my only caveat is that people will try to upload anything, and care none for optimisation. How to get around that, good question.

To be specific, I would like to have a tool that would create a sculpt image from the exterior surface of a union of a linked set of overlapping prims. This would warp to follow straight edges and adjust to surface curvatures. with the proviso that the sharp edges could be adjustably rounded to elimate the Phong shading artifacts.

I saw this idea mentioned long ago on the sculpt wiki discussion.

If you decided to go with import mesh.... for the love of god, please set a polygon limit.

(TREEESSSSSS)

Yes, I'd like to see an inworld tree and plant modeller, like the one that's been built for 3d Coat, for instance.

http://3dbrush.kriska.hvosting.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=1003

see, just one dude did that!

yea, I want my cake and eat it too... no surprise

Could do it in OpenSim, though.

I like the 3d Coat idea... its using sprites/billboards as the leaves rather than geometry, that face the camera. (similar to particle systems) Megasavings on geometry.

What ever happened to Ventrella's projects?

The comments in the other entry are mostly about using professional tools - and that creates a barrier the regular user has to creating content that they can feel competitive with. My other objection to this is that this is one more thing that moves users back out of SL. In some ways, even though I sell on it, I think SL Exchange has harmed SL itself by bringing people out of SecondLife itself, back to their web browser.

I remember using POVray, and enjoying the rich array of primitives available there.

And it will export COLLADA, so no worries.

http://www.collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/XSI_6_Mod_Tool

Cant think of anything better to animate with. Forget about Maya.

However, I don't think that SL is ready for general mesh importing. The system already has a lot of load on it, and this would add more. Plus, this will put more strains on the client, and SL will get an even worse reputation as being "laggy" because of slow framerates.

I was actually somewhat against (and not much for) sculpties when they were announced. They're great and people are doing a lot of cool things with them, but they also showcase the unwillingness of most SL content creators to consider the load impact of their content on viewers. All it takes is one person with a monstrous quad-core nvidia whatever spewing out a ton of sculpties that "work fine for me!" and you end up with a laggy sim. Most of SL is already pretty laggy because people don't use any restraint with the features we already have. Think the old-school phenomenon of "torus hair" lagging up an entire venue, or the current way people stick hundreds of flex-prims on a single avatar, all of which end up rendering at 1 FPS or less because there are so many on-screen. Entire builds are made with sculpties, so when you teleport in, you're surrounded by a bunch of grotesque spheres and ovoids for a few minutes until the sculpt textures load in.

It would be great if LL managed to do mesh import in a sane way, and I might come around to it. But you have to consider that people WILL overuse it. Entire builds will be made with it, and you have to consider the worst-case scenario. Be careful how many ways you give users to shoot themselves in the foot, because they shoot the rest of us too.

http://www.realityprime.com/articles/volumes-of-reading

I gotta think we can do better than what LL does right now, but doing it without raising the bar on the system requirements for the SL viewer is an important consideration also.

> Pro tools? XSI Mod tool is like, free. You can learn it and use it to model for any game for exactly zero money.
> Its a free version of XSI Essentials, with only a few limits (polygon limit and a max 512 render). Which is
> enough for SL. It is FREE mental ray. Srsly.

> And it will export COLLADA, so no worries.

> http://www.collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/XSI_6_Mod_Tool

> Cant think of anything better to animate with. Forget about Maya.

Or you could use Blender, or I'm sure there's some tool out there to convert POVray models to whatever your favorite format is. You're still getting pulled outside of the SL environment.

Heck, I'd like to see some tools for working on textures within the game - nothing on the scale of PhotoShop or CorelDraw, but something would be nice.

BTW, "Pro" doesn't have anything to do with cost - it has to do with the tools those who do this kind of work for pay use.

The only way I'd really want mesh modelling to be put into SL would be if you could do it in-game, grabbing a vertex and stretching it, or splitting a face down the middle to generate two new faces - things like that.

Prim-based modeling always results in redundant geometry and requires more polygons/vertices than necessary. Take a look at other computer games and ask yourself why they look so much better AND run at higher frame rates than Second Life. It's because of two things: Mesh-based modeling and normal-mapping.

