Mesh Studio Virtual

Updates and Status for Mesh Studio and Sculpt Studio

2018-03-03T22:33:00.000-08:00

Updates

The old update-mechanism is broken (RIP Hippo). Rather than go to a new system, that could also go defunct, we have opted to allow everyone to pick up any new updates via the Second Life Marketplace for $0L.

Here:
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/SSMS-without-MS-Activator/14076474?id=14076474&slug=SSMS-without-MS-Activator

The package contains the latest Mesh Studio and Sculpt Studio.

Status of Our Products

This may prompt some questions.

Is Sculpt Studio free?

Yes, we have decided that Sculpt Studio is now free. Just pick up the update package at the URL above on Marketplace and start using. We recommend joining Sweet Sculpties to ask questions about the program and how it works.

Is Mesh Studio free?

No.

Then why is Mesh Studio in the update package?

In order to work, a Mesh Studio owner must, first, use the Activator. If you already own Mesh Studio, you already have the Activator. You should already be registered from when you last rezzed it. If you need to re-activate, you simply rez the Activator again.

TIP: Make a practice of putting a copy of your Activator in either its own folder, any new update folder or both, to safeguard your Activator. You can re-deliver from MP and SL, but save yourself time and headache.

If you pick up the update package and are new to Mesh Studio, since it does not have the Activator, you simply purchase an Activator to register and begin using Mesh Studio.

On Marketplace, you can purchase the Mesh Studio activator here:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Mesh-Studio/2993083

We recommend that you join the Sweet Meshes group for help learning Mesh Studio as well as utilizing this blog which contains many articles on how to use the scripts and optimize and texture your mesh in Second Life.

If I want to make mesh, why would I need Sculpt Studio?

With Mesh Studio you are limited to what you can do with prims. That's a lot, in reality, but sometimes you might want a particular shape not achievable by prims alone. Curved prim surfaces are always problematic as they can hike up LI (land impact).

You can make low poly shapes with Sculpt Studio using something called Sub-sculpts (look for articles in the blog on this). In the Sculpt Studio package, you will find the SS-to-MS converter for sculpts which allow you to use those sculpts with Mesh Studio prim linksets and mesh them. Again there is more info on this blog.

How will I know when to update?

1) We will say so in the SL Chat groups as well as send out notices.

2) We will update the version numbers, with release date (bottom of page in red), on this page, so you can always check here when in doubt.

As always, should you have questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to come to the groups and ask, or drop us a notecard in Second Life.

Happy Meshing,
~ele

Latest version of Sculpt Studio as of March 3, 2018: 6.3

Latest version of Mesh Studio as of March 3, 2018: 2.0

Troubleshooting Mesh Studio

2018-03-03T17:12:00.000-08:00

First, try:

1. Reset scripts or replace script in root with a new one.

Next, check:

2. Is the linkset only prims or has a mesh snuck in? If you have sculpts, are they mesh-enabled Sculpt Studio sculpts or regular sculpts? (The latter won't work at all.)

Now try:

3. Re-log or go to a different region.
4. Try meshing a new box.
5. If it meshes, try your linkset.
6. If the linkset STILL doesn't mesh, unlink the linkset.
7. Start with the root prim which has the script. Try meshing it. If it meshes, something is amiss in the linkset.
8. Add one prim at a time and try meshing. Repeat till you hopefully find the bad prim and replace it.

If that all fails:

9. Try sending a moddable copy (without script) to a friend and see if they can mesh it.
10. If it meshes for them, go to their region and see if it works for you.

Contact us if you still can't mesh after these steps.

Hack your Material IDs for a new Face in SL

2017-01-29T23:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks to lilfae Resident, of Second Life, for this information on changing the Material ID numbers via your Collada DAE in order to control the FACE numbers in SL.

When you create a mesh in Mesh Studio, you can create Mesh-faces which create surfaces on your mesh that, in Second Life, are accessed by going into edit and using "Select Face". The problem that some have encountered comes when you are trying to script those "Faces" and you need a particular face to be Face 0 (or 1, 2, 3 etc). You have no control over this as the SL uploader seemingly assigns the Face numbers at random. Or, so we thought.

lilFae approached me with information some time ago, but life got in the way and I had all but forgotten until someone came to me with this problem recently. What lilFae had explained was that you could actually change your DAE file to renumber the faces to the order desired.

If you are not familiar with how to create Mesh-faces in Mesh Studio, I recommend you read one of the articles on this topic in the blog before continuing. Also, this information pertains to Mesh Studio DAEs as ones from Blender will have a different formatting setup and I will link to the Blender version of this procedure at the end of this post.

In order to renumber the faces, you will first need to determine which face number has been assigned to what surface on your mesh. There are two ways to do this:

The first way is to upload the mesh to SL through the uploader and go into edit, using "Select Face" to see which face has been assigned to what surface. Once you have made a list of the face order, you can open the DAE in a multi-format text editor. On a Windows machine, you can use Notepad or Notepad++, on Mac you can use BBedit and I am sure there is an equivalent in Linux as well. If you have Notepad++, you may find turning on the language, XML, option handy, so you can focus on the section we need.

Make a copy of the DAE and open it ( a DAE is simply an XML file). Always preserve your original file in case you make errors.

You have a header, at the top, detailing the creator, timestamps, etc. Also details such as the images used in the mesh, and it defines the materials and textures they use. We won't touch these.

You will do a SEARCH STRING (in most programs, you do this with the Find command). If you have Notepad++, you may find turning on the language, XML, option handy, so you can focus on the section we do need, which is tagged <library_geometries>. The search string you seek is in th <library_geometries> section and is called <vertices>. It is followed by <triangles.

The <triangles line will have data that contains material="blinn3o2jm1m1", material="blinn3o2jm1m2", material="blinn3o2jm1m3", etc.

IMPORTANT: SL starts with face 0 (zero) whereas Mesh Studio DAEs begin with 1. Look at the list you created of what surface was assigned which Face number in SL. Remember, the Face 0 in SL will correspond to "blinn3o2jm1m1". If for instance, you need "blinn3o2jm1m3" to be Face 0 in SL, you will change the end numeral 3 to a 0 (zero). There should be no multiple identically-named materials. If you have three materials, you should have "blinn3o2jm1m0", "blinn3o2jm1m1" and "blinn3o2jm1m2".

Note: XML is a regimented format, so it will help stabilize uploads, if you also move the sections to fit the numerical order too. If you renumber "blinn3o2jm1m1" to "blinn3o2jm1m3", then swap their sections around, too.

The second way to check the faces assigned is to open the DAE in Blender. Mesh-faces from Mesh Studio will appear in Blender under Materials. When you select a face polygon, in edit mode, from one of the surfaces on the mesh, it will show you which material it belongs to in the Materials list as shown.

The following shows the section you are looking for in the DAE. The string in red is the materials name and the numeral in blue is what you are changing.

</vertices>
<triangles count="18" material="blinn3o2jm1m1">
<input semantic="VERTEX" offset="0" source="#o2jm1libVert"/>
<input semantic="NORMAL" offset="1" source="#o2jm1libNorm"/>
<input semantic="TEXCOORD" offset="2" source="#o2jm1libUV0"/>
<p>0 0 0 1 0 1 2 0 2 0 0 3 3 0 4 1 0 5 3 0 6 4 0 7 1 0 8 3 0 9 5 0 10 4 0 11 5 0 12 6 0 13 4 0 14 5 0 15 7 0 16 6 0 17 2 0 18 8 0 19 9 0 20 2 0 21 1 0 22 8 0 23 1 0 24 10 0 25 8 0 26 1 0 27 4 0 28 10 0 29 4 0 30 11 0 31 10 0 32 4 0 33 6 0 34 11 0 35 9 0 36 12 0 37 13 0 38 9 0 39 8 0 40 12 0 41 8 0 42 14 0 43 12 0 44 8 0 45 10 0 46 14 0 47 10 0 48 15 0 49 14 0 50 10 0 51 11 0 52 15 0 53 </p>
</triangles>
<triangles count="18" material="blinn3o2jm1m2">
<input semantic="VERTEX" offset="0" source="#o2jm1libVert"/>
<input semantic="NORMAL" offset="1" source="#o2jm1libNorm"/>
<input semantic="TEXCOORD" offset="2" source="#o2jm1libUV0"/>
<p>16 1 54 17 1 55 18 1 56 16 1 57 19 1 58 17 1 59 19 1 60 20 1 61 17 1 62 19 1 63 21 1 64 20 1 65 21 1 66 22 1 67 20 1 68 21 1 69 23 1 70 22 1 71 18 1 126 48 1 127 49 1 128 18 1 129 17 1 130 48 1 131 17 1 132 50 1 133 48 1 134 17 1 135 20 1 136 50 1 137 20 1 138 51 1 139 50 1 140 20 1 141 22 1 142 51 1 143 49 1 198 64 1 199 65 1 200 49 1 201 48 1 202 64 1 203 48 1 204 66 1 205 64 1 206 48 1 207 50 1 208 66 1 209 50 1 210 67 1 211 66 1 212 50 1 213 51 1 214 67 1 215 </p>
</triangles>
<triangles count="18" material="blinn3o2jm1m3">
<input semantic="VERTEX" offset="0" source="#o2jm1libVert"/>
<input semantic="NORMAL" offset="1" source="#o2jm1libNorm"/>
<input semantic="TEXCOORD" offset="2" source="#o2jm1libUV0"/>
<p>24 2 72 25 2 73 26 2 74 24 2 75 27 2 76 25 2 77 27 2 78 28 2 79 25 2 80 27 2 81 29 2 82 28 2 83 29 2 84 30 2 85 28 2 86 29 2 87 31 2 88 30 2 89 26 2 144 52 2 145 53 2 146 26 2 147 25 2 148 52 2 149 25 2 150 54 2 151 52 2 152 25 2 153 28 2 154 54 2 155 28 2 156 55 2 157 54 2 158 28 2 159 30 2 160 55 2 161 53 2 216 68 2 217 69 2 218 53 2 219 52 2 220 68 2 221 52 2 222 70 2 223 68 2 224 52 2 225 54 2 226 70 2 227 54 2 228 71 2 229 70 2 230 54 2 231 55 2 232 71 2 233 </p>
</triangles>
<triangles count="18" material="blinn3o2jm1m4">
<input semantic="VERTEX" offset="0" source="#o2jm1libVert"/>
<input semantic="NORMAL" offset="1" source="#o2jm1libNorm"/>
<input semantic="TEXCOORD" offset="2" source="#o2jm1libUV0"/>
<p>32 3 90 33 3 91 34 3 92 32 3 93 35 3 94 33 3 95 35 3 96 36 3 97 33 3 98 35 3 99 37 3 100 36 3 101 37 3 102 38 3 103 36 3 104 37 3 105 39 3 106 38 3 107 34 3 162 56 3 163 57 3 164 34 3 165 33 3 166 56 3 167 33 3 168 58 3 169 56 3 170 33 3 171 36 3 172 58 3 173 36 3 174 59 3 175 58 3 176 36 3 177 38 3 178 59 3 179 57 3 234 72 3 235 73 3 236 57 3 237 56 3 238 72 3 239 56 3 240 74 3 241 72 3 242 56 3 243 58 3 244 74 3 245 58 3 246 75 3 247 74 3 248 58 3 249 59 3 250 75 3 251 </p>
</triangles>
<triangles count="18" material="blinn3o2jm1m5">
<input semantic="VERTEX" offset="0" source="#o2jm1libVert"/>
<input semantic="NORMAL" offset="1" source="#o2jm1libNorm"/>
<input semantic="TEXCOORD" offset="2" source="#o2jm1libUV0"/>
<p>40 4 108 41 4 109 42 4 110 40 4 111 43 4 112 41 4 113 43 4 114 44 4 115 41 4 116 43 4 117 45 4 118 44 4 119 45 4 120 46 4 121 44 4 122 45 4 123 47 4 124 46 4 125 42 4 180 60 4 181 61 4 182 42 4 183 41 4 184 60 4 185 41 4 186 62 4 187 60 4 188 41 4 189 44 4 190 62 4 191 44 4 192 63 4 193 62 4 194 44 4 195 46 4 196 63 4 197 61 4 252 76 4 253 77 4 254 61 4 255 60 4 256 76 4 257 60 4 258 78 4 259 76 4 260 60 4 261 62 4 262 78 4 263 62 4 264 79 4 265 78 4 266 62 4 267 63 4 268 79 4 269 </p>
</triangles>
<triangles count="18" material="blinn3o2jm1m6">
<input semantic="VERTEX" offset="0" source="#o2jm1libVert"/>
<input semantic="NORMAL" offset="1" source="#o2jm1libNorm"/>
<input semantic="TEXCOORD" offset="2" source="#o2jm1libUV0"/>
<p>80 5 270 81 5 271 82 5 272 80 5 273 82 5 274 83 5 275 83 5 276 82 5 277 84 5 278 83 5 279 84 5 280 85 5 281 85 5 282 84 5 283 86 5 284 85 5 285 86 5 286 87 5 287 81 5 288 88 5 289 89 5 290 81 5 291 89 5 292 82 5 293 82 5 294 89 5 295 90 5 296 82 5 297 90 5 298 84 5 299 84 5 300 90 5 301 91 5 302 84 5 303 91 5 304 86 5 305 88 5 306 92 5 307 93 5 308 88 5 309 93 5 310 89 5 311 89 5 312 93 5 313 94 5 314 89 5 315 94 5 316 90 5 317 90 5 318 94 5 319 95 5 320 90 5 321 95 5 322 91 5 323 </p>
</triangles>

When re-ordering your materials, it is the entire section contained by <triangles and </triangles> that you will move.

Hope this helps you.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

(link for Blender version will be placed here when the article is ready)

What to know about SS Sculpts for meshing

2016-04-05T18:38:00.001-07:00

Sculpts, on their own, make inefficient mesh. Remember, they were a hack to allow us to have mesh when it wasn't possible to import mesh. However, if you learn how mesh works and how sculpts from Sculpt Studio translate to mesh, you can make wise decisions to make good mesh and keep upload costs and LI down.

