Mesh – Page 4 – Ciaran Laval

September 13, 2011September 13, 2011

ORC Slays ARC

Nalates Urriah has an extremely interesting update from the Mesh user group meeting in which changes to prim equivalence on mesh and changes to Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) are discussed. There’s also information about a funky new build panel with confusing looking information in it as part of the details of Object Rendering Cost, or ORC …. I’m not making this up!

There’s a picture on Nalates blog of the new build panel, which you can view here. I’m rather amused to see there’s a “What is all this?” link on that image because a hell of a lot of people are going to be wondering what the bloody hell it all is!

Basically this is all about trying to make things easier to understand, prim equivalence is confusing, Gwynneth Llewellyn recently blogged about how confusing it is and how unfair it seems, you can read that here. The comments are worth reading on that blog post too as people try and get their heads around everything.

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August 26, 2011August 26, 2011

The Trouble With Mesh – Texturing

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:

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August 25, 2011August 25, 2011

Blender Noob To Pro Has Handy Tips

What on earth is this shining project on the Jira? Alexa moved my Jira about the region setting that allows or disallows Mesh on a sim not working to the shining project …. a rather disturbing looking project complete with an icon of someone doing a “Here’s Johnny” impression!

Anyway Mesh is the talk of the Second Life related forum and blog crowd at the moment and I’ve been having a very slow dabble with Blender, seriously, can we have bigger days to go with these bigger prims. The tool of choice I’ve decided to use for Mesh is Blender, this is largely because as a hobbyist Blender gives me the most options, I’d love to have Autodesk Maya but unless Autodesk sponsor me that ain’t happening, there’s no way I’m buying such an expensive tool with my artistically challenged hands at the mouse and keyboard, maybe one day if I find I can utilise 3D builds nicely I will. However for those with large pockets and good skills, Maya is highly regarded but it’s not really suitable for noobs.

Anyway I’ve been looking at a few video tutorials on Blender, they are handy but I like to read instructions at times rather than pausing videos and I’ve gone back to a handy resource I looked at a while back when I was considering trying my hand at sculpties.

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August 20, 2011August 20, 2011

New Region Setting To Allow Or Disable Mesh Creation

Happy days are here again, Aston Villa are top of the league for at least few more hours until the Sunday games are over, order is restored with the greatest team the world has ever seen at the top of English football, as they should be! I enjoyed my afternoon at Villa Park today and shall shortly be off to watch match of the day to relive it. However this has nothing to do with Second Life, Mesh however does have something to do with Second Life so let’s talk about that and the new region setting to allow Mesh on your sim or not.

If you are using a Mesh enabled viewer, such as Second Life beta 3.01, and if you’re on a sim that is on a channel that supports Mesh, and if you’re an estate owner (a lot of ands there) then you can get to a screen like this:

The only problem is, it doesn’t work!

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August 5, 2011August 5, 2011

Useful Blender Tutorials

Mesh is on the grid, although not officially released, so getting ready for Mesh is an important step, although as I’ve said before the prim is far from dead and Mesh will have problems, especially early doors, with viewer compatibility. I’ve been looking at Mesh and settled on Blender as my tool of choice, which you can read more about here. I’ve chosen Blender because Autodesk Maya, which is a fantastic 3D Modelling tool, is expensive for a noob to 3D modelling like me, it is of course aimed at professionals, which I’m not. Another popular tool is Google Sketchup, but from what I can see the free version is for personal use only, so Blender is the tool that gives me the most options at the best price, in this case nothing but donations should be forthcoming.

First things first, anyone who tells you 3D modelling is easy is talking cack, trust me on this, it’s not easy, inworld building with prims is definitely easier to learn, however Blender is a powerful piece of software from what I can tell, now you may be like me and rush head first in and then bang your head on the wall and then follow a process like this:

Excitedly download the program.
Open it up and stare at a cube.
Look at the menus and think “WTF”.
Read some tutorials and think “WTF”
UV Mapping? “WTF”

However fear not, because I have fearlessly sought out some half decent tutorials which have allowed me to upload a mesh cube with a texture on it … it’s a start! I will share some of the useful tutorials with you.

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