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Cube Republic

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Posts posted by Cube Republic

  1. I'm really excited with this release. I make a lot of meshes in zbrush and bake normal maps onto low poly for in-world. I've often found that data from the normals is lost in second life. They seem to have a greater fidelity now. Both images are taken with midday light settings. There still seems to be a problem with gamma though, the vanilla plywood texture blows out under the standard midday setting. 



  2. 3 hours ago, Fushichou Mfume said:

    And yeah, about NOT optimizing for mesh... WTF? Forcing us to choose between looking like Ruth just so we can socialize is NOT a choice. People want to mesh. They want to look good. So figure out how to constrain and guide the mesh makers so that you can effectively optimize for mesh. Like I said above, the only thing SL still really offers me is photography and machinima. You're killing the club/music/social scenes by stubbornly refusing to optimize for mesh

    This is out of touch with the reality of the engineering behind our beloved ancient game. 

    It's up to the creators to optimize the mesh avatars and clothing for the second life system. A single avatar can contain 100,s of 1000s of triangles when you account for the mesh bodies, head, feet, hands, clothes, hair, eyes, jewelry, etc. You're wanting the system to be modified to cope with streaming and you rendering more data than an average block-buster video game. Really it's a miracle any of it works at all given that a lot of content looks like it came straight from Zbrush or with subdivision applied. Part of the problem lies with there being no incentive for creators to optimize their meshes for the grid. Why spend time baking a normal map or making LOD when the land impact is going to be identical or less in some  cases. Plus there isn't anyway of accounting for object count on avatars like there is for land with the 'land impact' settings. Perhaps if avatars were given a kind of land impact setting that they couldn't go above creators  may take some time to look into optimizing their items more and using materials to display creases rather than modelling every one. 

    • Thanks 4

  3. 16 hours ago, Macrocosm Draegonne said:

    I adore your plants and things!  It was one of the first things I found when coming back to SL after being away nearly 5 years.  I had never seen plants so excellently done in SL, but Mesh wasnt much of a thing yet when I left, it was only a few clothing items back then.  You do a fantastic job on LOD and everything, definitely some of my favorite SL objects of all time.  I think I bought half the store my first visit lmao!

    Thanks very much for the compliment.

    • Like 1

  4. 6 hours ago, animats said:

    More impostor testing from my low-LOD generator, Impostor Maker. Not finished yet, but it's free and on Github. Right now I'd suggest this for developers only.. Try it if you like and file issues on Github.


    Low-LOD test. On left, over 800,000 triangles. On right, 34 triangles. This is a reasonable low or lowest LOD model.




    This would be good for lower LODs where folk can't really make out much detail. 2nd LOD is usually easy because it's just dissolving loops which is easy if a neat flow has been kept. 

    • Like 1

  5. On 8/30/2018 at 3:34 PM, Klytyna said:

    Artist - Somebody who creates Art...

    DJ - "Disc Jockey", the person who changes the record at the end of the song... Also accepts "requests" for what record to play next from members of the audience... Does NOT create Art...


    We don't call somebody an "Artist" because they hammered a nail into a wall to hang a painting from...

     Maybe this was the case in 1975, but now DJing can be more like music production. Also it is an art form, keeping people dancing, producing beats on the fly. When you play a musical instrument, you're taking some notation and playing someone elses music, is this hammering a nail into the wall? 

    • Like 1

  6. I use a combination of the following maps in photoshop to compile my materials. 

    • Base colour
    • Ambient occlusion set to multiply - usually 80-100%
    • Concavity also set to multiply - around 40%
    • Convexity set to screen - around 20% - this requires a light touch

    This is  flattened (to avoid seams) exported out and sometimes I then take it to bitmap to material and have a tinker in there  with the roughness controls. I then export the roughness map and use that to modulate the gloss via the normal maps alpha channel. 

    I never bake on lights, Why some folk think this looks good is beyond me. Take any of those objects into a scene where the light isn't the same, and they just look odd and out of place and make the avatar appear full bright. It's so 2012, plus it's a lag fest as often the smallest build contain multiple baked 1024 textures. 


    Edit: I bake most of my maps from high poly mesh made in zbrush or blender

    Edit 2: I use knald for baking, this is well worth the 100 bucks and never lets me down, but there's also 'handplane' which is free

    • Like 1

  7. I saw a 16k tri flower the other day which was no bigger than .125 meters tall. Also grass completely made from tri-polys, which was weird because from just a meter the tips went into sub-pixel broken black lines that looked terrible. Of course these fine works of mesh came with instructions on how to turn your graphics up to 8 in the debug menu. The attitude of the seller, given that they consider themselves a professional is that linden lab is somehow silly for wanting LOD and optimized mesh. Can you imagine a large installation of this kind of mesh, a field of poly grass would grind most machines into the ground. 

    • Sad 3

  8. Take a look at some of my plants in-world. I create a bounding box with triangles crushed down to single lines, then keep the models inside these frames so the meshes don't go funky as they LOD because I often use a billboard for this. 

    • Like 2

  9. On 10/25/2018 at 2:55 AM, animats said:

    As some of you know, I've been working on low-LOD impostor models. Here's another step in that direction.






    I hope you don't think I'm being an enormous pain in the ass saying this, but your model would benefit from some supporting loops at the junctions of the cross beams, etc. If using blender, Just select the loop and hit ctrl B to bevel, then adjust from the T panel. The shading will be a lot more defined this way. 

    • Thanks 1
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