Let's look at a sculpt. Ok, so we know that sculpts are 1024 points (or verts, in 3D vernacular). While Linden Labs allows a sculpt to count as one LI as a sculpt, or two LI when linked to mesh, it is for all intent and purpose a mesh consisting of 2048 triangles. Whether you collapse SS slices or make poles, since the points do not actually merge, you remain with 2048 triangles regardless.

In addition, if you use the sculpt, as is, with no optimization, and just straight conversion from Sculpt Studio sculpt to Mesh Studio mesh, you can end up with up to the 2048 triangles. There are a few things built into the conversion that assist in making the triangle count diminish in those converted sculpts. They are:

Any points in the same position will merge.
Same slices in the same position, as when we use slices to reinforce sculpts, will merge into only one slice.
Poles will merge into one point/vert.

One of the big issues is that sculpts can negate the awesomeness of Mesh Studio goodness .

The Mesh Studio scripts allow you to use a prim model to generate a mesh object. You then have the ability to change the resolution of the model, during the generation process, with the Default/Low Poly/Low LOD buttons, plus other options. However, a converted sculpt is unaffected by the scripts since the scripts only work on prims. This means that it is at it's highest resolution, throughout the process, and this throws off the LI count by contributing far too many triangles at the lower LOD levels (in that the triangle count is the same at High/Medium/Low/Lowest for the converted sculpt).

There are, however, ways to work around this.

SCULPT STUDIO SUBSCULPTS

Subsculpts are when you use only a small portion of the slices in a Sculpt Studio stack to make a sculpt.
Using 8 slices to make a leaf in a stack of 32 slices. The remaining slices are made into poles placed by the final slice used in the subsculpt.
This means you can then use this 8-slice subsculpt leaf four times in a stack of 32 slices (each of the 8 slices would have 32 points/verts) or 8 times in a stack of 64 slices (each of the slices having 16 points/verts). That's for a sculpt, but we want to think of it in terms of using for mesh generation.

Since we know that all like slices, in the same position, merge to one slice, and all poles merge to a single point/vert, then if we convert the subsculpt to a mesh, we end up with a mesh that is either:

512 triangles (8 slices X 32 point/verts X 2 (as there are two triangles to every full four-sided face)
256 triangles (8 slices X 16 point/verts X 2)
or 128 triangles (8 slices X 8 points/verts) X 2).

Armed with that knowledge, we can utilize the subsculpts, using the differing slice configurations to make the LODs work to our advantage. Ideally, the next LOD down is a 1/4 of the triangles of the level before it. So if the converted sculpt is 512 triangles, this would be the high LOD and the next LOD would need about 128 triangles. Snap, we have that!

If you are down to 128 for the Medium LOD, the next level down would be 32 triangles. Not many for a mesh. It only needs to look vaguely like the shape because you'll be fairly away from it at this point, visually. 128 triangles isn't that bad and could be used for the Low LOD as well and you can, as we often do, just zero out the Lowest LOD.

Caveat: Now, what I just described, with the subsculpts, works with something like a circle slice. Changing from 32 point circles to 8 points is no big deal (even if 8 is octagonal, with smoothing on, it will look roundish, especially from a distance). However, if you've made a subsculpt utilizing custom slice shapes, well, you need to do a bit of work. You'll need to redo the custom slice shape using the correct diminished number of points in the slice to make it resemble the shape you intended as best as you can. Remember, it's an LOD shape and seen from a distance.

SCULPTS THAT WILL BE USED TO GENERATE MESH DO NOT HAVE TO BE CLOSED

If you are creating, say, a pipe, or anything where one or both ends of the object will be embedded and not seen, you can design your sculpt to be open ended. Where possible, if there is mesh where it won't be seen, it is better to remove if you can.

This should give you enough good information to make good and efficient sculpts that will generate more optimized mesh. Don't just take your sculpt library and convert it to mesh. Redesign/rethink your sculpts to make better things that won't be laggy for your customers.

For more information on how to use the SS2MS box with your sculpt maps to use in Mesh Studio, please read http://meshstudiovirtual.blogspot.com/2012/10/rethink-your-sculpts-for-mesh.html?view=sidebar

Happy meshing!
~ele

Feel like you need a PhD in Physics to get your builds right in SL?

2014-01-09T09:23:00.002-08:00

(updated 01/17/14)

One of the more frustrating things I see people struggle with when doing builds that require you to walk around in a building, up a flight of stairs or walk through a door is how to get the darn physics to work. It isn't rocket science, but it can sure feel like it should be.

There are two things that we accomplish with a physics shape:

1. The Collision Surfaces. Here we tell Second Life where we want to walk on, walk through or be stopped from passing into something.

2. The size of the Bounding Box. If you put a box around your model to the boundaries of its HEIGHT, WIDTH AND DEPTH, then you have the size of the bounding box.

There is actually a third and that is to provide a shape for the above two in the simplest form, meaning the fewest number of triangles, as possible.

We base this shape on our full, highest LOD model. The mistake many make is to use this LOD model AS THEIR PHYSICS. This is bad on many levels.

The LOD model, even the lowest LOD may be too high in triangles and cause an error since you can only have a maximum of 256 hulls per mesh.

Using the LOD model may result in a very high LI calculation (and cost).

Waste resources on unnecessary geometry.

You can, however, make a copy of your LOD model and then pare it down to the surfaces you actually need as well as optimize to minimize the number of final triangles in your physics mesh. You can also create a new mesh, but the former's advantage is you have surfaces where you need them right from the start.

The video attempts to show you a simple build with floors, stairs and doors, and considerations for what to do and how to end up with a successful physics mesh. This video does not cover the making or uploading of multiple meshes (as in unlinked walls, etc). That will be dealt with under separate cover.

The physics mesh needs no UVs or materials. If you started with a copy of your LOD linkset and it has textures, you don't need to remove them, or any tints, as they will be disregarded for physics.

The physics mesh should be a linkset, if it is composed of more than one prim, and you should use the Object2JoinedMesh script.

The physics mesh is a separate Collada DAE file that is uploaded through the physics tab in the SL uploader when you upload your primary LOD mesh DAE.

Once you have uploaded your LOD mesh dae(s) and Physics dae files, you will need to go into Edit and, under features, set the mesh to PRIM in order to enable the physics of your mesh. This is the step that the largest percentage of people forget and then find their physics don't work. The second highest is forgetting to make sure there is a part of their physics mesh touching where the boundaries of the bounding box are.

Please note that the box I use in the video is not part of the physics mesh you are making. It is only there to show the boundaries of the bounding box around the mesh. It can be useful to use this as a temporary tool to help you see if there is a side of the bounding box on which you do not have a collision surface touching it.

Again, on those surfaces you only need a face or triangle touching where the bounding box would be and further note that it can be quite small. It will be enough to tell SL, "here is one of the boundaries of my bounding box."

Happy Meshing,
`ele

A beginner's workflow guide for Mesh Studio

2013-08-09T02:26:00.000-07:00

(updated with additional information on 04/16/13)

There are many workflows for using Mesh Studio. People have been asking me for examples of how they should work and how to learn Mesh Studio best, so I'll try to lay out something in this article for those who are just beginning to use Mesh Studio.

When you purchase your Mesh Studio and the box arrives, rez it.

Important: Make sure that you have done the IP Test and have payment information on record with LL. Instructions are found here and I highly recommend that you do both Agni (the SL grid we are all on) and Aditi (the beta grid where you don't pay with your money to upload tests). There is a separate test to take for each grid, though the test questions themselves are the same.

Touch the box and it gives you a folder with the contents. The folder name will start with "Mesh Studio".

Rez the registration prim, "MS Account Activator". This registers you with the server from which the Collada .dae files are generated. These .dae files are what allow you to upload your meshes to SL or take them to another 3D application that supports Collada.

Rez the updater prim, "MS Update Checker". This ensures that you are using the most up-to-date Mesh Studio. Rez it out regularly to make sure if any more updates have been released.

In this workflow, we will deal only with prim linksets. Mesh Studio allows you to use any prim with any prim cut or torture, supported by LSL scripting, to build an object. The mesh will be as good as your linkset is made and how well your prims are aligned.

We will build a simple, but detailed table to demonstrate how to:

Create material faces.
Pre-texture your prims. This is what creates the faces. We will use textures from your Library folder to keep it simple.
Make prim faces transparent, via the Edit window, to block generation of mesh on those faces.
Use the Object2JoinedMesh. This script is the more commonly used script of the two available in your Mesh Studio folder.
Create the High, Medium, Low LOD (level of detail) meshes and generate Collada .dae files for each.
Create a Physics mesh and generate the Collada .dae file for it.
Upload the mesh to SL.
Examine the mesh and apply textures.

If you are new to building with prims, please go over this article:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Build-Tools/ta-p/700039

Create the table as follows:

Create a box. Make it 1m on X, 1.5m on Y and 0.05 on Z.

Raise this prim to the height you want your table.

Hollow it with the default Square hollow shape to 0.95 (the max hollow).

Shift-copy this prim up and use Ctrl-Z to put it back to same position as the first box.

Hollow this box changing the hollow shape to Circle. Make the hole 0.75. Scale X to 0.85 and set Y to 1.3.

Shift-copy this prim again and Ctrl-Z to align it with the first two prims.

Scale this third box to 0.97 on X, 1.4 on Y and 0.03 on Z. We will be using these prims as our table top. By texturing this last prim with an alpha texture, it will give a nice border and inset to the table.

Use the "Waterfall-medium overly" (Waterfall folder) texture in your Library folder to texture the third prim as glass. Use any needed repeats, rotations and/or offsets to make this top look as desired. I used 0.3 Horiz/0.2 Vert with a horizontal offset of 0.3. Mesh Studido will remember these repeats, rotations and offsets when you apply textures after meshing.

Select the inner box with the circular hollow.

Shift-copy the prim downward. Un-hollow the prim and change the scale to 0.0150 on Z. This makes it a bit thinner than the table top. It will be a knick-knack or coffee-book shelf under the table top. Lower this shelf to a low level. We will now make the four legs.

Starting at the negative Y end, when looking in edit, create a box and make it 0.09 on X and Y. Taper it -0.2 on X and Y. I added shear to slant the table legs in a bit on both X and Y. Scale the leg so it will fit under the table top.

Note how the axes show the positive ends with the arrow
heads when you go into edit on an object.

Place the leg so it is inside the boundary of the knick-knack shelf in one corner. Adjust its height as you see fit.

Shift copy the leg and check the shear to make sure it's slanting in the desired direction.

Select both legs and shift copy the pair and move them to the opposite side of the table. Or if you sheared them, like I did, rotate the pair 180 degrees before moving them into place.

Link all the pieces together, with the outer border table top prim as the root (there's a reason for this), and name the linkset to Table Test in the Name line of the General tab in the edit window. Remember that when you select and name a linkset, you are naming the root prim.

Use the Brazilian Rosewood texture from the Wood folder in the Textures folder in your Library to texture the wood parts of your table. (Or any suitable texture in your inventory.) Remember to use "Edit Linked" to isolate your work on any one prim, or more, in the linkset. Make sure to set any repeats, rotations and/or offsets needed to make it look as desired. I used 1:1 repeats, but rotated the texture by 90 degrees. Then selected all the legs and changed the vertical repeats to 0.5.

Since we can keep Mesh Studio from generating mesh on any prim face that we make 100% transparent in the transparency field of Textures tab in the edit window, we will do this to a few faces that will not be visible in the final mesh. Using Edit Linked, pull one set of legs on the long side of the table outward by selecting one leg and shift selecting the other. Make the top face of each leg 100% transparent.

Use Ctrl-Z to return the legs to their original position.

Repeat this to the other pair of table legs and your linkset is ready.

Exploded view of the table pieces on the left, the final linkset in the middle and the final table fully textured one on the right.

We are now ready to generate out our .dae files, so go into edit on the table.

From your Inventory's Mesh Studio folder, take the Object2JoinedMesh script and place it in the contents of your linkset's root. It is important to use the "joined mesh" script because it is what allows you to maintain the material areas you have created by adding textures and/or tints.

The script creates hovertext which displays that we have a table made of 8 prims, with 50 prim faces; 4 of them invisible, and grouped into 2 Mesh Faces (which can also be called Material faces or Materials - the SL edit window will access them with "Select Face").

Want to learn more about the way we create "faces/materials" with Mesh Studio?
http://meshstudiovirtual.blogspot.com/search/label/Materials

Want to learn other ways to texture your prims in Mesh Studio?
http://meshstudiovirtual.blogspot.com/search/label/Texturing

You have now made a linkset that will be used to generate your mesh.
You have named the linkset, by naming the root prim, to make it easier to identify your files.
You have textured it with two textures which will result in two material faces which can be textured independently from each other after the mesh is generated.
You have made some faces transparent so they will not generate mesh.
You have placed the Object2JoinedMesh script into the root prim.

Now we will make the LOD (level of detail) meshes using the MS menus. The Mesh Uploader window has four LOD levels. This allows us to control how the mesh breaks down at each LOD switch as you cam away from the mesh and get further from the mesh. In real life, the further away we are from an object, the less detail we see and we mimic this in computer games. We will also create a simple box for Physics, so you can't walk through the table. We have named the root. We will further append the name for each LOD mesh as follows:

Go into edit on the linkset and add the word High to the name in the Object Name field.

Touch the linkset to get the MS menu. It is set to Default. We will use this setting for our High LOD mesh. Press the Mesh button.

A file is generated and you are notified of this in your local chat and given a ZIP link. Download this link.

Go into edit on the linkset and add the word Medium to the name in the Object Name field.

Touch the linkset to get the MS menu. Change the Resolution setting to LowPoly and then OK on the next menu. This will change the number of faces generated to a lower count. We will use this setting for our Medium LOD mesh. Press the Mesh button.
Download the generated ZIP. You can see why we are naming them to know which is which.

