Missing required level of detail

[AbbyRosseta]

I understand there has been a lot of posts on this subject but I'm still having trouble uploading a mesh I created to SL. Does anyone have an idea as to why this may be happening? Here's a photo! The mesh is rigged using avastar. Let me know if you need more references.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sassy Romano]

Hit subsurf a couple more times, that should fix it. *walks away slowly*

 

Or just wait longer while your slow internet connection uploads the way too dense model that you already have created whereupon the highest level of detail should finally appear in the upload dialog.

 

Your model is too dense, that's ridiculous for a shirt. It looks almost solid in wireframe view.

[AbbyRosseta]

....*toots*

I understand the mesh is dense for a fairly simple mesh shirt but that is because I'm only a beginner and learning my way around zbrush. With that being said, there was no need for you to be snarky in your response.

[Sassy Romano]

You're welcome for the answer.  I'll recap: Wait longer for the upload...or reduce detail.

[Gaia Clary]

One reason for "missing required level of detail" is due to using ngons (polygons with 5 or more faces) in your mesh. Avastar does not check on that. So what you can do is:

 

• go to edit mode
• Select -> Select Faces by Side

Then in the operator panel (at bottom of the the tool shelf) set:

 

• number of faces: 4
• type: Greater than

Now you get all ngons selected. If your mesh contains ngons, then you can proceed as follows:

 

• Mesh -> Faces -> Triangulate Faces

Now all your previously selected ngons have been changed to triangles. When you export again, then the problem of missing required level of detail might have been fixed.

Mesh density

However, as others also mentioned before your mesh is extremely dense and you should fix that in first place. There is one caveat that is often overlooked and which could cause the "missing required level of detail". That is: A texture face in Second Life can have no more than  21844 triangles. Because of that the SL Importer splits texture faces into separate submeshes of appropriate triangle count. Each of these submeshes actually represents a separate texture face.

And here is the problem: The SL Importer by default calculates the levels of detail (LOD) for your mesh. It can happen that one or more of the calculated LOD levels have completely removed all triangles which belong to one texture face. In your case your mesh might have 2 texture faces in high LOD but only one texture face in lowest LOD. Then the SL Importer stumbles over its own calculated inconsistencies.

So your best way to fix that is by reducing your mesh face count to less than 21844 triangles. Blender has a Decimate Modifier for that. This might work in your case, but honestly i would work directly on the mesh and in first place i would remove unnecessary edge loops. Especially the collar and the sleeves look extremely high polygon to me.

A rule of thumb

Check how many triangles are used by the area of the avatar that is covered by your attachment. This gives you a rough idea about how many triangles your mesh should have. Following that rule, your shirt should be doable with about 3600 triangles. However i personally believe that you can do this with less than 2000 tris.

[Arriane Ethaniel]

Honestly, they are right, it's most likely the density, and uploading that and just saying "well I'm learning" doesn't make it right.

As an example, the first thing I ever meshed was this dress, I was learning and it's a lot more detail than that shirt, with a heck of a lot less vertices.

[AbbyRosseta]

Thank you so much Gaia, for taking the time to comment! You dedicate so much time and effort to all of your replies. I greatly apprecitate it and I'm sure newcomers, like myself, do as well! So, before removing edge loops and vertices, I trigulated the faces and checked to see if any of the faces had 4+ sides. Turns out that one of the faces had 5 sides, which was preventing me from uploading the shirt and instead giving me "Missing..." etc. In conclusion, I was able to upload the mesh without any issues after that, but I do agree that I should work on creating less dense mesh in the future.

Again, thank you so very much for offering actual help and for not being condescending!

[Drongle McMahon]

"One reason for "missing required level of detail" is due to using ngons (polygons with 5 or more faces) in your mesh."

That's interesting, especially as correcting it did solve the problem. But what circumstances make it a problem? I just tried uploading a dodecahedron with all twelve faces as pentagons (triangulate off in exporter - checked collada and they were all 5-sided in the <polylist>). There was no problem. Same for a cylinder with 32gon caps. The uploader triangulated them as it is supposed to. So there must be a some other factor that makes this a problem. Do you know what that might be? Is it only for rigged mesh?

[Dain Shan]

I Had this before.

If i recall that back right, i found a polygon with more then 5 faces and triangulated it. But the error was still there, i rotated the edges of the polygons and then it worked. I guess that there are a few instances where the uploader cant figure out a proper sollution for triangulation.

Thats when this errors happen

 

After this i took special care to avoid the issue by looking out for faces with more then 4 vertices.

 

Addenum:

Oh it was a static mesh !

[DaveNtown]

I had the same error: Missing required level of detail. For me I just copied the object (pillow) and opened a new instance of Blender. I then pasted it into the new instance of Blender. Next I exported it to the desktop as a ".dae" file. I could then upload it into SL with no errors.