Mesh is still making a lot of noise in Second Life circles, but Mesh won’t be for everyone and there are times when the good old prim, the lovely wonderful prim is far more useful for creators and consumers and here I’ll give an example, a door. I decided I’d make a Mesh door, now doors in Second Life generally require some path cutting so that they open nicely, objects rotate on their centre so a door has to be half invisible to work nicely.
Bearing this in mind I created the door in Blender, I decided to do a loop cut so I could have one half alpha textured and the other half with my door texture, so it would be able to perform the spinning on its centre door trick, this didn’t work well but one point regarding all this is texturing, I created my UV Map and ended up with this:
Now this is probably overly complicated because I don’t know what I’m doing but basically those boxed areas represent the sides and edges of my door, that’s where you place your textures for the front, back, top, bottom and side faces and of course there will be some rotation of textures involved. The UV Map isn’t textured in Blender, you’d take it to something like GIMP or Adobe Photoshop for that but already you should be able to see that this is a bit more complicated than slapping a texture on the face of a prim.
Now some of you may be wondering why I didn’t just upload the Mesh door and texture it inworld, this is where problems may arise inworld, Second Life doesn’t recognise Mesh faces the way Blender does or indeed the way Second Life does with prims, you can’t select one side of a completed Mesh and texture just one side, that’s what UV Maps are for, if you try that inworld it will texture the lot. Another issue is that even if you’ve got the UV Map, if you change the texture settings to planar and start messing around like that, you may very well mess things up.
Now I will persevere with doors and basic builds because that’s part of the learning process and it doesn’t get much easier than creating a door in Blender but once I have got my head around some funadamentals, I would imagine I will stick with prims for objects such as doors because the inworld system is easier to use for such objects.
The beauty of Mesh of course lies in its ability to make items that the inworld system would badly struggle to make, there are weird and wonderful shapes that you can make with Mesh that will enhance Second Life, but there is absolutely no need to use Mesh for everything, well if we’re getting technical Mesh is used for everything but I’m talking about Mesh created outside of Second Life.
The issues I describe above are, as I said earlier, a result of me being a noob at modelling in 3D, more experienced people would probably wonder what the hell I’m playing at but the texturing inworld issues regarding face selection are a very real issue as pointed out on the official wiki, this is something for creators to consider when they make their items open to modification by consumers.