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The Mesh Question

So, i’m cruising around doing a land tranfer in viewer 1 this morning, because the land menus are painfully slow to appear and respond in the new viewers, when i see a monstrosity of an ugly prim on the Clockhaven waterfront! WTF is someone thinking, I think to myself. A quick investigation reveals it to be the city’s first mesh house, and a quick relog into viewer 3 shows me how its really supposed to look. Herr Hammerer has taken a texture set he bought into Google Sketchup and added depth to it, with a prim equivalence of over 30 prims.

[img_assist|nid=3500|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=640|height=367]

 

 

So, mein Herr, how is your land seeing that, as one prim or many?

and so you know, i consider v1 compatibility a moot point from here on out. i only use it for the sake of speed when doing admin things.

sooo, what do you think? what have you seen?

 

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24 Comments

  1. Jedburgh30 Dagger Jedburgh30 Dagger September 26, 2011

    I saw a mesh sailing ship that was reported to be pretty, but sadly looked like a container ship on my viewer…

  2. Tepic Harlequin Tepic Harlequin September 26, 2011

    i’m playing with mesh clothing, and trying to make a cave complex in mesh (prim costs may be too high!). Loki has some decent mesh clothing for smaller avs, but nothing steampunk or urchin yet….

    • Edward Pearse Edward Pearse September 27, 2011

      After reading Ordinal’s blogpost on Mesh clothing I think I’ll be giving it a miss both as maker and consumer.

      If a mesh clothing item is effectively no mod, plus no position change, then anything apart from whole avatars is pretty much useless.

      • Gabriell Anatra Gabriell Anatra October 2, 2011

        If it’s not rigged it can be moved or stretched like any sculptie. That’s a problem though as many of the sellers don’t bother mentioning this and just assume we have no problem with replacing the whole avi using alphas. 

  3. Jimmy Branagh Jimmy Branagh September 26, 2011

    I haven’t seen anything to bowl me over yet, but these are the early days.  I’m waiting for Firestorm to upgrade to mesh import capability before I get involved.

    I hear those slide rules may come in handy for determining prim costs … 8D

    • Edward Pearse Edward Pearse September 27, 2011

      The Firestorm with Mesh (Beta) is out already.

      There’s even a long rant from Jessica about how she wasn’t going to put mesh into Phoenix but that now that one of the team has worked out how to do it, she’s releasing an updated version of Phoenix with mesh.

      • Jimmy Branagh Jimmy Branagh September 27, 2011

        Unless I’ve missed something, Firestorm is still only a mesh viewer, not an importer.

  4. Mr Tenk Mr Tenk September 26, 2011

    The avatars are frightening AND hilarious.

    Here’s Loki Eliot’s Icarus class airship in 18 prims:

    [img_assist|nid=3502|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=640|height=308]

     

  5. Avariel Falcon Avariel Falcon September 26, 2011

    I have seen the future!

    Mesh highways in the sky!

  6. Zaida Gearbox Zaida Gearbox September 26, 2011

    I like that building/texture in the first post.  I’ve mostly seen some mesh furniture, but it hasn’t blown me away.  I don’t see that it even saves on prims.  I was out hunting for wingback chairs last week.  I found a mesh chair that was 13 prims.  I had several people assure me that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for for much less than that.  I kept hunting and hunting and found 1 prim sculpt chairs.  Were they as nice and detailed as the 13 prim mesh chairs?  No.  But, they were still pretty nice.

    • Junie Ginsburg Junie Ginsburg September 26, 2011

      I use 1 prim sculpted wingback chairs too.

      I don’t care if they’re a bit less detailed.  They serve their purpose, which is for my friends to park their butts in.  Not to sit there looking detailed.

  7. Breezy Carver Breezy Carver September 26, 2011

    The builds and designs esp Mesh ..  above all The entire Grid :  all are amazing on v3,  firestorm .. etc .

    The textures and colors Vivid !!!!

    **However and this is a huge however ..

    1) For many of us the *Mesh* type viewers are so buggy , unstable and slow it is just not worth it . At This Time!

    2) can’t move

    3) crash

    ** Frustrating …

    Therefore the true Mesh experience …be it  builds , clothing, hair .. avi’s ,etc ..

    Is on hold !

    ** Please Note I have a new pc with upgrade Graphic Card  .

    The Viewers are Just not stable enough .right now …for me …   (( frowns ))

    • Tepic Harlequin Tepic Harlequin September 27, 2011

      it’s strange, i’ve found the sl Viewer 3, with one update exception, to be stable with much less lag, even in crowded situations.This may be due to code complexity and combination of pc components? The days of saying “you have this problem? let me just tweak the code for your chip….” are long gone! (anyone else remember doing that? heheheh)

      My experiments with mesh so far have either been quite successful or total disasters, probably because i don’t know what i am doing!  The artists amoung us, especially those already familiar with 3D sculpting and texturing are producing some stuning results, us technicians may be out of our depth for a while yet :)

  8. Zaida Gearbox Zaida Gearbox September 26, 2011

    I agree with Breezy.  I haven’t experienced this kind of lag since 2007 that I’m getting with Viewer 3.  But, unfortunately, something has gone wrong with my computer that Pheonix will not run on it at all.

  9. Nathaniel Lorefield Nathaniel Lorefield September 26, 2011

    I personally prefer sculpts to meshes at this point for the simple reason that I find it easier for builders( ie. me XD) to create. Also, it almost seems as though one needs to hand over payment info and be sending money to LL in order to upload meshes. At least that’s the way it appeared when I tried to register to upload mesh. As far as appearance it looks great though. I think the biggest uses may be as clothing and avatar shape changes.

