What is rendering?

[lllooo90]

So. When someone says "well, this viewer renders mesh well," what does that mean? I'm a total noob with no knowledge of what mesh even means. What does it mean to "render" in simple words? And what is mesh VS prim?

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Generally, everything you see graphically is made up of "rendered" mesh objects. The current obsession about mesh has to do with the the newly introduced ability [since 2012] allowing us the capability to design and create objects with complex mesh shapes. These can be used to create just about anything. Before this time we had to use Prims and Sculpt-maps to create. 

from http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh

Mesh is the capability to bring 3D models, known as meshes, created in third-party tools into Second Life. Mesh background information explains in detail.

OK so to answer your question: Two basic things are required to allow you to see mesh on your PC:

1) A advanced Graphics Card for your PC or an Advanced Graphics Chipset in your Laptop.

2) A Mesh-enabled SL Viewer.

All Mesh-enabled Viewers display Mesh objects well. The viewer passes the [local] rendering information and hints to the GPU [Graphics Processing Unit(s)] in your Graphics System. It in turn displays the results onto your computer display.

Some viewers are better suited for capturing images of your SL Experience than others. They don't necessarily display mesh better.

 

Below are a few discussions regarding the differences in Land Impact of Sculpties vs mesh VS prims.

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Rendering-cost-Mesh-VS-Prims-sculpty-who-is-better/td-p/1312849

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Building-and-Texturing-Forum/Please-help-me-understand-Mesh-vs-Sculpt-vs-Prim/td-p/2872832

A lot more information about Mesh is at the link below:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/FAQ

 

BTW: " mesh VS prim" is the discussion term when asking the question of Why use Mesh vs Prim.

 

 

 

 

 

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

3D modeles on a computer are made up of triangles. Simple things just a few complicated things zillions. The triangles are covered with texture to make them look solid. Rendering is the process of calculating where the triangles are in a virtual space and covering them with textures.

A viewer that renders mesh well puts the triangles in the right place.

Because there were changes in the mesh used in SL there had to be changes in the viewer which, along with your graphics card, is the thing doing the rendering. So, an example of a viewer that does not render mesh well is one that isn't up to date with mesh requirements.

It is a process that is dependant on the graphics card so problems with mesh (triangles not in the right place) can be caused by a glitch in that department and not the fault of the viewer. So you could also say, this graphics card renders mesh well.

Press Ctrl + Shift + R to see the triangles. If you see things that look kind of solid zoom in on them and you will see the triangles are tightly packed, to give more detail. Press Ctrl + Shift + R again to make them go away.

[Nalates Urriah]

Since you are saying you’re new to all this, I’ll explain it another way and may be between all of us it will make sense to you.

First, in RL the physical world is made up of things that have width, length, and height, 3 dimensions. We’ll skip String Theory and the other 8 dimensions.

In the computer a virtual world has to represent the physical world using math. Then that math has to be turned into a picture that presents an image that looks like the physical world. Making that image is the Render. When something goes through the process and appears on our computer screen, we say it has rendered.

To render well is ambigous. It may be a statement about the quality or speed of the render.

The math is about drawing on an X, Y, Z graph. See: 3D Graph The image there is an example of a math function plotted on a 3D graph. So, to plot/draw/render a math thing that looks like a cube we give the system the 8 corners of the cube as a set of 3D positions/coordinates. We tell the system how to connect the points so we have lines between the points and can see a cube drawn. We tell the computer how to color each surface of our cube so it looks solid.

As objects become more complicated we need more points to represent the object. The results is things that look like a fish net or a mesh. You can see the meshes in SL by pressing Ctrl-Shift-R. Press it again to return to normal view.

Since everything in SL or any 3D game is mesh, our use of the word mesh in SL has special meaning. Our meaning comes from the way SL evolved. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s when SL was being developed sending big lists of points (vertices) over the Internet was a much slower process than today. So, the Lab devised a way to avoid sending 3D coordinate lists. The method is called parametric.

By parametric we mean they built a number of shapes into the viewer; cube, sphere, cone, etc. These are called the primitive shapes or prims for short. When you use the Build Panel you are changing the parameters of those primitive shapes. It is the parameters that control the shape because all cubes have the same coordinate list. It is those parameter values that the Lab stores in the servers and sends to the viewer. It saved a lot of data transfer and made for a faster render. That style of shape control is named parametric.

Now that the Internet is faster, they added the ability for us to add items that we make from custom lists of coordinates. We call those items meshes rather than prims. But, technically everything in SL is both a prim and a mesh. So, that we can easily talk about what we a mean we refer to our prim objects made of a list of coordinates and no other parameters as mesh items. By prims we mean the objects that we shape with parameters.