Go into edit on the linkset and change the word Medium to the word Low in the Object Name field.

Touch the linkset to get the MS menu. Change the Resolution setting to LowLOD and then OK on the next menu This will change the number of faces generated to an even lower count. We will use this setting for our Low LOD mesh. Press the Mesh button.

Download the generated ZIP.

Want to learn more about optimizing your meshes?
http://meshstudiovirtual.blogspot.com/search/label/Optimizing

We will now create the Physics mesh. SL requires us to tell it where the collision surfaces are on a mesh. These are the surfaces we walk on, do not go through or define the area we can walk through. A simple box will work for this table. While complex builds may require more, the goal is to keep the physics shape as simple as possible and to be logical about it.

Want to learn more about Physics?
http://meshstudiovirtual.blogspot.com/search/label/Physics
https://sites.google.com/site/tamaproducts/slmeshphysics

An easy way to create the shape is to either make a box that fits over the table, or make a copy of the linkset (keep the original linkset intact in case you need to change it later). In the case of this table, use Edit Linked to select the root prim and unlink it. We chose this prim as it is the prim that has the same dimensions as the outer surface of the linkset on X and Y. The texture will be ignored by making it physics. Physics models have no texture or face assignments.

Now select the rest of the still-linked prims and delete them.

Un-hollow the hole on the root prim and edit the prim to pull down the bottom end to the ground. Now your prim is the same mass as your table (if your legs don't extend past your tabletop).

Rename this prim to Table Test Physics. Since it is the root prim, it also still contains the Object2JoinedMesh script.

Touch the prim. The setting should still be at LowLOD, but if it is not, touch the Resolution button and change it to LowLOD and then OK, on the next menu, and then Mesh to generate the .dae file.

Download your Physics ZIP.

Original table on far left. Root prim is unlinked in center. Root prim is un-hollowed and the height scaled for the bottom to reach the floor; thus matching the mass of the table. This box now can be used for physics.

We now have four ZIPs. Unzip each one. By having named our linkset's root prim, prior to creating our .dae files, we are able to clearly distinguish between the LOD meshes and the Physics files. My recommendation is to create a directory with a project name for your meshes and place all relevant files within the directory.

(Tip: Remember to always change the root prim's name to what you want the file name to generate as; once you have several files to upload, it pays off to easily see which is which. I can't stress this enough.)

Let's upload our table.

NOTE: The SL Mesh Upload window will upload up to four LOD mesh files (high, medium, low, lowest) and one Physics mesh all in the same upload. This is the recommended way to upload.

For meshes with physics, I will still stand by my recommendation that you use the LL viewer over any other one. I know Firestorm, and possibly other TPVs have or are getting the full Havoc license, but it's your money to upload, so why take the chance. There are many ways to set the phsyics in the SL Mesh Uploader, but since we are providing our phsyics mesh, we can ignore the other settings other than just loading the physics mesh file in the appropriate tab (see below).

On your Inventory window in SL, you should see a plus sign and when you press that, select Upload>Model.

The "Choose a File" browser window opens from which you will choose your Table Test dae.

The Upload window opens. The model name invariably says "o2jm1Mesh". Change this to a better, descriptive name for you model. Table Test, like your files, would be fine.

SL will do the lower LODs, but they may not be how you want them to break down and the results can vary for how the LI is calculated. We have more control when we make them ourselves. You can, however, see how SL breaks down the LODs by changing the preview to show you the high, medium, low and lowest LODs. Use the same navigation controls as you use to rotate, scale and move the view in SL in the Preview window.

Press the Generate button on the Medium level and load in the Table Test medium file.

Press the Generate button on the Low level and load in the Table Test low file.

We have one more LOD, Lowest. For this one, you need to experiment. You could enter 0 (zero) in the Triangle Limit field. This normally results in one triangle. This is what is seen at the furthest LOD. You may want more of the mesh to be seen. The more of it you want seen, the higher the number of triangles, which may result in higher LI. How much depends on the complexity of the mesh which is why you want to experiment and why I recommend the test grid, Aditi. For this example, I changed the numbers (while watching the lowest lod level in the Preview) until just two shelves were left; that number was "9". When I changed it to "8", it went to only one shelf, which might be acceptable to you or you may want more mesh showing at the lowest LOD.

Once the LOD levels are done, change to the Physics tab. Under "Level of Detail", change "choose one" to "load from file". Navigate to your Table Test physics file and load it. The yellow piece in preview under physics, is the physics mesh. If you upload your own physics mesh, you do not need to analyze.

Please note that recently, we have found that, especially for doorways, we have had to press the analyze button for the mesh to upload correctly.

Now just press "Calculate weights and fee". Mine came in at 0.5. The three calculations are important. My download was 0.2, physics was 0.4, and server was 0.5. The highest of the three becomes your LI (land impact). 0.5 will round up to 1 in the edit window. However, because the table was 0.5 in reality, when I linked two copies of the tables together, the LI became 1 for the linked tables. When I linked four of the tables, it was 2 LI.

Once the mesh was uploaded, I rezzed it and made a copy. I used "Select face" in edit and applied the same textures I had on my prims and the mesh textured like my prim linkset and it stayed faithful to the repeats and rotations I had used.

There is, of course, a lot more to what you can do, but this should give you a thorough start. Press the "Labels" button on the right hand side of the blog for categories for my articles for more information on what I covered in this one.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

Download, Server and Physics, Oh My!

2013-08-09T02:00:00.000-07:00

So many people get flummoxed over the final LI of their mesh that I thought I would try to put into simple terms some things you can do to figure out how to get the best LI and that means understanding your mesh and the Second Life Upload window. This will be an amalgamation of information from various sources, so they can be accessed on one page and the information is accurate as I have understanding of it at the time of this writing in April of 2013. Once you create your mesh, whether with Mesh Studio or any other 3D program, it is time to upload it.

While working with your LODs and physics mesh is very important, once you upload, there are three things which determine the final cost and LI of your mesh: the DOWNLOAD, PHYSICS, and SERVER calculations. The highest of these three calculations becomes your LI.

•What is LI?

The terms land impact and land capacity replace prim count and prims parcel supports, but the numerical values remain the same for legacy objects made only of standard prims. Therefore, a linked object composed of 42 normal prims with their physics type set to Prim has a land impact of 42. (source)

•What is Download, Physics and Server?

For each object in the Second Life world, Second Life compares three important performance factors: download weight, physics weight, and server weight. It then chooses the highest of these weights and assigns it to the object as that object's land impact rating.

Here's a very quick overview of the different weights; for more information on each, follow the links below:

Download weight: Calculated by determining how much bandwidth is required to download and view the object. Larger and more visually complex objects have a higher download weight. You can reduce the download weight of complex objects by generating or uploading less complex meshes for differing levels of detail when you upload a model.
Physics weight: Calculated by determining the complexity of the object's physics model. You can reduce the complexity of a mesh's physics model by using the analysis and simplification tools in the Upload Model window, by uploading your own less-detailed physics model, or by choosing a different physics shape type, such as Convex Hull, on the Features tab of the Build Tools window. Vehicles must have a physics weight of 32 or lower, but may have higher download or server weights.
Server weight: Measures the impact an object has on Second Life's server resources. Objects that are composed of many prims and have physics enabled and/or contain scripts tend to have high server weights. (source)

•How can I offset these calculations to lower my LI?

If the high contributor is DOWNLOAD weight. This has to do with your LODs.

In MS, you control your LODs by using the Mesh Studio menu when generating your meshes as described in these articles:

http://meshstudiovirtual.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-beginners-workflow-guide-for-mesh.html?view=magazine

http://meshstudiovirtual.blogspot.com/2012/09/optical-optimization-options.html?view=magazine

The other way is to use physically modified copies of the prim linkset where you remove prims, or simplify forms by combining parts. Remember that the LODs represent what you see as you cam away and you see less detail when you do that.

Also remember, and take into consideration, that if anything you remove removes a part that was its own prim material face, at least one face on your linkset must survive that has that material on it. (Example: if your linkset is set up to have 4 prim material faces, then all the LOD mesh must contain the same 4 prim material faces on at least one face somewhere on the build.)

Look at your build carefully. The larger the build will eventually be in SL, the more impact the types of prims you use will have on how quickly the LI jumps. If the mesh uses cylindrical beams, for instance, you could change these to box beams in the lower LODs as boxes are the simplest form you can use. Again, read the Optical Optimizations article for more insights.

In Blender, similarly, it's a matter of simplifying the forms in your meshes: cylinders to cylinders with fewer sides or down to square box shapes, etc. You can take your high LOD mesh and copy it and use the "dissolve" function in the menu that appears when you press X in edit mode. You can remove loops. Dissolve is great since it preserves the UVs. You want to watch your UVs as you work.

When you cam away from your mesh in SL, you want to retain the overall silhouette of your object, and lose detail as you back away.

If PHYSICS is the high contributor, you need to examine your physics mesh. If you did not provide one, it likely used the number of triangles in your lowest LOD to make its calculation. If that is the case, lowering that number will help resolve that issue. If you provided the mesh, then you need to study how you made your physics mesh.

Remember that the physics mesh is simply telling SL, "here is what I want to walk on, there is what I don't want to walk through, this is an opening through which I want to pass." This implies that you can use planes to create the surfaces. It has been shown that using boxes will be fine to use and not much of a contributor. If you are dealing with very large builds, perhaps it would be wise to consider using planes with possible. This article deals with Physics and shows how to create single planes from a box for use in Mesh Studio.

Remember to simplify your forms for phsyics. If you have a wall with windows and a doorway, you don't need to walk through the windows, normally, you do through the doorway. Simplify the wall as if it doesn't have windows. If the door is round, simply to a square. If the wall is thick enough that you think your customers will walk into them, then do a physics shape for each side without edges inbetween them. For curved surfaces, such as a round balcony, use flat planes in the least amount that will help keep the balcony from being walked through. Narrow faces create narrow triangles and these are not good for physics shapes and can throw errors.

This information will serve the same if you are making your meshes and physics shapes in Blender.

If SERVER is the high contributor, in Mesh Studio, this normally means you may have used the Object2Mesh script as opposed to the Object2JoinedMesh script since the server calculstion has to do with the complexity of the mesh which can be greatly affected by the number of unjoined meshes.

In Blender, joining the meshes will help you.

If I can find more info on this topic, I will update this article, but hopefully this bit will assist you in leaning out your meshes while keeping them pretty and efficient.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

Optical Optimization Options

2013-08-09T01:15:00.000-07:00

Once you have the hang of making your linksets to create and texture your meshes with Mesh Studio, the next important thing to conquer is the almighty LI (land impact) and equally strengthen the LoDs by controlling how they degrade with custom LoDs. Remember, LoD is level of detail that you see as you move away from the objects with your camera in Second Life. You see less and less detail, optically, just as in real life, the further you are from something.

First line of defense is your Mesh Studio menu when generating your mesh. Here is one tactic I use.

ONE.
I create my linkset and leave the default settings for use as the High LoD level.

TWO.
For the Medium LoD level, I select the Low Poly setting on the MS menu.

THREE.
Low LoD level can use the Low LoD setting on the MS menu.

FOUR.
For the Lowest LoD level, you can do one of two things. Use Use LoD Above or set the Triangle Limit on the level to 0 (zero).

FIVE.
Calculate with the Use LoD Above setting and then again with the Triangle Limit set to 0 (zero). Check to see which gives you the lower LI and decide which you want to use.

The second line of defense is to create the lower LoD levels by modifying your linkset. The above workflow will work in many cases. I recommend trying it to have values to compare to this second method of working.

The first thing to remember is that you are simplifying your forms but trying to retain the general silhouette of your linkset. Let's use my lampost as an example.

This lamp is 22 prims: spheres, cylinders, boxes.

Since the center is a single tapered cylinder, let's focus on the top and bottom parts of the lamp.

In addition to the prims that make up the top of the lamp, I have created two sets of colored prims by tinting the faces of some of the plywood prims. One I will use for the glass casing around the lampflame and another for the metal encasing what will be textured as glass. The rest of the prims are all in plywood and this constitutes another material for a total of three. In 3D programs, these material faces are set up by selecting faces on the mesh and assigning materials; in Mesh Studio, we select faces on the prims and tint them with all faces having the same tint belonging to the same material.

Second Life chose not to change their Edit menu, so to access these materials on the uploaded mesh, we use Select Face. Doing this on any face that was within one tinted group of faces selects all faces in the group even if they are on opposite ends of the mesh (think of having candles in a candelabra and all the candles have one material; selecting and texturing one candle, textures all the candles at the same time).

The bottom of the lamp is a series of cylinders and a cut sphere.

This linkset had the Object2JoinedMesh script added and the default settings were used to generate the High LoD level. Remember to name your root prim.

I made a copy of this lamp linkset and renamed it to reflect I would use it for the Middle LoD level. Now it's time to examine the prims and see what you can do to simplify, but keep the general shape of the lamp.

It is very important, if you have made materials, to make sure that there is at least one face left on a prim that bears the tint used for a material face, so in this case that would be the plywood (which would be abundant) and the blue and green. On the left is the original and on the far right, you can see the prims I removed (they need to be unlinked so they are no longer part of the linkset) and then the remaining prims modified to adjust for the removal of these prims.

It's a bit of experimentation to find what works and/or what is acceptable. Remember these will be seen from further away. You can see what I removed from the bottom and how I adjusted the prims, but I could have chosen to try it differently.

On the next copy I make, I name the root for the Low LoD level for which it will be used. I have removed more prims and begin simplifying to full tapered boxes, but always seek to maintain the general shape that will be seen as your camera moves further away.

Since this is an LoD which is implemented at a much further distance, I am not concerned with small spaces between prims, you really won't see it.

Again, simpler forms. As long as they have a visual feel for the shape, it will read fine at distance.