The big advantage of mesh-based modeling is that only visible surfaces need to be included in the model. This reduces the load on the graphics engine. In the long term, mesh import will also open the door to custom avatar meshes. These will be much more efficient than standard meshes with dozens of attachments.

Of course prim-based modeling in SL will not go away. Of course there will be reasonable limits on the number of polygons per custom mesh. But unlike sculpted prims, the number of polygons in a custom mesh is not static and can be much LOWER for simple irregular shapes. Furthermore a custom mesh can have any topology, not just cylinder, plane, sphere and torus. All these things will bring the number of polygons DOWN and rendering speed UP.

Clothing artists arent crying because they have to use a gasp, graphics program, many times even, bigger gasp, a 3d program! to make good clothing textures. Fashion designers arent crying because they have to use Lightwave or Zbrush to develop properly seamless baked clothing textures or sculpted items to accent their clothing designs. They were using outside programs already and =always have=. Probably why so many jumped right into sculpties so well.

Animation artists have been using mocap and programs outside SL such as Poser for quite a long time. In fact this is one of the things that should have been INWORLD for a long time. People should be able to interact in the environment more naturally. Yet that work by Ventrella was all put aside. I'd like to see that taken back up again.

Only "builders" scream they need to "remain in the environment". Only "builders" want to be subsidized.

No, I am realistic. There are things that math can do better than mesh, but mesh can do better than prims on a host of other things. This is why I voted for both. I want the CHOICE to pick what works best for the project at hand.

I don't have anything particularly against meshes if they are something that would work properly in SL - it sounds rather like a lot of work on the back-end, but I am no expert - but there should definitely be an inworld tool to manipulate them as well.

Also, I would agree with Lex Neva that it had better be absolutely bulletproof in terms of lag. Casual and widespread use of sculpts is starting to become a problem now.

(As well as this I could name you half a dozen things that I would put far before either of the options given.)

But as Ordinal says, the implementation needs to be bulletproof. That's why I could see a number of serious limitations on uploaded meshes. Among such potential limitations, I'd suggest the following be considered:

• high upload costs*; staged to polycounts
• automatic asset IP tagging/tracking* (with a searchable catalog so IP-owning 3D modelers can more easily flag violations)
• phased-in ability to "Copy"; starting off with "No Copy", proceeding through limited duplication and eventually ... when bandwidth is less of a concern ... to unlimited.
• phased-in rezzing limitation; first non-Mainland and then the Mainland

If we can't implement mesh uploads in a highly controlled manner I'd rather LL focus on providing more capable in-world modeling tools.

*Note: I've always wished an "asset removal/refund" system was in place for items which haven't been duplicated and could be wiped from the system.

The other option seems mostly self-serving...people with expensive tools/relevant job experience/infinite time to learn meshes wanting to corner the ingame market as it were, with LL's help. Their skills already put them over most creators, but that apparently is not good enough and they must CRUSH the non-pro builders in the market.

Rather than a mesh import system geared to giving pros the market, give us some simple things that were in VRML 10 years ago for christ sake'....say allow overlapping a prim and joining them into one 'object mesh' ingame OR overlap two prims and subtract one to make a custom shape. or let us build something out of prims and have SL turn it into a mesh object. The pro would STILL have an advantage over the average builder, but not crushingly so.

Some of the artiste' types in the other JIRA should realize once they have driven all the inferior creators who make 'junk' (as one pro poster referred referred to prim builders) who use the money they make off THEIR content to buy OTHERS conten or to pay for landt, who's going to be left to buy their ubersnazzy mesh content? For my part, LL should stay true to 'your world, your imagination' on building, rather than 'your world, content by pros only' and keep as much of the tools as possible INGAME and accessable to all of varying skill levels.

I see it over Fashcon which is an excellent barometer of what people are making. Yet nobody is screaming that good designers are all using Photoshop of whatever flavour. Which is a pro tool used widely by non-pros. Nobody has been arguing to GIMP them.

Arguments for hobbling SL will only help tremendously whatever world competitors that come along to crush it (the response for mesh import is obviously overwhelming), and helps those who run Opensim grids tremendously as content makers will eventually need to go elsewhere to places that are willing to innovate. Don't fear mesh import, fear what will happen to SL if it doesn't keep up with its own competition just to placate some people who don't want to learn.

