Too many vertices

[Spinell]

I need some opinions on a mesh.

I had been working on my new dress and, once the main structure was complete, I added some extra details: the rose beltand the neck ribbon.

 

 

I was beggining to start texturing, when I decided to test out the rigging functions of the mesh, just to be sure I didn't need to alter anything. Now, when I tested it without the details, the mesh was working fine: needed a little weight-tunning on the skirt, but other than that it moved perfectly.

But, after the details... PArts of the mesh dissapeared. I know his happens when the mesh has way too many vertices (it hapened before), and true enough, when I uploaded it it had 270+ prim-equivalents on SL.

Now, I'd like your opinions:

*Should I get rid of the details and just go with the simple dress?

*Or do you have any suggestions on ways I could reduce the vertices and keep the details?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Spinell wrote:

 

Now, I'd like your opinions:

*Should I get rid of the details and just go with the simple dress?

*Or do you have any suggestions on ways I could reduce the vertices and keep the details?

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Unfortunately I'd say neither. If adding some details will push the vertexcount over the maximum of 64 000, your dress is probably way too heavy to begin with. The proper way to handle this would be to start over. Use a high poly model to bake your textures for creases and folds to suggest details where there are none.

I know you didn't want to hear that, so this is what is seriously NOT the way you should do it, but could help you out. Split your model into seperate pieces and rig them both. In SL the linkset would appear to be one rigged item.

Specific ways to simplify your model without losing all the detail are a bit difficult to provide as long as you don't show a wireframe.

Btw, if your dress is very simple (you could post a vertex/triangle count), forget all I said and lose the roses and ribbon you have now. It does look like the vertex density of dress and roses are a bit out of tune.

[Drongle McMahon]

The following is just in case you are interested in details. What you need to do is drastically reduce your vertex/triangle count. No material should have more than about 20000 triangles (10000 quads), for the reasons below. Ideally they should have much less, to lower the stress on the gpu and avoid consequent lowering of frame rates.

What limit you run into depends on the number of materials you specify andhow many triangles there are in each. Although there is a piece of code that tests for the limit of 65536 vertices per material, and should return an error code, there is* (for now - a bug) another test that prevents that limit ever being reached. This is a limit of 21844 on the number of triangles in the list of triangles for a material. For each triangle, there is a maximum of three different vertices. So even if there are no re-used vertices in the list (eg, if it's all flat shaded), this limit is reached first, with 3 x 21844 = 65532 vertices. However, instead of stopping with an error message, the code simply starts a new material with new vertex and triangle lists. That seems to be able to be repeated indefinitely, but when it's finished, if there are more than eight materials, the extra ones will be discarded, along with all the triangles associated with them. This happens with more than 174752 triangles (if there is only one material specified in the collada file), and leaves holes in the mesh for the extra triangles. Where the holes appear depends on the order the collada exporter sees the triangles. If you try to upload a mesh with more than 174752 triangles, you will see that the uploader will always say 174752 triangles because it has removed the rest. For example, I have a cube subdivided seven times. The Blender model has 98306 vertices and 196608 triangles. It uploads as 174752 triangles and 233685 vertices. So it has about 2200 triangles missing when it's rezzed. The excessive vertex count is because the secretly added materials are intimately interspersed over the mesh surface, so that many vertices have to be replicated in several material lists.

*this is in the official viewer, tpvs may have fixed this so that the vertex limit applies.