Note: The LoD will push on the shape of the prim to its largest mass, so it can be tricky to make shapes match the more delicate they are. Case in point is the final version of the lamp as follows...

I changed the central cylinder on the lampost to a tapered box (right hand prims in image). Notice how the tapered box looks thinner than the cylinder. In trying this out, thicker versions, with the box shape, spread out in mass more than what could be seen with the cylinder, thus making the change visibly too different to the eye. This thinness kept a more loyal silhouette to the original lamp and that is the goal.

For this final LoD, I was trying to trim a much fat as possible (i.e.prims/faces). Look carefully on the right hand side final version and you'll see there is still one part of the blue material face prims left (bottom of the green prim) to make sure that the number of faces are maintained throughout.

So each of these versions, the original and the three simplified versions is used to do the four DAE files that are used in the four LoD levels in the SL Uploader window. I set physics to lowest. When this lamp was uploaded to Second Life, it came in at 4 LI from 22 prims and very strong LoD.

Hopefully this gives you some information to start bringing in your meshes with lower LI and better LoD.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

When you texture the prim, you texture the mesh...it's MAGIC!

2013-08-09T01:10:00.000-07:00

(updated 09.15.12/12:15 pm PT)
Even after working with something for a long time, I find that I still have so much to learn. This is, however, why I like to teach people because it makes me delve and ask questions and really try to understand things in order to explain them to someone else.

So in speaking with TheBlack Box and asking some questions, I had an AHA! moment. Some of you may already know, but I finally just got it.

Here is the lectern I've shown before.

The one on the left is made from my prim linkset made of 19 boxes, no material faces, with the Object2JoinedMesh script. I simply made it and made it mesh and threw on a seamless texture, the one on the left, you see in the bottom picture, light maple bounded on top and bottom with tiger oak. Didn't texture bad at all.

Now look at the one in the center. This is the same linkset, but this time I textured all the prims beforehand, using the same single seamless texture. I used offsets, repeats and rotations to get the texture to go onto the different faces as nicely as possible; decorating it more as I had wanted. When you do this, Mesh Studio uses the repeats/rotations/offsets in the creation of the UVs and when you generate the DAE and upload it to Second Life, the mesh has all of this texture information embedded. Drop your texture into the texture panel of the Edit Menu or, if you have no materials as on mine, drop the texture onto the mesh itself. It will match the textures as you set them on the prims in your linkset.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Look at the lectern on the right. Note the texture below it on the bottom right of the illustration. It is a 1024x1024 image comprised of four textures, each 512. I retextured the linkset once more, this time repeating and offsetting to utilize one quarter of each texture on any given face. All four of the textures in this image are used on one face or another throughout the prim linkset. Once I generated the DAE and uploaded, I dropped my texture on this single material mesh and it also matched everything I did to the prims. Using the four textures in one, expanded what I could do on the prims design-wise.

What this means is that without making a material face, you can get more than one texture on your mesh. All without ever going to a 3D program. That is pretty darned nifty!

Take a look at the steps in this linkset. They have had a simple brick seamless texture put on them. You can see, on the left, when all the settings are 1:1 with no offsets, they are different sizes and don't follow how a brick pattern should look. On the second linkset, to the right, the pattern has been offset and scaled to provide a more realistic use of the pattern.

So it's just a matter of setting up the textures before you create the mesh. While it doesn't mean that the mesh will upload with the textures on the mesh when it rezzes, the textures are already in SL and you just drop them on your uploaded mesh.

How do you work with a four-textured-tiled-image?

If you start with a 1024x1024 texture that has one 512x512 textures in each corner you'll end up with a texture that can have multiple uses for texturing your prim linkset for Mesh Studio. Upload this texture to Second Life. First, we will talk about using this on a prim linkset where you have elected to use no additional material faces.

My recommendation is to make whatever faces, on your linkset, that are not visible at all when you will look at the mesh, and set those to a transparency of 100% which means these faces will not generate any mesh. Now you can either drop the texture on each face, or open the linkset in edit and drop the texture into the texture window of the SL Edit panel or select it from the list of available textures.

The most common setting for using these four textures in one image is to set the repeats to 0.5 on both the horizontal and vertical repeats. Then set the offsets to 0.25 or -0.25 in horizontal and vertical offsets. By changing the offsets from positive to negative 0.25 in each offset field, you can quickly apply any of the four textures from your single image. In the case of very narrow prims or odd cuts, you may need to increase or decrease the repeats. You may also, depending on the texture and it's pattern, change the number of horizontal or vertical offsets to place something in the texture just where you want it. You may also try rotations and flipping the repeats horizontally or vertically.

However these textures end up on your prims, the parameters you set for the textures on each face will be faithfully reproduced on your mesh.

NOTE: At this time, Mesh Studio does not support the use of Planar Mapping. Only the Default setting works as expected. This may change; I will update the blog if it does.

ALSO: DO NOT USE TINTS when texturing, these tell Mesh Studio that you want a separate Material Face for that area.

In the next post, I am hoping to continuing this topic by incorporating the use of material faces as well to further expand what you can do not only with textures, but the "effects" settings of transparency/glow/shine and bump.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

I'm a Material girl!

2013-08-09T01:08:00.000-07:00

In Second Life, the primary building component is the prim. These are a set of primitive shapes that can be created through the SL Edit window and put together to build cities, hair, clothing, animated creatures, statues and more. They can be cut a number of ways and when we taper, shear and apply other types of deformations, this has come to be known as Prim Torture.

If you go into edit on a prim and choose "Select Face", you can isolate one of the surfaces on a prim and texture it independently from the rest of the faces on the prim. You can shift-left click additional faces to make a grouping that can be textured at the same time.

There are two ways to generate mesh with Mesh Studio. One is to use the "Object-2-Mesh-MS-Node" script in the root of you linkset. This basically treats each prim as a separate prim. When you upload this mesh's Collada .dae file, the meshes are linked and can, therefore, be separated either with "Edit this link" in edit, or you can completely unlink one or more of the links. The advantage is that you retain the texturability of each prim's faces as if you were texturing prims in Second Life. Of course, they are mesh at that point, so you lose the ability to do any further cuts or torture. The downside can sometimes be that the LI can be higher than using the second script included in Mesh Studio.

The second way to generate mesh is with the "Object-2-Joined-Mesh-MS-Node"script. This treats the linkset as one, inseparable mesh object, similar to sculpts, with only one surface.

However, we have the ability to create more than one texturable section on this single surface. One way we do it is by putting a color tint on the face of a prim in our prim linkset.

Here I have tinted several faces with red and blue. Even if the colors are on different prims, as long as they are the same tint, they will all be chosen as if they are a single area to texture or tint when you use "Select Face" on the SL Edit menu.

You can designate up to 8 tint colors total. The joined script will notate them as "Prim Faces" in the hovertext. It is also a good idea to use this hovertext as an indicator as it will tell you if you have ended up with more than eight Prim Faces.

There is one other way to make your Prim Faces and that is with the use of textures.

Take a look at the above image. On the left, I have one area left as white, creating our first Prim Face. The bird's eye maple creates Prim Face 2. The reddish wood creates Prim Face 3. The combination of Burr Maple with Tiger Oak Trin on the lectern's flat face is now Prim Face 4. I used the textures to get the texture and offsets I needed to make the texture look as I wanted (read the post on texturing the prims to texture the mesh from an earlier entry). I can still put other textures on these areas, after I make the mesh, but they will have the same repeats and offsets that were used when I initially prepared the prim linkset. The white area, I've left, will accept both textures and/or tints. Any tints you add, on top of textures, would colorize that whole Prim Face material area on the generated mesh.

Now examine the linkset on the right of the above image. This is the same linkset, but I have added some color tints on some of the faces. These faces all have the bird's eye maple, but some of the faces have blue (making Prim Face 5), pink (making Prim Face 6), and red (making Face Prim 7). Finally, which may be hard to make out on the small image, I added green to the top of the back slats.

Here, above, you see the final result. I used the textures where I had the blue, pink and red tints and added tints more in keeping with the textures on my build. You may have to click on the image for a larger version to see that I added a tint plus low shine and the siding bump to create a pattern on the prim faces that had been left white.

The texture, btw, with the border on the lectern large face, is the 4-in-one texture I used in the previous texturing tutorial. If you create your Prim Face materials (of which you can do eight) and then also use 4-in-one textures, you can really extend how many textures you can use on a single joined mesh.

So the ways to mark your linkset to create Prim Faces (sometimes called just Faces, Materials or Material Faces or Prim Face Material) is to use:

either a tint color or a texture (or both as explained below).
the SL Edit menu choices of Blank or Plywood. White would constitute one Prim Face (essentially being a tint) and Plywood would constitute a second (essentially being a texture).
texture or tint, alone (which would each create a Prim Face material).
a texture with a tint (which would create a Prim Face material, and be in addition, if the texture is used alone or with an entirely different tint on the same mesh).

Once you have created your mesh, you would use:

he SL Edit menu, with "Select Face" enabled to select all faces within a Prim Face material (example: texture was used with and without tint; each is its own Prim Face material so even if they share the same texture, there are two separate areas to choose since you could also conceivably put two separate textures on each Prim Face material). This selects the entire area that was designated as one Prim Face material when you prepared your prim linkset. All areas, even if on different parts of the mesh, are selected when one part of that Prim Face material is selected with "Select Face".
experiment with shine, glow, transparency and bumps from the SL Edit menu in conjunction with your textures and tints. Each Prim Face material can have it's own texture, tint, shine, glow, transparency and bump.

I hope you will find this useful as you continue to explore the world of mesh with your Mesh Studio.

Happy Meshing!

~ele

The shape of things to come: it's a resolution thing

2013-08-09T01:05:00.000-07:00

So you want to know what the heck all those resolution buttons are and do. It depends on the prim shapes you use, first.

For this article, I'll use the box (or cube), cylinder, sphere and torus.

I linked these and added the Object2JoinedMesh script.

First I do Default resolution which is 4/24.

For each of these examples, I created a .dae and imported the .dae to Blender so you could more easily see the mesh and how it looks in 3D.

In Blender, you will see that the mesh is triangulated and this is the way it comes into Second Life. However, it makes it very difficult to select loops (rows of faces, verts, edges), so we use the Alt-J command (all verts selected on the object(s) in edit mode), and this creates quads wherever possible. It's just much easier to work with quads for many reasons.

So below is what these four prims look like in Blender (after quadded).

Time for a 3D term: UV

While our objects are three-dimensional, XYZ, the UVs for meshes get laid out in a two-dimensional format and these are, in turn used as a template that guides us when we texture. A UV map; a map of the coordinates of the 3D object in a flat 2D way.

When looking at a UV map, you will see rows going across and up/down. Now mind you, the UVs can end up being rotated and such, but we basically refer to rows going across the UV space as "U" and going up and down vertically as "V"(as demonstrated by the yellow and grey bars on the the box in the image above).

At Default Resolution, 4/24 (illustration above)

Boxes (known as cubes in some 3D programs) have 12 faces on a U row and 12 on the V rows. There are four sides around and four sides up and around. Each side of the cube shows 3 faces on each row U or V.
The Cylinder has 24 faces going around in U. There are three going up in V, if the cap ends are visible, they also have 24 faces.
The Sphere has 24 faces going around in U, but only 12 going up in V.
The Torus has 24 faces going around in U and going around in the other direction in V.

At Low Poly Resolution, 2/16

Boxes/cubes have 4 faces on U and on V.
Cylinders have 16 faces U and 3 on V (the 2 cap ends, if visible, only have 8 faces)
Spheres have 16 faces U and 8 V.
Torus prims end up with 16 faces U and V.

At Low LOD Resolution, 2/8

Boxes/cubes still have four faces on U/V. This is the minimum number a box can have when all sides are left opaque to generate mesh.
Cylinders have 8 faces on U with only one row vertical on V and if the cap ends are visible, they have only four faces.
Spheres have 8 faces on U and 4 faces going vertically on V.
The torus has 8 faces on U/V.

So we've covered the main resolution buttons, now how about all those plus and minus functions for Straight and Circle.

Straight pertains to prims based on the box. So...box, prism, pyramid and tetrahedron. Adding or subtracting straight will ignore prims based on circles.

In the following example, the prims were set up with Default. I then press Straight+1 five times. In default, if you recall, the U/V rows had 12 faces; 3 faces, in the row, on each side of the box. I wanted to end up with 32 which meant I needed 5 more faces on each side (4x8=32).

Only the box was affected here; the rest of the prims are based on circles and ignored.

NOTE: Notice that the rows on the cylinder increased in V. This is because this is considered a straight side. It just didn't increase around the circle in U.

Here, below, I added Circle+1 eight times to get 32 faces on the mesh. Again, notice on the cylinder that this time the increase occured on the U rows where they are defined by the circle. The straight side remain untouched. (Mind you, these examples was only for illustration; I wouldn't go above default settings myself.)

Now let's look at how subtracting from the circle changes these prims. I wanted a pentagon, five sided cylinder, for a table in a lower LOD level mesh I was making. Using Low Poly resolution makes the cylinder eight sided, so I applied Circle-1 three times to make it five and it worked as expected. Different prims can have other effects.

So what uses do you have for these. As mentioned, the most obvious is for lowering the triangle count on your LOD levels. This is why even using just the Default, LowPoly, and LowLOD buttons will work for your high, medium and low LOD levels in the Uploader. Now, armed with how the rest of the buttons work, you can experiment and get lower if you need to.

Always check your results in Blender, another 3D program or Aditi, the beta grid.

Knowledge is power. More power to ya!

Happy Meshing!
~ele

Thinking Outside of the Box: Let's get Physical

2013-08-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

So many people have been begging for information on Physics that I'm posting the text first and will add graphics to illustrate the examples and such as I am able.