And no, I'm not a pro from some pro school professing the wonders of Maya when they can barely operate the program and just want to import meshes out of lazyness (which I admit are a significant amount of people who ask me questions, and I ignore them by now), I am self taught in 3d from a 2d illustration background, and a perfect example of what people can do if they are persistent enough. And I use midrange 3d software which is easily affordable by the enthusiast rather than a pro.

I would prefer if people looked at this from not a monetary but a purely performance perspective. As the average user and the average landowner is not a businessman but uses SL for their own pleasure, they dont care nearly as much about the plight of builders business as they do bad performance.

Meshes, if implemented, need to have limits on polygon sizes. I want meshes to exactly create those very small size meshes that do not have a quad based topology (using triangles) - this is very difficult with sculpties and extremely wasteful from a performance perspective. Hobbling me doesnt stop me from making hard edged objects with few faces, it just takes me longer as I am forced to use a topology which doesnt work well for the task, and prims are even more wasteful resourcewise to create such objects which should be a cinch to make in SL.

I really am having a hard time make this choice I welcome and fear mesh all at the same time.

As I said before, the REAL issue for nice appearance in SL, as far as I know, is network bandwidth, not vertex-count. And, Qarl just added the upload/display support for the new x by y sculpty textures. Before I'd support new types of meshes, I'd like 1) to see what can be done with the new sculpties, 2) to see what the original programmer left out of the primitive set and options that SL currently supports, and 3) see what the bandwidth cost of supporting new meshes will be like. Oh, and better caching of textures would be a good thing to implement first, as well. Not to mention better animation support for sculpties, and stitching support for scultpies of various sizes and shapes.

My guess is that for the kind of virtual world Second LIfe is (arbitrary content used by arbitrary individuals in arbitrary simulators), ad hoc geometry like scultpies and primitives will ALWAYS look and behave better until everyone using SL has a direct T1 connection all the way from the sim to their home computer.

And no, in this case, the fact that YOUR mileage may vary doesn't matter one bit: it's the average case that matters, not the extremely fortunately few who currently have such connections.

Performance in the viewer is a combination of vertices viewable on the screen (directly impacting frame rate) and bandwidth considerations.

Small meshes will be highly useful for NON quad topologies, something that is not very feasable with sculpties and prims. (not impossible, just very prim AND polygon intensive if you use a prim to draw each triangle, or highly annoying and not very high quality to do with sculpts in comparison to using the actual meshes.) I have done them ALL, and so I can compare. When you have done them all and can compare, then you are in a position to talk about it.

I do a lot of this kind of modelling, so I am very MUCH in a position to comment about it from a point of experience. I'd like to be able to use my own gemstone designs in SL. They are VERY small meshes. I can't very easily. This annoys me to no end.

I was the one who posted the edge stitching and sculpty skinning animation JIRAs. I still want these improvements to sculpties to enter SL. Sculpties are highly optimised for NURBS and subdivision surface modelling - they should continue to be improved. And let us use something else for hard edged low poly objects with non-quad topologies. (using triangles instead of quads) Sculpts were NOT designed for this kind of modelling - its trying to fit a square peg into a round hole to keep on bothering.

Use a hammer when you need a hammer, and a drill when you need a drill. Let's stop using a hammer when we need a drill.

I read Avi's article, and again, he makes the same point many of us make when supporting low poly mesh. Prims are not automatically better from a performance perspective as they are wasteful with polygons. This problem impacts frame rates in the viewer.

"The downside, of course, is that these pseudo-solid volumes are not as efficient to render as arbitrary hand-crafted polygons, since there are lots of overlapping and hidden surfaces (which take time to render, even if you don't see them) and require lots of tiny state changes, including simple changes in position and orientation, each of which takes a small-but-cumulative amount of time for any 3D hardware system to set up and work through."

http://www.realityprime.com/articles/how-sl-primitives-really-work

This is the program I use to make gemstones - I have used it for years. (way before SL)

http://www.gemcad.com/

Note its not a "3d modeller" per se. It is a lapidary simulator, for cutting gemstones. Most users of this program are not 3d modellers... they are jewelry designers. Most of whom are not very computer savvy. (I've spoken to many when showing my 3d renderings made with this program)

Here's some of my work from way back in 2004, when SL was just a fledgling.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hypatiacallisto/2812253153/

The center diamond is a replica of the Hope diamond. Want to know how many faces it has? A whopping 96 polygons. Tack on a few more when triangulating the table facets, so if brought to SL, would maybe be... oh, 110 ish or so.

