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Hi everyone, for my own project I'm currently interested in knowing more about 3d building. I'm not a creator but I'm curious about the topic and I hope to learn something new. Let's say I'm working on something in Blender just because it's a free and OS software, I'm going to optimize my object anyway but I want to know during building how much land impact will have on SL even though I'm trying to use as few prims as I can. Is there a way to know or "calculate" that before actually importing the stuff inworld? Do you have your own way to tell "ok, this is just too detailed, I'm going to smooth it out" if I'm making any sense? Thank you very much

Today I saw an experienced SL user referring to using prims, because mesh apparently needed Blender, which was frightening. I would argue that Blender, and similar paid-for programs, are not necessary for non-rigged meshes, the sorts of things that prims were used for. There are things which you need to take into account to make a good mesh, but for the basics, what do you need? 1: The object shape, the part we usually think of as mesh. 2: The physics shape, making this right lets you walk through a doorway. 3: LOD models. These can be generated in the import process, which may be good enough. For some things a very simple mesh may be enough for the lowest LOD. Maybe an inside wall for a house. Who is ever going to see it, through other walls, at the lowest LOD? It's still needed, but it needs to have the same number of texture faces. 4: UV mapping: how the usually non-flat surface of the model is split up and fitted onto 1 or more flat textures. Compare how a spherical prim is UV mapped to what the flexibility of mesh can give you, something like a Goode Homolosine projection. I don't think the standard spherical prim uses a Mercator projection but the difference is getting a bit picky. There's a huge amount of stretching at the poles. This may be the most complicated part of making a mesh. But, when it is done well, it can let you use bump maps for detail. None of this needs Blender-level tools.