The outside of the lowly prim Box can be your best friend when it comes to physics meshes. Min Barzane and I spent a good bit of time, a while ago, talking about and figuring out things about physics. The conclusion we came to is you should:

simplify the physics shape as much as you can
concern yourself primarily with the actual collision surfaces: walkable surfaces, wall surfaces you don't pass through
use boxes, where only one face is visible, to create your physics meshes when needed. This, in essence, creates a plane and a single plane generates two tris. We will refer to boxes with only one face as a plane from here on in.
remember that you do not have to have perfectly aligned pieces when making your physics shape. You always want to test your shapes (try Aditi where the Lindens give you money that can be used in this test grid and not come out of your own pocket) to make sure you can walk well on and not walk through any gaps.

Creating a plane with which to work.

Create a box prim.
Go into Edit on it and set the box's transparency to 100%.
If you have trouble locating your faces, use Ctrl-Alt-T which will show all transparencies in red.
To give you a more workable plane, select one of the side faces of the box to make opaque by zeroing the transparency.
Depending on which side you chose, you will be able to taper the plane on X or Y. You can also shear on X or Y. This gives you more flexibility for fitting areas as you make your physics shape.

Whether you are making a house, a staircase, a doorway, or a chair, it is the actual surfaces that require collision that matter. Let's look at some examples:

A wall with windows and a doorway. Unless you intend to have people walk through your windows, you can treat them as part of the wall (meaning they don't need a hole in the physics mesh). Use common sense. If the walls aren't very thick, you may only need to collide with the inner wall. If you do need to collide with both sides of the walls, only do surfaces for the walls and not the sides of the prims making up the walls.

You want to walk through a doorway, so you devise your "planes" to allow the entry way. If the doorway is on a wall, make the prims 100% transparent and use Ctrl-Alt-R to see the transparent areas in red. Use "Select Face, on the SL Edit window, and select the wall surfaces and set the transparency to 0% to make those wall surfaces opaque. On the door way, you want the wall surfaces, but don't need to make the inner surfaces of the doorway opaque; the walls provide the perimeter of the area you walk through.

If you are creating a pre-hung door for sale (consists of 5 parts: the two side uprights known as the jambs, the top piece called the jamb header, the bottom threshold piece and the door), you can do the same, and make all the edge pieces 100% transparent. Just the door? The same holds true. Check out the blog post on doing pivots for your doors.

Floors. The box will be used for square floors. The sides and bottom of the boxes are not walked on and are thus made 100% transparent. With round floors you have to take care as you want to use the full cylinder. Minimizing the sides on a cylinder could result in pockets where someone could fall through, so you really want to experiment and see if you can get away with any minimization. How do you minimize? The settings on the Mesh Studio Menu. A setting of Low Poly on a cylinder creates 8 edges. You can use that as a starting point and then use Circle + 1 or Circle -1 to add or lower the number of edges on your cylinder's circle till you have a walkable floor for your particular "floor plan".

A round balcony. The inner part of the balcony needs to keep the user from going through it, but it does not need to be completely round to be effective. Use your planes to define the arc of the balcony railing with as few box planes as possible.

Railings. A railing is a good example of how much or how little of the mesh needs to be involved in the physics shape. The collision surface is merely to keep the user from falling off the side of the steps where your railing is positioned. Any single surface side will provide this, whether it is the top of the hand rail, its side, or the side made up by the balusters (again, treat it as if you're shoddily covering them up with planks since the physics mesh does not need to be perfect).

A roof on a house. If you think your users will walk on your roof or fly through it, then by all means choose the inner or outer surface of your roof to supply collision. If the roof extends past the boundary of the house, it is not necessary to match the dimensions.

Staircases. Steps can be handled with one long or several short ramp planes depending on the direction and formation of the steps (like a spiral staircase).

Chairs, benches and other seats. The only important collision surface on a chair may be where the avatar actually sits. First, this may be enough to define the area of the chair itself and second, it may be an effective way to handle the avvie being able to sit on the chair without the assistance of an animation.

These are just some examples to get you thinking. So what else do you need to know? When the physics shape is ultra simple you can sometimes get away with having to do little else than loading your LoD daes in the Level of Detail tab and the Physics dae file in the Physics tab of the SL Mesh Uploader window.

Aditi, aditi, aditi. Experiment your heart out on on the Linden's dime. Make sure your physics work right and THEN take it live to Agni (the main grid we're all on).

Until any of the TPVs (Third Party Viewers) get the full Havoc license, only the LL Viewer has it, so you should definitely use it to upload any mesh particularly with physics. I have had people tell me they successfully upload with their TPV and all I can say is after the first time mine failed me (a doorway that couldn't be entered), I chose not to lose money again by sticking to the LL Viewer. Feel free to try the odds if you like. The Lindens will love you for it.

Once you upload your mesh, don't forget to set your mesh to Prim in the Edit window's Features tab. This is the one thing that almost everyone forgets sooner or later and wail their physics aren't working.

If it still isn't working the way it should, here are some videos that explain the decomposition method:

Plus some other reference pages to help you out:

What is Decomposition?

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Decomposing_a_mesh_for_physics_shape

Making Mesh Physics for SL:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Making_Mesh_Physics

Recently the Lindens updated the Physics Optimization wiki page. Some good info here:

https://sites.google.com/site/tamaproducts/home/mesh-studio

So I hope this helps you understand this topic a bit better. As always, please let me now how you like the articles and if you would like to see certain things covered. More to come as always.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

Rethink your Sculpts for Mesh

2013-08-09T00:55:00.000-07:00

First, let's go over the procedure for using sculpts you have made in Sculpt Studio. For those of you not familiar with Sculpt Studio, this is Mesh Studio's inworld sculpting sister product. Follow this link for more information.

In the latest Sculpt Studio version (set a new mat out if you haven't lately, this is how you update), is the "SS 2 MS - Dropbox".

In order to use a sculpt from Sculpt Studio, a copy of it must be on the server. This means you must have just made the sculpt. If you want to use a sculpt that is no longer on the server, you will need the notecard data for that sculpt and place it's -SCULPT card in the mat, rerez it and use the Sculpt Frame to generate a new sculpt. This places it on the server again. Sculpts are only on the server for approximately 24 hours after being generated.

Before you generate the sculpt through the Sculpt Frame, name the sculpt with the name button and then use the Sculptie! button to make the sculpt. If this is a new sculpt, download the ZIP from your server page (this contains all files for your sculpt) and upload one of the sculpt tga maps. If this is a regeneration to use a sculpt you made before that is no longer on the server, you don't need to download anything if the sculpt map is already inworld.
KEY INFO: It is critical that the name of the sculpt on the server be the same name you use on the sculpt map; the names MUST match. The names will be used by the drop box to match up.
Rez your SS 2 MS - Dropbox.
Make sure your sculpt map is full perm in your Inventory.
Ctrl drag a copy of the sculpt map, from your Inventory, to the contents of the dropbox (alternately, open the dropbox in edit and place a copy directly in the contents).
The map has been used to register and "mesh-ize"it. This means the original in your Inventory is registered. Mesh Studio will now recognize it. Any sculpt you make from it, by putting the sculpt map on a Sculpt Type prim, can be used alone or along with prims in a linkset to genereate mesh with your Mesh Studio.

Recommendation: In the description field of your sculpt map, add Mesh Studio, so that you know this is a sculpt that can be used for mesh generation in Mesh Studio. A folder for these "mesh'ized" items is not a bad idea either. Do this to any sculpt made with this map so that you know it can be used with Mesh Studio.

SOME THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT MESH-IZED SCULPTS

Mesh Studio always loads sculpts at their highest LoD (comparable to resolution 4/24 in Mesh Studio) regardless of what settings you use on the Mesh Studio menu. This is because the Mesh Studio script can only affect prims and not sculpts.
Poles, in these mesh-ized sculpts, will merge to a single point (also known as verts or vertices). BTW, textures on these triangular ends (produced by the poles) will texture fine and not have the same radiating texture problems we have with sculpts.
Wherever points are in the exact same position (example, double points, slices copied to the same position), these points merge into one single point.
We do not have to reinforce points in mesh to strengthen LoD.

What was that last point? We don't have to reinforce for mesh?

If you've been reading my articles, you have seen that we control LoD in mesh by either letting SL generate the lower LoD meshes, or better yet, we create them for exact control of the shape that each level degrades to as you cam away.

So what does this mean for sculpts?

You can:

use as much or as little of the sculpt mesh as you want for your shapes.
use separations in a sculpt. If you will only be working inworld, separations between parts in the sculpt are done with poles as usual, but you only need one per separation; not two as in sculpts. (ex. Table with legs: each closing end of the table top, each closing end, top and bottom of each leg all require only one pole for use in mesh.) The poles will merge and give you clean separations on your mesh (one pole per each end on a separation). If you use a 3D program such as Blender, you can remove the merged poles if you want to do anything different.
use Cylinder stitch if you want the ends of your sculpt open. As noted above, you will need poles to make physical separations so cannot have more than two open ends.

Here is an example of two sculpts done similarly (because I made a slight error on one and joined slices in the center that I didn't intend). In figure 1, you can see the slices as they were setup for the second example I made. The first example had slices evenly distributed and only the poles and slices were copy/pasted together producing the separations. You can see the result, where I imported the dae into Blender, in figure 3. You can also see that the openings made by using Cylinder stitch produced no mesh in the Blender examples. There is a separation where there was a pole on each separating end and where there was one pole on top of a slice, and no pole on the next section (very bottom of object), the pole simply merged and closed the bottom and continues on to the next slice in a taper.

fig. 1

fig. 2

fig. 3

fig.4

In figure 2, you can see more clearly what the SS 2 MS dropbox (found in your Sculpt Studio accessories box) looks like. You can also see each of the two sculpts I made. If you look carefully, you can see the sculpt on the right has a slightly different look to the texture because of all the slices copy pasted on top of each other. So in figure 4, that second sculpt is shown and there are 226 verts on the mesh because so many slices were pasted on top of each other. All the points on top of each other merged into one. The result is a less dense mesh with far fewer triangles.

One thing you can do if you are closing at least one end of a sculpt, for MS, is to, say, use a 128 slice stack because you wanted 8 points in each row. You make your sculpt with the minimum of slices and then take all remaining, make them poles and put them in the same position as your last slice. Remember all poles merge, so all poles on top of each other will merge, too. Then you have a low poly sculpt that will be low poly mesh.

If you wanted the two ends of your sculpt open, you can collapse (copy/paste) the slices together one each end with no poles, set to cylinder stitch on the frame, and it will leave the ends open and MS will use that to indicate that no mesh should be created on the ends.

There is much more to explore, but this should give you some things to think about and play with.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

Using Sculpts and Subsculpts from Sculpt Studio with MS

2013-08-09T00:53:00.000-07:00

If you own Sculpt Studio, you may have seen that you have an object called the Mesh Dropbox in the contents of you latest update (remember: check for updates regularly by putting out a new mat). This box allows you to register a sculpt made with Sculpt Studio to be used as a component in your Mesh Studio Builds. How to do this is covered in my "Rethink your Sculpts for Mesh" article in this blog.

Here is some more information on what things you can do to make sure that your sculpts are going to make your mesh even more dandy but not at the expense of higher land impact (LI).

Key points to understand when using sculpts for mesh:

The Mesh Studio scripts will only affect the prims in your linkset if you use the menu options for lowering the resolution of the mesh surfaces made from your prims. Sculpts will always be at their highest resolution as a result (the equivalent of Default 4/24).
While sculpts will still have 1024 faces, when making a sculpt, even if you only used 8 slices out of stack and turned all others to poles, the number of faces will not diminish. However, that same sculpt, when used for generating mesh in Mesh Studio, will only use the number of any full faces as any points that are in the same location (pole slices, slices with multiple points on top of each other, or slices on top of each other) will merge. Examples: poles will merge to one (1) point, a 4vert square slice will merge to 4 points, three slices in the same position will merge to the number of points in only one of the slices.
If you put a texture on your sculpt when you link it to your linkset (or use by itself), it will retain the ability to use that texture (and any repeats, rotations or offsets if you use them) when it is mesh. Each separate sculpt will count as a material face if you put a texture or color different than on any of your prim faces.

Using Subsculpts for Mesh

If you are not familiar with how a subsculpt is made to use in Sculpt Studio, you can learn how at this page: http://www.sculpties.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Plug-Ins

Basically it is using a finite subset of the slices, so for instance, you could create a gem with 8 slices out of 32. For Sculpt Studio, that means you could use the subsculpt four times in a stack of 32 slices to make four gems (4x8=32). However, if you use them with Mesh Studio, the slice shapes you used for the gem may be octagons. This means the slice points will whittle down to 8 points each since any points on top of each other merge. The poles will merge as well. So your subsculpt may be nice and low poly which is very good for use as mesh.

You can use these subsculpts for Mesh Studio by registering the map for the subsculpt from the directions in the aforementioned article. Now you can just use these subsculpts to build with and they contribute far less potential mesh than a full sculpt.

What if you've made a sculpt that uses most of its points? How do you then make this far less of an LI-exploder?

In the same way that I have shown, in other articles, that we can create the lower LOD meshes by lowering the number of faces in the LOD mesh by simplifying the prims we use for the model (see "Optical Optimization Options"), we can do similarly to sculpts. Create simpler versions of your sculpt by recreating it with fewer points. How?

If the model has slices that had 32 points, revise the slice shapes by doubling up the points so they will merge. Do the same with the slices. Sure it takes more time and thought to do this, but if you're LI-conscious, then it's a no-brainer that you just need to buckle down and do it.

Here's a trick that sometimes works depending on the complexity of your slice shapes. You have a sculpt that is 32 slices with 32 points each. Make the sculpt and then make it into a subsculpt. Use the sculpt with a 64 slice stack once and make the second set of 32 slices into poles and copy them to the position of the the 32nd slice (which is slice 31). Now you have a new sculpt that is still 32 slices, but only 16 points on each slice. You can still try doubling some of those remaining slices, too. Always preview your sculpt to see if the silhouette is adequate for your needs; remember, you're looking for it to look enough like your sculpt with less detail for when you're further away from your mesh. You can even try it a second time with a 128 slice stack in the same manner.