That is ALL.

A sculpty is MUCH larger than this! The OBJ for just my Hope is 25.5 KB. Tiny. A sculpt texture is both much larger in texture and polygon size, as it has to define the placement of 1024 vertices, not the 88 vertices which is all this model comprises! Prims inworld are also much LARGER than this!! It's very hard to get a sculpt to do this kind of nonstandard geometry accurately, and with gemstones, ACCURACY of angles is PARAMOUNT when you are doing replicas of actual stones for a jewelry design.

As altering the end / profile cuts would trigger a mesh update, it's also the ideal way to implement sculptie animations as film strip sculptie maps could be changed to the next frame just by updating the cut positions.

• Sculpties are beautyfull
• Sculpt are a bit tricky to make
• ... are very tight limited, so chalenging
• have a constant rendering cost (i guess so)
• have a fixed UVmapping and fixed LOD system (so they dont need more data for those)
• can/could be used for soft shapes and for hard edges too (just need an option for phong like "soft or hard")
• cant be used to "import" any 3d file newbies could find... (that s a big point i guess, and maybe the major issue concerning "arbitrary mesh import" )

Now they need a bit more work (you know what i am telling about)... before they may disapear o.O ( could they survive "mesh import" )

Meshes will come to SL or SL will die!
Who can imagine a virtual world made of spheres and cubes compare to modern gaming 3d.
But i think it WILL be absolute priority to limit the use of "arbitrary meshes" as so much ppl building here just dont care about rendering cost.
What looks great and could be a disaster, allow anyone to import any 3d mesh inworld. I can imagine the great lags, copyright issues, and creativity going down... please dont !

So, lets take some time and find some "standard" like for game engine "props", with tight clear limits keeping in mind that builders are not professional low poly modeler but will need to work like if they were.

My position will be: finish the sculpties system to a fully usable state (new features are great for sure but plz fix the loading priority ) and lets think A LOT before bringing new object type inworld so the transition to "mesh revolution" (should be) will be smooth and sweet.

(this is my opinion, a modeler point of view, but speaking about meshes(technicaly) with non-modeler Avies is kind nonsens... isnt it?)

But given the circumstances i would take these thoughts into account:

Sooner or later for virtual worlds in general there needs to be a high-end 3d standard format.
Here is one approach towards exactly that: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-363.htm

This format is still in development but far better than all formats that are commonly used nowadays.

So i would conclude:

Fix and improve existing tools for now and at the same time investigate and approach U3D directly.
Introducing data into SL that is not really made for this kind of dynamic environment can bring a whole lot of issues.

Dont waste time and nerves on old formats ... do your thing (sculpties) and wait for better times to come (U3D)

To what degree you focus on one or the other would then be mainly determined by the development of U3D itself.

Sculpties are an excellent and simple hack for now. (Kudos to Qarl)
And in the future of cause we NEED an open high-end 3d format that can be used in all virtual worlds and as of now U3D seems to be candidate.

http://tumansky.com/blog/2008/08/how-to-texture-in-sl-like-pro-part-1.html

The mesh itself can be more efficient that the current prims, and as an airrcraft builder the problem with crossing sim borders is most noticely caused by a high number of attatchment or vehicle prims crossing the border with the associated Avatar. Also attributes like hard or soft edges, and different surface attributes can be applied by the face by material ID. if the Polygon count is low enough it could have true collision like the prims rather than the approximated collision of sculpties.

Limitations to preserve bandwidth, or keep the assets small for storage can be implmented in ways similar to how SL handles files outside acceptable parameters in other file types such as sounds and animation. You can set a hard limit of how many polygons or vertices that can be uploaded. You may want to go with verts, because each attribute, such as the UV assignments and material IDs will add another layer of verts to the existing ones. The average Game character is between 4000 -7000 polygons. If LL were to limit the number of polygons to 4096 per object, for example, and fail anything over that amount. Entire games were created with assets much less than that, such as Quake II Arean with 1500 to 2000 Polygon models and Quake 2 and the original Half Life as low as 600-800. with the counts low, but one allowed to link 30 pof these objects together would make things fairly simple.