  10. Mr Tenk Mr Tenk September 27, 2011

    and my personal favorite, the disembodied cat mobile!

    [img_assist|nid=3503|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=640|height=401]

  11. Amadeus Hammerer Amadeus Hammerer September 27, 2011

    Well, maybe I can bring some light into the darkness.

    First a mesh behaves like a sculpt, you can stretch it, which makes it more prim-expensive or you can make it smaller. But this function is not important when you use Sketchup because 1m in Sketchup is like 1m in SL. This is one of the points that makes it easy to create a building.

    If you give a mesh a physical shape, you can save prims and walk through doors…

    You can make a simple physical shape and use a more detailed cover for it, which make crazxy things possible. like Loki’s Airship, which is still physical with a primcount higher than 32 Prims. The physical shape is below 32 Prims, the visible shape has a higher prim count, but that doesn’t count on the physik engine.

    Viewers…well, that’s a bit strange. Atm the Linden V3 (not beta) seems to be the only one to upload meshes, I heard Kirstens viewer can do that too, but I also heard the project has been stopped. The Linden V3 viewer works well for me, but it has still the V2-design so I use for my normal SL the Cool Viewer. The Cool Viewer is the only V1.XX-Viewer that can show meshes. It’s based on a Snowstorm-Viewer. It seems the new version CoolVLViewer-1.26.1.8b is very stable.

    For those of you, who would like to play around with meshes: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Exporting_a_mesh_from_SketchUp

    I would suggest to start the first tries on beta-grid called Aditi. You pay nearly the same like on the normal grid, but you have 100000 L$ when you log in there.;-) Just look for the mesh sandboxes.

    If you have questions, just ask, maybe I can help.

  12. Gabriell Anatra Gabriell Anatra September 27, 2011

    The Cool VL is, to a large degree 2.x underneath as is Singularity. I’ve noted in testing that the performance of the mesh-eanbled Cool VL is not notebly different than the non-mesh version. It still retains the brownian motion problem that finally drove me off of it back around the start of the year. Not much point in mesh when I am too busy ping-ponging off of objects and people to look at it.

    The no-mod factor may be a deal killer for me. So far I’ve had to mod ~70% of my purchases. I suspect that if the current project to make fittable mesh does not bear fruit we will end up with a very narrow range of ‘off the shelf’ avi’s and little real ability to personalize them beyond off the rack options.

    One can use alphas, of course, but that’s really no better than using a different shape for each set of clothing. If this is done then mix and match will become more difficult too.

    If it does pan out it’s probably goodbye to sculpties as attachments in the long run as the makers abandon them in favor of a standardized mesh skillset. If not then we may see sculpties continue as attachments for that small market that cares about this sort of thing. 

    Regardless, true editing of mesh will require one of three things : 

    You are the one who made it to begin with.

    A change in the TOS to allow upload to local drive of items made by others.

    A TOS violation.

    • Yang Moreau Yang Moreau September 27, 2011

      I was so excited to try Cool VL when I first heard about it, but really disappointed it’s not on LL’s list of approved third party viewers.

      About mesh, I’ve got nothing to say I haven’t already said in world or hasn’t been said here, I think.

      It’s not replacing anything, it’s just shouldering in and defining niches of work a bit more.

      Sculpts still have their strong suits as do regular prims and they are still better suited to some jobs than mesh is.

      Likewise mesh is better suited to certain jobs than sculpts and prims.

      It’ll probably do best for structural builds, inhuman avs and some av accessories depending on what they are, probably things like Vic’s goat legs or a shoulder bag that moves with the av, though admittedly it would still float on some avs.

      As far as I’ve seen, it’s a really bad idea for large articles of clothing due to floating off the av, bloating the av and changing the appearance of the av’s dimensions due to poor shape support.

      The prim count and upload cost still seems to be awkward from what I’ve heard, that I haven’t gotten to test myself yet, having trouble getting it to recognize my files to upload.

      blah blah, same old chatter, but my two cents.

  13. Loki Eliot Loki Eliot September 28, 2011

    To correct Mr Tenk, the Airship is in fact 37 PE (Prim equivilance) BUT THATS OVER THE 32 PRIM LIMIT FOR MOVING VEHICLES! i hear you cry, well yes but now things are more complicated in this modern world of progress. The Airship maybe counted on land as 37 Prims but of phsical movment the airship only costs 18 prims. So the simulator allows the Airship to move as its physics count is only 18, but a plot with only 32 prims left will not let the airship pass because it counts the Airships PE…. still with me?

    • Mr Tenk Mr Tenk September 28, 2011

      Yes! That is what I wanted to know!

      i guess we can make slide rules… or get the monks to come up with a simple equation… er, sure…..

  14. Loki Eliot Loki Eliot September 28, 2011

    Also i do not plan to rebuild any of my places in Babbage with mesh untill next year. Hopefully that is enough time for LL and the TPV’s to iron out wiggyfish. I may though take adveantage of the Mega prim situation in order to reduce prims on plots.

    Infact i have been wondering how many in Babbage are using Mesh Enabled viewers. I would like to make some mesh objects for use in Babbage.

    • Jimmy Branagh Jimmy Branagh October 2, 2011

      Oy’m not sure Oy would troy ta iron a wiggyfish, even ifn it IS out of th’ water.

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