It's a matter of some planning and ingenuity, but it can pay off in the ability to use shapes only achievable with sculpts and lower LI to show for your effort.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

Parent-Child Conference: extending what you can do with linksets in Mesh Studio

2013-08-09T00:50:00.000-07:00

We have seen that there are two scripts included in the MS package.

Object2Mesh, which treats each prim as an individual object and these come into SL, when uploaded, as linked single meshes. This often drives up the LI (land impact amount). I almost never use this script. I even put it in a folder of its own to make sure I don't mistakenly use it.

Object2JoinedMesh is what we use for most needs. It treats the entire linkset as a joined object and, when uploaded, is a single, non-linkable mesh object.

There is, however, another aspect to the Mesh Studio scripts and that is the Switch Parent button in the script. While you can use it with the Object2Mesh script, it makes more sense to use it with the Joined script.

Each linkset, used as parent or child, creates a single mesh and then those meshes are linked to each other as opposed to the whole thing being one single, unlinkable mesh. This also allows for each meshed linkset to retain its own set of 8 material maximum. These and other advantages are explained below.

THE WAY TO SWITCH PARENT (version one)

Create three box prims on top of each other and link them together.
Set the texture on this linkset to "blank" to make it white. It will make it easier to see the tint colors.
Shift-drag this linkset twice to make a total of three linksets.
Name the first one, Stack 1, the second, Stack 2, and the third, Stack 3.
Tint seven (7) individual faces on this first stack of three cubes. Remember that the base color, blank (white), is your first texture/tint/mesh-face and you can only have up to eight total.
Do the same to the other two linksets, but first make tint the entire stack a new different color than the white used on the first stack. This is your first tint.
Now replace 7 of the face tints with 7 new and different colors.
Repeat this process with the third stack, so that you end up with 24 unique colors across the three linksets.
Place the Object2JoinedMesh script in the root of this first linkset. The hovertext should read: 18 prim faces, 0 of them invisible, grouped into 8 mesh-faces.
Place the Object2JoinedMesh script in the root of each of the other two linksets.
Take Stack 2 and Stack 3 into inventory.
Touch the first, and remaining, linkset, to get the Mesh Studio menu, and choose "Switch Parent". The hovertext now changes to green and shows "will be parent to new nodes. These new nodes are also referred to as child or children.
When you now rez a linkset with the Object2JoinedMesh script, it will become a child node. Rez Stack 2. (note for those on latest Firestorm: right click on the linkset in your inventory and select "Restore to last position" and it will place it back from where you took it.
Look at the hovertext on your first linkset. It should now show "1 child node" near the top of the text block.

(So did you catch that I missed changing the white base color on the other two stacks? :) I realized it after I uploaded the pictures, that changing that base color ensured each stack had a completely unique, maximum number of textured mesh-faces.)

Rez (or restore) Stack 3. The hovertext, on linkset 1, now shows 2 child nodes.

THE WAY TO SWITCH PARENT (version two)

Do steps 1-10.
Touch the first linkset, to get the Mesh Studio menu, and choose "Switch Parent". The hovertext now changes to green and shows "will be parent to new nodes. These new nodes are also referred to as child or children.
Select Stack 2 in edit and reset scripts (normally found in the build menu on the menu bar). This will force the parent to recognize the new stack and should now show 1 child node.
Do the same with Stack 3. Either method works fine; use whichever you find most convenient.

SO WHAT IS PARENTING?

Parenting is a way to build a hierarchy. Just like when you do an outline.

Object 1 is a stack of 3 prims with 8 tints.

Object 2 is a stack of 3 prims with its own 8 tints and is parented to Object 1, otherwise known as being its child.
Object 3 is a stack of 3 prims with its own 8 tints and is parented to Object 1, and is also a child of Object 1.

You generate the meshes by going through the menu on the first linkset. It will show in chat that it creates a mesh per linkset:

[15:02] Stack 1: Mesh creation started

[15:02] Stack 1: Sending ...

[15:02] Stack 2: Sending ...

[15:02] Stack 3: Sending ...

[15:02] Stack 1: Creating Mesh for: Stack 1

[15:02] Stack 1: Creating Mesh for: Stack 2

[15:02] Stack 1: Creating Mesh for: Stack 3

One DAE file is created containing all three generated meshes for upload.

For purposes of this example, I didn't do any LOD meshes, and just set the lowest to zero.

Physics was just set to use the lowest LOD mesh as physics.

When you rez them, they will be three linked meshes. The parent will be the root. Each linkset is a single mesh, but the three meshes are now unlinkable as well. In addition, each linkset retains its unique maximum number of mesh-faces (accessible by "select face" in the SL edit menu).

HOW IS PARENTING USEFUL?

The first way should be apparent. It allows you to create mesh sets within one upload.

Let's say that you want to build a robot with arms that pivot at the shoulder points. For sake of expediency, I'm going to use my same three stacks and use the parent as the head/body at center. I'm going to use the two child nodes as the arms.

We need a way to do a pivot point on each stack arm, so again to expedite, I'll utilize the root prim on each child and repurpose it to make the pivot.

The root is on one end of the stack.
I use "edit linked" and, while in edit, I can see the axes on the prim.
I set the axes at the top of the prim I want to have the pivot point (the shoulder point). The center of the axes is the pivot point on which it will rotate.
Using "stretch both sides, I scale the prim so that one end goes all the way to the end of the two prims in the stack remaining. This creates an excess on the other side (left side in image below), but keeps the axes at center.
I scale the prim to make it flat (again, the axes is still at center).
I make all the faces transparent and then make only one face opaque with a unique tint so it will be a different material from everything else. I can make this mesh-face transparent after upload.

I do the same to the other stack.

I then position the "arms" where I want them. Just for ease, I rotate each "arm". This also shows me my pivots are working on the linksets.

Now I export.

Inworld, I make the "pivot faces" 100% transparent and test the pivots.

THEY WORK! YAY!

Robots, doors in door jambs (otherwise known as the door frame), chests with lids, accordion room dividers...anything you want to upload with parts in place where the parts then have to separate in some manner.

ON A GRANDER SCALE HOWEVER...

This is great for architecture. Say you build a model but when you try to link, you get

"Second Life: Link failed -- Unable to link any pieces - pieces are too far apart."

This means the centers of your prims exceed the linkable distance of 54 meters somewhere. With parenting, you can break up the build into linksets and maintain the positional relationships of your meshes. If the entire build is is no larger than the rez limit of 64 meters, this works handsomely. If, however, your build DOES exceed the limit, you can still use this, but the caveat (as Victor1st Mornington explained to me) is that the meshes will rez at the 64 meter limit. What I found was that when I tried this, with linksets that pushed past the limit, was that on upload, they were softlinked. If yours come in linked, as Victor went on to demonstrate, "unlink and group size the lot back up".

Happy meshing, everyone!

~ele

Making the Cut: What parameters does Mesh Studio work with for Prims

2013-08-09T00:45:00.000-07:00

Mesh Studio works with all prims. As far as cuts and torture, those supported by LSL (Second Life's scripting language) are what MS will handle as well.

Please note that Linden Labs recently added "SLICE", as a parameter they support, on BOX, CYLINDER and PRISM.

PRIM_TYPE_BOX 0

[ integer hole_shape, vector cut, float hollow, vector twist, vector top_size, vector top_shear ]

PRIM_TYPE_CYLINDER 1

[ integer hole_shape, vector cut, float hollow, vector twist, vector top_size, vector top_shear ]

PRIM_TYPE_PRISM 2

[ integer hole_shape, vector cut, float hollow, vector twist, vector top_size, vector top_shear ]

PRIM_TYPE_SPHERE 3

[ integer hole_shape, vector cut, float hollow, vector twist, vector dimple]

PRIM_TYPE_TORUS 4

[ integer hole_shape, vector cut, float hollow, vector twist, vector hole_size, vector top_shear, vector advanced_cut, vector taper, float revolutions, float radius_offset, float skew ]

PRIM_TYPE_TUBE 5

[ integer hole_shape, vector cut, float hollow, vector twist, vector hole_size, vector top_shear, vector advanced_cut, vector taper, float revolutions, float radius_offset, float skew ]

PRIM_TYPE_RING 6

[ integer hole_shape, vector cut, float hollow, vector twist, vector hole_size, vector top_shear, vector advanced_cut, vector taper, float revolutions, float radius_offset, float skew ]

The steps to "TRI" for nanos

2013-08-09T00:40:00.000-07:00

To make a nano mesh with Mesh Studio, you can use this method to trick SL into thinking the mesh you want to nano is larger than it is in reality by using single or double triangles. There are a few things to consider for nanos. These three steps create a single "tri" (triangle) from a prim box.

Create a box and color one face red (or other color). Remember that when you create a box, the top and bottom of the box is what can be tapered, which is good because the next step is...
Taper the top of the box on X or Y to the full extent (1.0).
Now make all the faces 100% transparent except the red, triangular face. Since fully transparent faces generate no mesh, you are now left with something that will give you a single triangle.

You can use this for many things, but for today, we are using it to trick SL as mentioned above. Here are some things to consider:

We can create a Prim Face material by coloring one or more faces with a texture or tint.
We can apply full transparency to this Prim Face material once the object is made mesh, if we so desire.
The smallest an object can scale to is 0.01 on any given axis.

So what if I have a sphere that I want to use as a pearl or a gem, as a simple example, and I want this to be smaller than 0.01?

Let's call this example sphere the target or target nano piece.

A single tri will tell SL the size of two axes for height and depth or height and width or width and depth. If all you need to do is regulate two axes, then the tri is your solution. Put the target prim, you want as the nano, at the center of the triangle (remember these prims don't have to be tiny to begin with since we can scale them down).

Center the target prim on the triangle? Kinda hard to get centers without some math here, you know.

Yeah, which is why I always work on grid so the centers of the objects I work with are on whole numbers (25 instead of 25.8738). It's easier to subtract or add to a whole number (helps if the prims are not odd sizes, too). This is the recommended way for all builders to work. Makes life a whole lot easier. Don't know how? Watch this classic video by Torley Linden:

If you need to be able to scale on all three axes, then you can:

use a box with a double taper (1.0 on X and Y)
make all the faces transparent except one on the left and one on the right.

The height of the tapered prim will give the Z height.
The length of the red triangle base will give the Y length and
the distance between the red triangles will give the X width (if the triangles happen to be on the opposing side than my example, it is not a problem; this is just explaining that the size all three axes are being described through this double-faced triangular setup).
Centering the target prim on this setup is easier since you just use the XYZ position of the tapered box
If you need to be able to size more on one or two axes, increase the size of the tapered prim on height or width or length or a combination of any two.
While you would normally use the Stretch both button on the Edit menu, you may want to experiment with it off if you need to affect one side of the target more than the other. This means the target would be off-center within the tapered prim (can be done with the single tri as well).

Why go to all the trouble of making a tri or two when you could just use a box?

a full box is 6 sided. Each side generates at least two tris. This means 12 tris for a box.
if your nano is fully enclosed, you can't reach it to texture. Making the box material alpha doesn't mean you can easily reach in to the inner nano'd piece.
a single tri can be used at any angle or rotation; even if you use two singles together, they are still independent of each other at the prim level. The double taper that creates two tris, leaves an opening to your target nano (transparent faces prior to generation, don't create mesh), but remain interdependent to each other being part of a single box prim in the build stage.
if you are working with a comlex linkset for which you are doing the custom LoDs, the fewer tris in the lowest levels, the better, has been my experience, to keep down the LI.
keep in mind that anything I say to you in my blog has been from what I have learned and what has been my experience. No hard and fast rules, just suggestions from what little I know. :)

Once you have set up either the single or double tri with your target prim, make sure the target prim is the root. As always, name your linksets and drop in the Object2JoinedMesh script. In this case, I used just the Low LoD setting in the MS menu and used it for the top three LoD levels and dropped the last two zero.

The result:

Once uploaded, you can make the triangular faces alpha. I used a single prim for the demonstration; you can place a full necklace or other linkset in place of the sphere used here. For mesh, really, you nomally would be making linksets that may have to come down in size. If you have an object that sizes well on all but one axis, the single tri is a good thing to use.

Want a gem-like cut to your sphere?

I used the Low LoD setting, on the MS menu, which produces fewer triangles on the sphere. The one on the left, above, used a Crease Angle of 10.000 in the uploader window (see image below). This sharpened the edges on the lower polygon sphere I called for in MS. The sphere you see on the right side is the same sphere with the default crease angle of 75.

To enable Crease Angle, you must checkmark Generate Normals.

What is the Crease Angle?

There's a good wiki page on various ways of testing the functionality of Mesh and gives an overview of much of what you find in the uploader window. It's an older page; you can tell because the Uploader window you see on the page is different than the one you open in your present viewer. Still, it has some good info.

Under Crease Angle, we have the following:

The Crease Angle adjusts the smoothness of the model.

Change the Crease Angle to 0 or 1.
Hit Enter in the text entry box
Verify nearly every polygon on the face should be apparent. In this case there is no smoothing - the normal of the face is used at all vertices producing a faceted look with a crease or hard edge between faces.
Change the Crease Angle to 180
Verify that the model now has smooth shading, no creases.
Confirm the bounds for entry are 0.000 to 180.00. Entering a value higher or lower will default back to boundary. Ex. entering 5000 will default to 180.00. Entering -20 will default to 0.000.
Confirm non-numeric characters cannot be entered for crease angle.
Confirm entering a blank value uses the previous value entered.
Confirm setting values for this field works for large and small models

You can see the model in the preview window and use the same commands for move, rotate and scale as you do for your camera controls. When you work with the Crease Angle, watch your object in the preview and you'll see how the angles sharpen or smooth as you change the numbers. A box has six sides that are all 90 degrees. So on a box a crease angle of 89 will sharpen all of them. The sphere will need a decrease in angle depending on how many faces on it.