Someone above posted the number of polygons in a sculptie. Keep that as the bench mark. You could further limit the mesh to only allowing mesh that passes a Stereolithography Test (STL Test) so make sure the mesh is properly closed , welded and legal, and fail to upload it if there are mesh errors. A high upload cost might or might not be a good solution, as I see it causing a bit of inflation in world as yhe greter cost to upload is passed on to consumers, but 10 or 20L would work. But a further limitation may be to have those loading Mesh also have to hand optimize two more Level of Detail (LOD) meshes of lower polygon counts, for distance or performance limited clients. (or use soemthing like Polychop to reduce the counts for LOD's. these meshes arent' going to animate themselves). Also the upload should fail of the object loaded has a bounding box larger than 10m on a side (conversely all objects rez in world in proportion but at .5m on the longest dimension of it's bounding box). I would suggest against "fixed" point compression of mesh as that brings in imprecision that causes people to tear their hair out. (pre-SL Uploader Sculpties looking melted. or abused)

--Karl

One of the greatest allures of SL is that you can build almost anything and teach people how to build, completely inworld. I fear that a push towards the externalization of content creation would further reduce the number of people who experiment with building. Making users learn external 3D modeling programs to compete with top tier, elite content creators is going to limit variety, since most external 3D modeling programs use an interface that is completely foreign to those who are more comfortable with creating in SL. Additionally, the majority of 3D modeling programs outside of SL have an extremely high learning curve.

The current primitives system of building inworld allows people to be introduced into content creation with a very simple, forgiving learning curve that promotes collaborative efforts. Right now, there are many people who are excellent at building using primitives, since the inworld build tools are fairly good at what they do. In world sculpting tools would be the next step in the evolution of their skillsets.

It is great that many people consider me to be one of the very "top" content creators in my niche, due to my RL design background and familiarity with many external design programs....but I feel that that same opportunity should be afforded to the many ambitious and creative people already in SL, by enhancing the inworld tools.

"Your world, your imagination"...let's keep it that way.

Part of its beauty is its relative simplicity, and trying to satisfy 'standard' requirements for a 3D application is within the scope of SL, but I think not in the immediate future.
In the wider world of serious 3D apps we are now approaching a relatively standardized interface/gizmo/terminology set for 3D apps in general. So maybe the day isnt far off where implementing a comprehensive 3D tool interface into a virtual world viewer is relatively trivial... but the general user has to intuitively understand how to use or ignore it , and that may not be quite so close.

Forcing the user to convert to the current simple RGBA image format solves a multitude of problems.
Primarily it forces the user to understand the limitations of the medium, and adapt their model to fit as perfectly as possible within that necessarily finite system. (data packet sizes, rendering power, etc)

I vote first for "mesh import" (MISC-1494), because its what takes us immediately forward, and allows us to use the tools of our choice. Which will be significantly more powerful and refined than any inworld tools for some time to come.
I also vote for "inworld tools" (MISC-1495), because as a natural course of events this will naturally evolve out of the previous issue in a more timely and on-demand manner.

MISC-1494 = important now
MISC-1495 = will come from MISC-1494 anyway.

Sorry - but that doesn't follow at all. What will actually happen, most likely, is that mesh import will come - and then anyone asking about how to edit them in world will be told they can't do that - go download $3DModelerOfChoice, and learn it. The Lindens will almost always have something more important to work on, and so in-world editting of meshes, just like in-world editting of sculpties, will fade rapidly into the background. Requiescat in Pace Semper. No "Create Mesh", no "Convert Object To Mesh", nothing. Just "you'll have to import those".

It's not like there's any in-world way to edit textures, or sounds, or animations...

Oh, well - I'm sure LL could cut their support calls WAY down by getting rid of the prim editor anyway - for that matter, why not get rid of terrain editting too. Island owners can just upload a new height map (and have you seen the wonderful fun THAT format is??? 13-channel RAW????)

I would like to see:
-better collision detection for sculpties
-continue with the oblong sculpties
-sculpties can be edited like normal prims

The more I use sculpties the more i realize they are a very convenient and compartmentalised way of keeping poly counts in check. What is the difference between adding a low ploy mesh with a 256 vertices support maximum, and staying with sculpties for example?

