, but that's no reason to use them compulsively in SL. Bucky Fuller, does that ring a bell? I think people use domes in SL because they like the shape, nothing more, nothing less. Nothing compulsive about it. Anyway, those domes are made out of triangles anyway, as far as all your soft- and hardware are concerned. Even if both these things are true, there would simply be contextual trade-offs in the rendering question. That data is wasted is absolutely clear, whether the trade-off is contextually applicable or not. Not entirely sure what you mean, but if you mean a blank space on a sculpt map is by defentition wasted data and using all the space is not, I think the Drongle experiments with compression might tell you something different. If you use half the sculptmap for your shape and the resulting map is less than half the data (bit-wise). Not sure about the numbers on this at all though. It doesn't matter to begin with since you already acknowledged meshes are preferred in most cases. I will. I'm not sure with what consistency, but really damned often. More than anything, I get the feeling that the 2nd floor will collapse under me. Not that this scares me, literally, but I'm reasonably uncomfortable with the effect. I rarely go to houses or other buildings, anywhere, for just such reasons. I feel like I'm going to knock the thing over if I make one wrong move. And when it doesn't happen, it's almost more unnerving. Like waiting for the other shoe to drop. You won't. Picture a 100 meter long room. Place a plane in the middle of that room, dividing it into two. You have two 50 meter rooms. You can't honestly claim you can see the difference between a 49.9 or 50 meter long room. You'd have to either measure it or rotate your camera through the wall, in which case a "solid" wall wouldn't look so solid either. I find those to be weird, but less weird, depending on the implied material. In RL a 10 cm thick wall can take tons of pressure, a 10 cm ceiling would need a huge construction to keep it from collapsing. I recognise that immediately, without thinking about it. I know others don't, so to them it looks believable. That apparently includes you. As long as there are no holes in the ceiling for stairs or skylights, you can use a plane just aswell as you can for the wall I described, I won't notice.

Yes I got the same inworld message and I got the same problems, well I had access to the forums, but lost connection with it altogether every time I wanted to post. As a matter of fact my previous post I typed at least five times. At least for me it seems to be fine now. EDIT! I think the problem has been identified, I just read this post and it looks like it's the exporter indeed, which I suspected in the first place, since even a model that was succussfully uploaded by someone else didn't upload. link I hope that fixes it. You need to export to FBX, then convert to DAE. Btw, it's the second post in the thread. (first answer)

Can you post some pictures? I know a couple of pitfalls concerning sculpts/PrComp/3ds max, but I can't exactly picture what is wrong with your object...

Chosen Few wrote: Biggay Koray wrote: Furthermore can someone explain to me whether or not i should be using the multi subobject material method or just materials set onto faces? I'm not familiar with how Max handles the multi subobject thing. I would expect that simply assigning materials to selected faces really aught to be enough. That's how it works in most other programs, anyway. Assigning objects per face works just aswell and gives the same result as far as max is concerned. If you assign two "normal" materials to the object and go to the material editor and pick the material from the viewport, it will be a multi/sub. By using a multi/sub in the first place though, you have better control over the channels and texture IDs.

Josh Susanto wrote: >Apart from the fact I'd like to keep calling it an intersection, not "effectively a vert", you are right. I think we're on the same page with that. It's a point of articulation or angular definition which does not require the dedication of data cost that another one might by virtue of actually being a vert. Yes? That depends on how you use your textures. If you don't use a repeat on your textures so every pixel will show on a non hidden surface, you have useless data. Other than that, yes. I see that. But if we do something similar with twice as many tetras, we can get quite a few more intersections for the same or lesser data cost. No? Practical applicability does not necessarily, follow, I know. But this is the basic math question that needs to precede the practical applicability question. Difficult to answer, since a mathematical surface isn't neccecarily the same as a triangular polygon. I'll try to show the different possibilities for some shapes, including the tetrahedron and the box. I'll go with the shape resulting out of intersecting two identical objects, with the most visible unique surfaces as a result. First the number of unique mathematical surfaces for the two single objects against those on the two intersecting ones. Second the number of triangles needed in 3D modelling to make the original two shapes against the number that's needed to build the combined object without any hidden structure. tetrahedron: 8 to 24 (1:3) and 8 to 24 (1:3) 4 sides pyramid 10 to 32 (1:3.2) and 12 to 32 (1:2.67) 5 sides pyramid 12 to 40 (1:3.3) and 16 to 40 (1:2.5) 8 sided pyramid 18 and 64 (1:3.6) and 28 to 64 (1:2.3) cube 12 to 42 (1:3.5) and 24 to 51 (1:2.1) Let's not focus on the mathematical numbers, which are clearly in favour of anything besides the tetrahedron, but on the 3D modelling ones on the right. As you can see the tetrahedron indeed has a better ratio than the cube, so one would guess that's the best option. However, on hard edges the vertices aren't shared between the different faces so we need to look at something else. Now look at the number of triangular faces the objects APPEAR to have. two tetrahedrons seem to have 24, two boxes seem to have 51, which is more than twice as many. We already established a tetrahedron has 12 vertices according to SL (4 faces with 3 vertices each) when the edges are hard. This is exactly half of the 24 vertices for a cube (6 faces with 4 vertices each). I think math gives us a winner here and it's not the tetrahedron. (I can't predict what will happen if we intersect 3 or more objects, but my intuition says the difference will get bigger with every object added. Please don't ask for the math on this, two was a pain already) Hmm, forgot one thing, that is SL rendering cost is NOT the same as GPU rendering cost, which to my best knowledge is based on the number of normal triangles facing the screen. For a cube that is a minimum of two and a maximum of six. For the tetrahedron that is a minimum of one and a maximum of three. Again that exact factor two. Seems the way rendercost is calculated by SL isn't so dumb.... I ran out of brain for today for this post....I'll answer the rest later.

Hell it happened again, a post that took well over an hour destroyed.....

My best guess is you didn't apply the correct material IDs, they correspond one on one with the faces in SL. The step by step you need is given by Medhue, although I would make the multi/sub material before setting the texture IDs, that way you can see right away if it goes the way you intend when setting the IDs. Since you are trying things out, you could skip the whole UV mapping for now and focus on the material IDs. The smaller and more isolated you make your steps, the faster you will find what's causing the problem. make an object - Check export as DAE - Check upload to SL - Check upload with material IDs/ different SL faces - upload with materials properly mapped - As you can see you are nearly there...