I hope you found this helpful. Please leave comments or questions.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

The Pivotal Point of this Message

2013-08-09T00:35:00.000-07:00

(updated Nov. 28, 2013)

This is the first in a series of posts on physics with your Mesh Studio. In this particular example, we will also cover creating a pivot point on a door. As I worked on this, I realized it really was almost identical in content to a tutorial made by Ashasekayi Ra for Blender. For those that work in Blender as well, I highly recommend Asha's great tutorials. The main difference in mine will be how you can create a pivot point using Mesh Studio.

First, I've set up my prims for the door utilizing a full box and four more boxes that are hollowed for the decorative trim. Presently, I have everything left unlinked because I need to set up a center at the hinge end to the left of the door.

For this, I can easily do it by utilizing a setting in the Edit Menu called Copy Selection. With the main, large prim of the door selected, I touch the hinge end of the prim and it creates a copy of the prim perfectly aligned to the original.

Copy Selection is a function you should really play with as it not only copies single prims, but will also duplicate linksets, sculpts and meshes. This includes the textures.

I've added a red tint to the newly created prim. I am making this a Prim Face material so I can make it transparent once I've uploaded it.

Always try to make faces, you don't want to generate mesh, 100% transparent to lower the number of tris in your build on upload. For the prim we are using to define the new pivot center, we only really need the top face of the box as it will both tell the uploader what the overall width of the door is (faking it out) and the depth (which is identical to the main door prim as my choice). At this point, I can link everything with the main, large door prim as my root. I add the Object2JoinedMesh script to the root.

I use this setup to create the highest LoD by choosing the default setting of 4/24 on the MS menu. Make sure you name the root. It's just easier to identify things when named. Now I will make a version for the Medium LoD level with just the menu. This time I set to Low Poly after I renamed the root to identify it as the Medium LoD. Next, I'll make some modifications to create and use for the lower LoDs. The easiest thing is to remove detail, in this case, that is the hollowed boxes. When I create the DAE file, I use the Low LoD setting as this will take it down to 2/8. What this does, is create the minimum amount of tris per face. Each prim face generates 2 tries. (Example, a box has 6 sides, so that is 12 tris).

Last I now turn to making the physics shape. Hopefully you noticed that the red face we made was included in all the LoD levels I've made. It MUST also be included in the physics shape. However, with physics, the key is to leave only the necessary collision surfaces. We know we need to keep that red face for the pivot to work. I think I only need the front and back faces on the remaining door prim, so I make all the others transparent. This leaves me with only 3 faces or 6 tris. Very good, indeed!

On upload, I use the the high version, the medium and set the low version in both the Low LoD and Lowest LoD. Then in the physics tab, I load from file and use this last version I made. Also, make sure that you press the Analyze Button on the Physics tab. This is crucial. Since you are supplying the physics mesh, you do not need to do anything other than the Analyze button. When I calculate, I see that I have

Server cost: 0.750000
Streaming cost: 0.403195
Physics cost: 0.360000

Sweet!

When I upload and rez the door, I use Select Face in the Edit Menu and to select the single top face material to 100% transparent. I also go into the Features tab on the mesh and set it to Prim (important to do this). This is what allows me to walk through the area on the left of the door, but not through the closed door.

One thing to note: If you upload a mesh that does not have physics assigned through the dae, it seems only the convex hull and none choices appear. When the mesh has physics assigned through the dae, all three appear. If you link your non-physics mesh to a prim, all three appear. If you link a prim to your non-physics mesh, only convex hull and prim are available.

And now when you rotate the door, you'll see it rotates on it's hinged edge as expected.

Something to keep in mind. The piece you create to enlarge the bounding box and set the pivot point can be made even smaller than I've shown. This piece is mesh even if set to transparent. So it will block someone from moving through it. I didn't worry about the size because I placed it at the top and it is only one face (2 tris) and I would expect this to end up within a wall. It could have easily been put at the bottom to end up on the floor. So just remember this when designing the piece you use and where best to put it. It could also have been a tiny prim (0.01m) as long as the start of the red prim we used remains where it was. The start point, in this case, looking that demonstration image, is on the far left.

Happy Meshing!

~ele

Tip: Use a Pre-alignment on textures for more freedom

2013-08-09T00:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when you make something, you may not know what textures you want to use right away. Or you may want to change them later. We know that in Mesh Studio, if we texture beforehand, we set the repeats and offsets. Here's a way to give you a bit of flexibility.

I built a wall with a door and a window.

The yellow shows the box shapes I used to make it. I next used a texture alignment pattern. Now you can do this by hand, but I use Skidz Primz' TNT. With this I aligned the prims. I used the texture function to align all the textures. It does a very nice job. As with any tool in SL, it can have its problems, but overall does a remarkable job without ever using the SL Edit window.

I added a tint to the prims that make the doorway and window inset.

By using this alignment texture, my goal was to even out all the prim texture repeats and offsets so everything would match up. My goal is to then have a mesh that will be able to accept a texture that I can repeat and offset in SL for varied needs and it would work across all the prims with the same Prim Face material.

What you see here is only the surfaces that will be the interior wall plus the surface you step on as you go through the door.

A note on Physics: I removed all the back faces on my wall. I removed the prims for the doorway, except the bottom one which would be stepped on to enter the doorway and then only made that top face visible. I removed the prims that made up the window and the surrounding prims and extended the one above the window, so that it reached the floor (I don't feel you need to walk through windows). This left only the actual collision prims I needed and cut down the number of triangles, when I uploaded, to eight. So I did my LoDs the way I've presented in past posts and used the physics dae for the Physics tab and the wall came in at 3 LI. Set to prim, you could walk through the door.

Repeats set to one on the left hand mesh; set to 2 horizontal on the right.

Repeats set to one on left; horizontal repeats at two on right (Cottage rosewood wallpaper by Robin Sojourner).

Repeats at one on left; 4 horizontal/2 vertical on right (Tiles by Nicole Stiles).

This should always be tested and planned out ahead of time, but can give you much more freedom in your designing with the ability to choose more textures since they should all line up nicely.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

KWIKTIP #1: Transparency vs. Transparent texture

2013-08-09T00:25:00.000-07:00

KWIKTIP

When you don't want prim faces to generate mesh, you go into edit on the prim and in the Textures tab, set whichever faces you don't want meshed to 100% transparent.

Recently, there have been a couple of MS users who have used textures that are 100% transparent instead. The problem with this is that the texture setting remains zeroed and the script is tied to the transparency setting of 100% as the indicator to ignore a prim face so that it doesn't make mesh from it. Textures are UUID based, so using one on a prim face only tells the MS script there is a texture on it.

Why is this important? If the face has a texture that is transparent, it will:

become visible when a texture with opacity is applied
generate mesh which can contribute to LI
possibly become an obstacle if you set the mesh to convex hull or set to physical
possibly impede accessing a nano mesh if the faces surround the nano
add a Prim Face material to your linkset

The Big Stuff: Architecture in Mesh Studio

2013-01-14T23:07:00.003-08:00

Architecture is a topic of interest to many in Second Life. We've all seen our share of wonderful destinations where residents have recreated real life global points of interest as well as spun sims out of their imaginations. When making these large structures, there are always considerations about how to make them and keep the land impact (LI) at a manageable level for mesh. Mesh Studio is a wonderful way to build architecture. We have a Mesh Studio Flickr group (Founded by Jo Yardley, please feel free to join and show off what you have done in Mesh Studio as well.) and two of its prominent contributors both do architecture.

I thought it would be great to showcase both Jo Yardley and Victor1st Mornington and hear how Mesh Studio is part of their workflow. I hope you find their work as inspirational as do I.

Victor1st Mornington

What is the focus for the type of architectural style you have chosen to do in SL? Did your own interest spur you to do what you're creating or did someone come to you with the idea or job?

The bulk of my builds, for at least the mesh side of things, is done in New Babbage or related to the distinct Steampunk Victorian era style which goes with the era and setting the nine regions of New Babbage is set in. The biggest building I have made with Mesh Studio is Brunel Hall, a "Mock Tudor" style of building which is commonly referred to as "Tudorbethan". Other buildings I have made in New Babbage are based on the same Victorian era styling.

I started building originally for the Doctor Who community, add on expansion rooms for TARDIS consoles, even some TARDIS exteriors. I bought a plot of land in the City State of New Babbage in 2009 because I was told about the steamlands by another Doctor Who fan in Second Life. New Babbage has a reputation is being a city full of fine builders. The main region has been in the Destination Guide for.. well.. a LONG time, almost every major social event in New Babbage somehow gets listed in the Destination Guide as well and there have been countless Machinimatographers, Photographers and bloggers who have filmed, pictured or told stories about the city. My build style has started leaning heavilly towards the Victorian era due to spending 4 years in New Babbage :)

I rarely build anything for the Dr Who community nowadays. That community has a large pool of Blender, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max users. New Babbage as well is now seeing a rise in the amount of folks who are using desktop modeling programs but there is also a lot of Mesh Studio users in New Babbage.

What are you finding as the biggest challenges to working with large structures where we know that mesh LI can loom large when objects are scaled up? What kind of things do you do to keep the LI from getting out of hand?

Simple.. don't scale up the mesh build.. build it in prims to scale, that way you wont need to size it up. Brunel Hall is roughly 90m from the bathing hall wall to the pub wall, 50m from the front wall to the back wall and 50m from the bar cellar floor to the peak of the roof. The entire structure of the building, inside and out was made with Mesh Studio from the pre-existing prim build that was already there. I had no need to scale it up which meant i got true LI counts when the mesh item was rezzed inworld. The only time you should scale a mesh build is to scale it DOWN...try to avoid scaling UP!

As for keeping the LI low...

Large buildings, say 20m and up, you can get away with using 2/24 for the resolution. If your building has no curves and all flat lines, use the Low Poly (but not Low Lod) setting. If your building does have curves in it, lets say for a drain pipe going down the outside, or arch top door frames and windows, then use 2/24. It is always better to use the default 24 setting for curves because the lower that resolution setting for a curve below the default the worse it will look close up.

Also, think about your building. Do you REALLY need all those curves in it? A square top mantle door frame and a square top and bottom bay window looks just as good as an arch and costs you far, far less in LI in the mesh model itself. Also, one thing to remember... make those hidden faces 100% transparent! All those transparent hidden faces all add up to making your LI count as low as it possibly can be! Physics is the second one, but i'll go into that on the next question :)

Physics is an oft misunderstood part of working with mesh. Have you had any adventures, or misadventures, with this?

Physics with Mesh Studio needn't be a nightmare. The only misadventure I've had was the physics mesh not "matching" the actual mesh model, so I would be floating above a floor by a meter or so, but i figured out what was causing that. The one thing to remember with physics when working with mesh studio is one single question...what prims faces will avatars be bumping into to walk on, or to keep them out of the building?

If you keep that question in your head whilst modifying your prim build for the mesh model, then your physics model will come out perfect!

Why Mesh Studio? How did you hear about it? How has it helped you with your projects?

I tried using Blender...its UI is a mess, i tired using 3DS Max, it was too confusing. The 'Mayor' of New Babbage (who is the owner of the regions) Mosseveno Tenk told me about Mesh Studio and what it could do, essentially taking an existing prim build and converting it to mesh, and I was hooked.

As for how it has helped, well...

The original prim build of Brunel Hall was just under 900LI for the entire building, and that was even using the convex hull trick on flat linked walls. The Mesh Studio version? Under 500LI It saved me a LOAD of prims on the land the hall is sitting on, enough to add more higher detailed stuff on the inside and expand the furnishing on the inside of the building to bring it more inline with what a classic 'Mock Tudor' mansion would have looked like.

What would you tell others about working with Mesh Studio? What would you tell others that you wish you had known about Mesh Studio when you first began using it?

I would say two things to them. Take your time on the prim build check EVERYTHING on it, and secondly, take extra time on the physics build! Time spent on making sure the base prim build is all fine is less time spent having to constantly upload mesh model after mesh model (which costs a lot) because you found one texture face out of alignment >.<

As for folks who are thinking about buying Mesh Studio? Buy it. In the long run it will save you prims on your land, those extra prims can be used to extend your home out, add more furniture and basically make your home or shop a more enjoyable place to be in.

Where, in Second Life, can your work be seen?

Brunel Hall Hotel & Muirsheen Durkin Restaurant (entire building done in mesh studio) - http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Academy%20of%20Industry/64/86/108
Sovereign House (entire building done in mesh studio) - http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Academy%20of%20Industry/196/69/111
Fullarton House & The New Babbage Art Gallery (lower half and internals done in mesh studio) - http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Clockhaven/128/132/103
Hawksley Water Pumping Station (entire building and working twin beam engines done in mesh studio) - http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/New%20Babbage/177/71/103
Citadel of the Timelords (internals in the process of being converted with mesh studio) - http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Eutopia/246/127/3034

Also... the well known white oval RFL donation kiosks now have a 1 prim mesh counterpart, yup, you guessed it...made with Mesh Studio by me and sent to the Relay for Life of Second Life leads for upload to use for the 2013 RFL season.

Jo Yardley

What is the focus for the type of architectural style you have chosen to do in SL? Did your own interest spur you to do what you're creating or did someone come to you with the idea or job?

I've always loved old architecture and hated modern architecture, my only interest outside of SL is trying to stop the destruction of old buildings.

But being able to build allows me to recreate the past and that is why it means so much to me in SL.

Building something that is gone, bringing it back, that is magic.

My only focus is realism and authenticity.

Recreating the past and giving visitors an as realistic as possible experience of traveling back in time is what I am going for.

I got the idea for the 1920s Berlin Project after realising there was a Nostalgic scene in Second Life and simply started sticking prims together, I was only a few weeks in SL and had no experience at all.

So another reason I build how I build is connected to how much experience I've got, after more then 3 years in SL, I am still learning new things.