As I see it the biggest issue with mesh is how do you fit it into the current pay per prim structure of SL?

With my experience creating on other platforms one of the biggest problems is always model import, both from a technical and proceedural standpoint.

Sculpties are portable, transferrable, and the fact that they are contained within an image file gives them a familiarity to newer 3d artists.

-why

Some of us are interpreting "better tools" to mean some means of editing sculpties and textures inworld.
Others are interpreting that to mean that the existing toolset and all its inconsistencies and jira issues be resolved. And that many of the now fairly standardized interface elements of 'real' 3D applications be properly implemented in SL.

Many of us are interpreting "mesh import" to mean the direct conversion (a 'file > import' menu for example) of complex geometry from formats such as .obj
But this could also be interpreted to mean better sculpties as per ratio'd sculpts (and numerous other possibilities that would largely still mean an image based format with the associated geometric requirements.)

These two questions seem fairly clear cut, but i'm feeling that the questions could do with some specific qualification as to what precisely was intended. But I suspect the questions are intentionally open to some interpretation.

Blah blah blah, blah blahdy blah blah.

1. bending the path, possibly as an alternative to rotating the profile. This would allow for things like flexible bent cones, rather than depending on gravity hacks.

2. An option to make the force vector on flexies relative to the prim rotation.

3. Formally make path cut a parameter for linear-path prims, so you don't have to depend on prim torture.

4. Full-object scaling, so you can stretch a linkset along one axis instead of having to recalculate, move, and stretch the prims.

5. Asymmetric prim scaling. Grab any single corner of a prim bounding box and drag it.

6. Flexible circular-path prims.

7. Linked flexies.

8. ...

Actually, WTF why don't we have a tree modelling system yet? obvious place to put in a parametric system.

If I could vote to send some people to art classes, I would Where is the JIRA on that?

BUT

Content theft is already rampant. I see more stolen artwork than I do original in world, and even the in world product gets ripped on a regular basis. If mesh import is allowed without strict controls I foresee a lot of problems with the same copybotters going to the torrent sites that those of us also in the 3d community have to fight on a regular basis, and then seeing models made for sale in another market entirely being pulled into here and sold. What's more is that since these models can often times be very high on poly counts it could cause massive instability to different computers as the cards try to render these models.

IF mesh import comes into play it would definitely need to be regulated, and at minimum the number of poly's has to have a ceiling. If SL can lag on loading an area on a computer that was built to order and designed to be able to render 3d images, then high poly models would crash most users.

Instead better controls for shaping prims, and maybe more options on how to work with sculpties.

1) I don't have the time or resources to invest in 3rd party tools and therefore having strong in-world modelling tools is essential to my content creation efforts. If I had a better paying bay job with short hours then the situation might be different. As it stands I already feel that there is already division between builders who can invest the time in learning to use tools to make sculpties, and can pay for software and those who can't. One of the great things about most areas of content creation in SL was that everyone could compete with everyone else using largely free tools but some 3D modelling tools cost a considerable amount of money. I would love to see LL focus on developments that the majority of residents can take advantage of rather than give even more of an edge to the minority of residents that can afford to spend money on sophisticated 3rd party tools.

2) On a more personal level, I have experimented with 3D modelling tools and discovered a curious personal limitation. When building in SL, the 3D context of working inworld and the ability to easily pan the camera around my build or even walk around/through it helps me greatly visualise what I am making. Using other 3D tools everything just looks flat to me and fundamentally less intuitive. If it were possible to work on meshes inworld rather than having to import them from another tool would be ideal, imho.

for Helena Lycia:
There's verry nice tools and for free that works offline (blender/gmax/gimp...) they compete verry nicely against the expensivest softwares outthere. I agree it is less intuitive tools, but if you liked to build with prims, you'll like someday the "non limitation" over building in such softwares

Makline Deckard
"The other option seems mostly self-serving...people with expensive tools/relevant job experience/infinite time to learn meshes wanting to corner the ingame market as it were, with LL's help. Their skills already put them over most creators, but that apparently is not good enough and they must CRUSH the non-pro builders in the market."

Are you in politics ? Do you have any interest on stoping evolution ? What is your point about making actual builders proud of the less they can do instead of giving them some challenge to get better ? Why "pro skills" become "bad" when it is for the best of SL ? (makin it more beautiful) This is kind of speech people have when they're deep drown into habits and nostalgia when instead they can dream a better tomorow. Let me tell you something, "non-pro and/or non-skilled" builders on sl can't handle a sculptie, can't handle a nice prim build, and this will remain the same after having the ability to import meshes, or NOT. They aren't the ones who make "big" amounts of money on sl of course, but giving them better inworld tools will just change nothing and will simply bother skilled people who actualy can make SL more beautiful, more attractive for people who actualy just ignore SL because it looks (be honest) ugly like a 90ies game... so to think that "the evil pros will come steal your job and your wife" when in fact they'll just enhance your OWN SL experience, ... think logicaly, you missed something.

Now to get to the real point, in fact LL should just provide SL inside meshing tools as well as the ability to import meshes to be fair, because what made SL so attracting was the ability to build inside it. But now if they create new tools, it'll have to be based no more on prims/limitations/... but realy like a true 3D software.

It is fine if you add mesh import.

But if you go changing sl over to a place where only a few people have the skills to create content then congratulations you just killed the entire thing.

Where are flexi sculpts?

Where are user definable attach points for linking along the spine of an object?

Where is defining an attach point at the flexing end of a flexi like exists in other 3D game mod systems?

There sure is a lot of stuff LL needs to be doing before they enable mass import of even more stolen content from turbo squid and renderosity.

How about scaling sl to one million concurrency? That seems a lot more important.

How about doing something to make sure SL doesn't tank from the evacuation of estates going on? I hear CF Estates and another big estate pulled out. What good is mesh import if sl is closed? What I am driving at is this suggestion of priorities seems odd. Linden Lab has the money, or should have the money, to employ the staff necessary to do a complete rewrite if necessary. At minimum LL has the money to employ the engineering staff to do whatever so I don't see why there is a question of prioritization other than a need for maybe a more evolved product management capability that decides what the developers will work on and when their work is due.

What is necessary is for LL to understand that a few extremely technical people that do not have day jobs so they can attend office hours should not be the people that decide the future of Second Life. That needs top be decided at the executive level tyvm.

-Having the tools doesn't mean having the skills imo. Prim or Mesh, if you can't build, mesh importing or not you're not more or less skilled.

Ann Otoole:
Where are flexi sculpts?
Where are user definable attach points for linking along the spine of an object?
Where is defining an attach point at the flexing end of a flexi like exists in other 3D game mod systems?

-Well well well, sculpties is a SL tech, so LL have to create / invent / ... all the related techs ...
Go get a look at realXtend, to understand how benefical is to be able to play with meshes inside SL... You will no longer need to wait years to get what you want.

Ann Otoole:
There sure is a lot of stuff LL needs to be doing before they enable mass import of even more stolen content from turbo squid and renderosity.

-No there is not, they're already late on the eye candy, and for the turbosquid issue, I'm sure LL will find a way to limit things so that verry few turbosquid or renderothing will be compatible

Ann Otoole:
What good is mesh import if sl is closed?

-Nice way to invert the problem ... Just imagine yourself watching a crapy show on tv while knowing that on another chanel there is a good one, doesn't make sens at all. Now imagine SL catching up with graphics = more poeple comming in = SL boost... (I say catching up with graphics, NO, it's a first step, but a GOOD one)

Ann Otoole:
What is necessary is for LL to understand that a few extremely technical people that do not have day jobs so they can attend office hours should not be the people that decide the future of Second Life.

-You're talking about LL employees ? lol jk

Nice try on taking things out of context to troll and start a flame war which is a violation of the rules here.

You make your statement as for pro or con and allow others to state their opinions. You do not get to attack anyone that raises an objection.

This game will not be played out in pjira. The decisions about the future direction of Second Life do not belong to a few technical people perched over the pjirs and at every office hour that attack everyone that argues against their efforts to eliminate competition. This will play out in the ugly reality of mass content creator awareness campaigns that will have M Linden inundated with thousands of screaming angry customers demanding that the pjira and office hours be eliminated as the way decisions about the future direction of second life are made.