Physics is an oft misunderstood part of working with mesh. Have you had any adventures, or misadventures, with this?

I try to make as many sides invisible as possible but I've also decided to make all my floors regular prim.

It was hard to get the collision to work perfectly on floors, somehow I always kept floating a little above the floor or my feet disappeared into it.

By keeping the floors prim, I also save on the textures I can use for the mesh.
But I also build in a RL scale, 1 meter = 1 meter, that means that my buildings in general are a lot smaller then other SL buildings.

Why Mesh Studio? How did you hear about it? How has it helped you with your projects?

Yes lots, just recently I made a door and just forgot about the physics, so it turned out phantom...

But it is worth doing it right, it keeps the LI nice and low.

It still can be tricky to get right.

What would you tell others about working with Mesh Studio? What would you tell others that you wish you had known about Mesh Studio when you first began using it?

I tried some of the mesh software but soon realised that it was just much too demanding for me, at least at that time I did not have the patience or time to figure out how it all worked.

Someone mentioned Mesh Studio to me after I had been complaining about how tricky the software was.

It was exactly what I was looking for, it made Mesh easy for me.

And it motivated me to completely rebuild my sim and I am now turning everything to mesh.
I've already turned quite a few buildings to mesh.

If I had not found Mesh Studio I'd still be trying to build a simple table with mesh software.

It is easy!
Well not very easy, but a LOT easier (and cheaper) then the software I know.

And if you know how to build in SL, you can make mesh with Mesh Studio.

Where, in Second Life, can your work be seen?

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/1920s%20Berlin/237/232/751

Points of Inspiration: Ashira Legien

2012-11-04T23:27:00.002-08:00

CREATED BY ASHIRA LEGIEN

You may or may not have seen or heard of Ashira Legien. I assure you, however, once you see her jewelry, you'll agree she's unforgettable. A long time user of Sculpt Studio, she started right in to Mesh Studio and now uses her sculpts (through the SS 2MS dropbox) in her Mesh Studio creations with great flare and creativity. Here is a short interview before we take a look at her jewelry, true gems of Second Life.

1. How long have you been in Second Life?

Six years this December.

2. Did you start out to be a merchant?

Yes .. my dream was to own my own private island. It took me 6 months to learn to build and script and get a store going to where I could afford one. I've owned Isle of Mists for over 5 years now.

3. What kind of products do you make?

Jewelry mostly .. but also tree houses .. fun vehicles .. and a unique sculpted blanket that covers you like a real blanket and changes with each pose.

4. Is your interest in jewerly based on what you do or would like to do in real life?

No. I took the Master Jeweler class mostly because the owner said I wasn't a good enough builder to take it :-) The beauty of SL is that you can make things here without expensive supplies or tools. I couldn't afford the materials to make jewelry like this in RL.

5. How did you first get started with Sculpt Studio and Mesh Studio?

I got Sculpt Studio when it first came out v1.0 (boy you don't know how good you guys have it with v6.1 lol) I let TheBlack Box use pictures of some of my creations as examples to get Sculpt Studio going. Mesh Studio was just a natural extension.

6. How much of your work is done with one or both of these tools?

ALL of the sculpted and mesh items I create are made with Sculpt Studio and Mesh Studio.

7. What pieces would you say have been your most favorite that you made with Mesh Studio? Are they for sale and where can they be found?

My current favorite is the Phoenix Necklace set. It took me about two weeks and 700 sculpted pieces to make the mesh necklace and earrings.

It is currently for sale in my tree store .. Ashira's Aerie http://slurl.com/secondlife/Isle%20of%20Mists/84/123/45

8. What would you like people to know about your work with Mesh Studio?

Mesh Studio allows me to create jewelry with highly detailed sculpted prims and condense them down to a few mesh pieces with less land impact and more detail than the same pieces made with just sculpts. Mesh objects are also easier to script for color change and rez faster than sculpted prims.

9. Where would you like to see Mesh Studio go in terms of what you would like it to do?

For jewelry Mesh Studio seems to work fine just the way it is.

Ashira has been making beautiful things in Second Life for some years now. She was an early adopter of Sculpt Studio and is now working with Mesh Studio as well to make her wonderful jewerly and other creations.

Ashira uses sculpts she has made in Sculpt Studio and then transforms them with the SS 2 MS dropbox so that she can use them with Mesh Studio.

These are some of her marvelous creations:

You can see them in her online Marketplace store, https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/7297 and inworld, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Isle%20of%20Mists/84/123/45.

Hope you find's Ashira's work as inspirational as I do.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

TIP: Break it down to shed some light!

2012-09-15T17:29:00.001-07:00

When approaching anything you want to build, you can use the same methods employed by 2D and 3D artists alike. All things complex can be broken down into simple forms.

If you look at a lightbulb, you can do a sphere for bulb. While it often curves into a more cylindrical shape at it's bottom, we could take liberties and just use a short tapered cylinder going into a smaller, but longer tapered cylinder which is the metal part from which the glass protrudes. It can be rounded on the bottom, so a small, thinned-out half sphere can work. For the threads, the torus, when used with radius and revolutions, can give us something akin to what we seek.

For this example, I don't want to mess with alphas. In SL, it's not absolutely critical. You could create a material face so the bulb part could change to a whitish yellow when lit and it gives a very nice effect, especially with glow and light.

We now have a bulb composed of 5 prim parts. I made any parts that are not going to be seen set to 100% Transparency. I used two textures out of this glass and metal 4-in-1 texture image to texture the bulb as explained in my previous post.

Using the Object2JoinedMesh script, I generated the bulb mesh with defaults and it was 1.9 LI. I decided to try and make the lower LoDs with the menu settings. I generated the mesh again, this time setting to the Low Poly setting, and once again, using the Low LoD setting. I used the first one I originally made for high LoD, the Low Poly as the medium LoD, the Low LoD version for the Low LoD setting and zeroed out the lowest with physics using the lowest settings. This bulb came in at 0.6 LI (rounds up to 1). And, of course, when I put the 4-in-1 texture image on the mesh, it matched the prim linkset.

So when you see something complex, remember, it's just a bunch of simple shapes put together.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

Unwrap that thing already!

2012-09-12T04:01:00.002-07:00

This video will show you how to examine the UVs of your Mesh Studio mesh in Blender. Now you don't have to...really. Come back. I didn't mean to scare ya! :)

When I talk with you guys inworld, I get a better sense of where my information fails to impart stuff correctly or gives a false impression. First and foremost, you never have to use a 3D program to use Mesh Studio if you do not want to. You CAN use one, and it gives you a broader tool set to work with your meshes made with Mesh Studio. I will be looking at how to teach you to work with MS when you don't want to learn a 3D program, though. When I show Blender in this blog it will be to illustrate something about mesh in general or specifically for use with Mesh Studio meshes and Second life. :)

You can just look at the video to see them and hopefully get a little understanding of what happens to the uvs, and thus the textures, so you know what you might expect when you attempt to texture a mesh from Mesh Studio that you made with the Object2JoinedMesh script.

I'm using the lectern from a previous post as it was created with this script and is one solid, inseparable mesh. The textures are basically layered on top of each other and the way that works is what is on top of another uv part will texture the same as any above or below. However, the UVs are not necessarily in scale to each other because we're using all manner of prims, sizes, cuts, torture and this affects how they lay out. Being able to examine the UVs gives you better insight into how you can best use textures on the mesh.

Above and beyond that, however, is the ability to rearrange the UVs. While I will show different ways you can do this in coming posts, I'm starting with the fastest/easiest: Smart UV Project (as in projection). Even this method can be finessed more than I show in the video. So bear with me as I try to show you bit by bit so that the written and video tutorials are in manageable chunks than one big wallop to the head.

I do try to show things you need to do what I'm presenting to you in Blender, but we can't take up time to show the basics of getting around in and editing in Blender. However, I have a page on Blender information where I have listed a variety of information and links on where to learn the basics and more in Blender. You can download the latest version of Blender at Blender.org.

The one thing I didn't cover in the video, but ran through quickly, I'll elucidate a bit better here:

Once you assign a texture to your model in Blender, to see the texture on your model, you can go into the Properties Bar (toggle with the letter N) and checkmark the Textured Solid button under Shading.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if you do choose to change the UVs, you need to create a new DAE file and this time from the 3D program you are working within. For Blender, I recommend saving a .blend file of your mesh so you can easily go back and edit more if you need to in future. As I mentioned in the video, you should try to save all associated files: blend, dae, textures, at the same directory level. It's wise practice to create a folder for each project and since Mesh Studio has one for your dae if you open the zip, you could consider using that one for storing all the files you make for your mesh.

To export the .dae, select your mesh object, either in object mode or in edit (with all verts selected) and go to the File menu in Blender to select Export and then Collada(default)(.dae).

When it opens the file browser, you want to navigate to your directory, where you're putting your mesh's files, and then before saving, you want to check the areas I'm indicating in the following image:

You can then upload this new DAE file in the same manner that you upload the ones generated by Mesh Studio.

I hope you are enjoying these posts. Please leave comments or questions.

Happy Meshing!
~ele

It's my mesh, so I'll clean it up!

2012-09-11T01:49:00.000-07:00

TheBlack Box's "Sculpt Studio" is a feat of scripting virtuosity, that uses scripted prims, in Second Life, to simulate 3D program functions. His Mesh Studio can use sculpts from SS, prim linksets or both, to generate mesh all while inworld.

Mesh Studio is 4999 Lindens (that's about $20US, give or take); same price as Sculpt Studio. For most SL users, building with prims is a fundamental skill you develop to make houses, furniture, clothing, hair and more. Many are very good at building with prims. Land in Second Life sustains a limited amount of prims you can rez before it smacks you and says, "Stop!". The amount varies with the amount of land you own, or rent, or are allowed to rez when visiting. Hence the all mighty quest to do more with less to maximize your prim allowance.

Notice where the arrows change scale on these shapes even when they are very simple. The texture being applied can be seen in the lower right hand side.

Sculpts are a kind of mesh hybrid....like mesh but with limitations and LOTS of rules. They are standardized sizes for the sculpt maps, they use up parts of the sculpt mesh to reinforce and withstand LoD changes (level of detail you see as you move away from an object inworld) or collapse rows into, what are called, poles, to make separations within a single sculpt. The sculpt map is an exact square which means the rows of the mesh are continuous (think, first, a plane as the starting point; then a cylinder, a sphere or a torus, the four basic shapes from whence all sculpt shapes start). You are more shaping an object than creating from the ground up. Due to the rows all being the same size on the map, but squished or stretched on the 3D model, the textures are hard to do in just a 2D image editor; painting in 3D will greatly help this. To do more with the sculpt, which counts as one prim against the land, we stretch and cajole the points to make more and more out of one sculpt. This, of course, takes a toll somewhere: LoD, texturability, smoothness of surface.

With the cylinder shaped into a wineglass (this is the outer surface only/more needs to be done to create the inside of the glass), the same "arrows" texture presents how the sculpt reshaping distorts the texture when it is applied as is; things like projection painting in a 3D program or materials are useful to avoiding distortion.

Once you generate the sculpt map, it is 1024 faces. A good mesh modeler can do a lot more with that budget than can be done with a sculpt and it can texture far better.

I was able to make this deer head, in Blender, with 1638 faces; less than two sculpts. It comes into SL with 1 LI. Note the difference in the handling of the UVs (uv editor lower right) for this mesh deerhead; uvs can have many pieces, called islands, and are closer to the shapes of the mesh object.

There is only one acceptable type of sculpt map for sculpt UVs. There is an infinite number of ways you can UV map/unwrap your mesh when it's not a sculpt. You have the full set of tools available in your 3D program to create and build your mesh, and are basically using a small subset of tools when you do sculpts. Finally, a sculpt works best when closer to an evenly spaced sculpt mesh, but by the nature of making a shape, the first thing we do push and pull the sculpt out of this even space to make it look like our desired object.

Still, for Second Life, there are advantages for using sculpts over mesh for some things. So they shouldn't be out of the picture entirely.

So let's say you are interested in doing mesh, but you don't want to learn a 3D program or have tried and just don't get it. Perhaps you have an easier time building up something in prims or need something that is specific in sizing to interact with something else in Second Life. This is where Mesh Studio comes in.

Prim linkset on left is 22 prims (less the one added for the candle particle). Colored surfaces (you can have eight total colors which would include the plywood or blank texture if it can be seen on the prims) create material zones on the mesh which you can access in SL, in edit, by using Select Face and applying your texture to the face as you would on a prim face. The generated mesh was 4 LI with strong LoD.

This linkset was composed of 19 box prims. The generated mesh was only 1 LI with strong LoD. Boxes will produce lower LI in most instances.

You get to build with prims and turn them into mesh which will likely be far fewer LI (land impact which is the number of prims the object counts as against your land) than the original prim linkset. Scripts are provided in the product that generate mesh in two different ways. In addition, those with Sculpt Studio can create sculpted shapes, that may be unachievable with prims, and vastly broaden what you can put together to generate mesh with Mesh Studio. Sculpt Studio owners will find that a Mesh Dropbox has been added in the latest updates for just this purpose.

I will post information, tips, techniques, written and video tutorials to explain and help you get the most out of your Mesh Studio. I'll show more on using sculpts from Sculpt Studio and how to prepare pieces for use only in SL or further work in 3D programs (I use Blender 2.6x.) This includes the creation of static meshes and pieces that could be used in rigging for use on an SL Avatar. Static pieces can be done fully inworld with Mesh Studio and we'll be exploring how to strengthen LoD and create physics meshes so you can go through doors, walk up stairs and stand on floors. Rigging can presently only be done in a 3D program.

Our TAMA site has a general information page on Mesh Studio and how to get set up to be allowed to upload mesh in Second Life. This blog will be able to address topics in more depth to make your experience with Mesh Studio enjoyable, and profitable, if you choose. Feel free to leave comments to ask questions or suggest topics.

Happy Meshing!
~Ele