Or the technical people can discontinue the automatic attack reactions on anyone that raises a counter opinion and instead maintain a professional attitude and allow people to have their say.

>> Ann Otoole:
>> What good is mesh import if sl is closed?

> -Nice way to invert the problem ... Just imagine yourself watching a
> crapy show on tv while knowing that on another chanel there is a
> good one, doesn't make sens at all. Now imagine SL catching up
> with graphics = more poeple comming in = SL boost... (I say
> catching up with graphics, NO, it's a first step, but a GOOD one)

A couple of points here -

1) Watching a crappy show that I'm interested in, vs. a good show that I find boring as hell - I think I'll be watching the crappy one. So, yes, watching the crappy show CAN make sense.

2) The comparison with two TV shows is of limited value - TV shows are a strictly consumer activity. Much like playing WoW - you're not adding new content. At best, you can make superficial skinning changes, such as making your armor red rather than blue, or you can do some neat machinama. You're not building quests that others can go on, complete with new dungeons, new monsters, and new equipment. In SL, you CAN do that.

3) I'm actually not against meshes in SL - I am COMPLETELY against resources being devoted solely to mesh import, without any thought of being able to make and edit them in-world. There needs to be thought on texturing the meshes, as well, unless we're going to get one-look-fits-all meshes. Will we be able to assign a different texture to each face, or will there be one large texture baked onto the whole thing from the start? If one large texture - will the normal resolution limits for textures apply? Those 100 meter tall mesh buildings are going to look kinda fuzzy when you get up close if you're limited to 1024x1024 textures.

Frankly, I'm all for having a lot more options on prims. I'd like surfaces of revolution, constructive solid geometry a la POVRay, and more options for the prim types we have, such as hollow start and finish on the X, Y, and Z axes so that holes don't have to run all the way through a prim...

A lot of the things I'd like most, though, will really need to wait until the rendering engine moves to a ray-tracing basis.

Prims over the net are verry fast, just a few values run through the net to set up a prim on your screen.
They're verry easy to manipulate (rotate/stretch/cut...)
But prims are verry heavy on the client side, when a prim appears on your screen, for lets say 1 box, your client does not calculate 6 faces, but over 50.

Sculpties , like prims, are realy fast over the net, but they have to stay verry small in order to keep a good texture feeling, and there is not that much control over them (mirror/inside out/rotate/stretch and only 1 texture). They're verry unprecise but a bless nowadays in SL. They're also verry heavy on the client calculations (1024 faces).

Mesh, since they're verry precise (the positions of the vertexes) the values sent through the net "can" be "bigger" than just some flags sent by a prim or a sculptmap,... But if you send a 6 face mesh box VS a regular box prim or even ANY sculptie, they'll get there at the same time. (I'm pretty sure of this)
Since you control the amount of faces on the mesh, they will be in 100% of the case easyer to calculate on the client. Meaning unprecedented details in SL.
You have total control over them while working, and they're verry easy to build (I bet my shirt you'll master them faster than the prims). If they create the mesh system based on the prim building tool, hell yeah, you'd love it, believe me.

Now technicaly to answer your point 3, you can attach textures to your mesh, lets say if you attach it 8 textures, you'll have 8* 1024*1024 textures wraping your mesh.
For large builds I presume a channel system or a multisubojbect (like on prims) will be enabled.
If they release all the techs that exist already, you may even dream on texture blending and such (like on terrains), and so not finishing wiht just 1 texture/face, but 3 or 4 if you want, and blend them the way you want.

For real, it's not going any further than this, eccept for creating them. You know already 80% of what's behind a "scary" mesh.

Working with mesh allows you so much, I can't pray more for LL to include it, for the good of everyone (even the business-woman, Ann ) because I know new things are scary at first, but later one always end asking ourselves how we did things without them.

Know that when I express my opinion here, is in the hope to inform people, in noway to "kill the competition". You probably noticed that I always talk about ART possibility, and never about selling more or less... and now it's time for the funy twistable metaphore ...
free health care is great and benefical to everyone ^^

1. Sculpties are slow slow slow over the net. They can take MINUTES to rez in.
2. Meshes without an in-world building system are what we're likely to get.

Remember that making the viewer caused copybot. This will not create a copybot, because anyone can just upload anything from the net and claim it's his or her creation. The end is near!