Please vote for Mesh imports for Second Life® (If you feel like making a second vote, getting the licensing issues with the SL Viewer fixed would be another good target).
While RealXtend have managed this feat a good year ago, it would be nice to get this feature into the mainline standard viewer. Now sure, going by their track record Linden are probably going to manage to cock it up and implement it badly (Can you say “Nonstandard Custom Format” or “Stupid limitations”?), but a feature like that is going to be incredibly useful even in a broken state (Look what’s been achieved with sculpties for example).
It also has some real benefits for content creators - first the largest is it permits real world artists with real world skills to use those skills effectively. Second big reason is it adds the capability to use well developed editing suites with Second Life seamlessly - this is going to dramatically ‘raise the bar’ on content quality and potentially bring SL into line with games only two years old (from the 5-6 it is now).
The first argument I’m going to hear against this no doubt is “By allowing professionals to create content for Second Life effectively, the inworld tools are going to be worthless” - which is basically saying “Let’s keep the tools retarded.” - the fact is the SL building tools are not the best, and by adding complementary support for out world editors, it means that content can be designed both more efficiently and with better visual quality. If the implementation is done similar to the RealXtend implementation, it will end up being like sculpties - you can manipulate them in world, but the core shapes are developed out world.
Really the biggest argument above is a simple case of protectionism - and like real world protectionism, the people hurt the most are going to be the people who don’t adapt and see their countries (platforms) lose economic growth to competitors. Sculpties didn’t kill builders, and neither will meshes, but yes you will probably need to learn a new skill or two.
The next one will be “This will cause additional lag” - the irony here is that it actually will do the inverse. Mesh objects are significantly more efficient computing-wise than primitives. Not only can you cluster texture space significantly more efficiently using UV maps, but you can additionally render less triangles with more detail. In terms of network downloads - it’s not going to be a case of one primitive vs one mesh, you are comparing lots of primitives vs one mesh, and like textures - you can cache them effectively.
As an ammendum to that - people often bring out the idea of million polygon meshes. The answer here is that meshes can be artificially limited on upload (lock em to a certain filesize or number of polygons) - the ultimate irony here is however that primitives are no better - the average second life furry avatar fully rendered is around ~100,000 triangles, or approx 2x that of the average complete Doom 3 scene.
So this means that the talk about RealXtend creating modules to work with Opensim has been wiped and instead it’s going to Linden and beg for mesh import?
As for mesh import for SL, somebody already wrote the code for that in the past to integrate it into the viewer and got it working with a 95% success ratio. Linden started to nag about legal aspects to use this code and the guy who wrote the code backed out.
I think you can still download it the person who wrote it is named Dzonatas Sol
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=191214&package_id=235614
Croquet allows direct object import by using .ASE files, many other applications support it as well. You understand the importance of this, still little to no progress has been made so far on such an important subject. Something which could seriously increase business for professional content creators, game developers and virtual objects as a market which today mainly consists out of commission work or sold on sites like renderosity. But also something which could really have a large impact for Opensim and how the masses are looking at it as a platform. It’s a shame that RealXtend hasn’t been productive in this area and from your post I have to conclude they don’t have intentions in that direction.
What is needed is a mesh import module and a hacked viewer to get the meshes on the server and of course a talk with Avi Bar Zeev so that one doesn’t have to admire mesh objects at 2 FPS
http://www.realityprime.com/articles/how-sl-primitives-really-work
As for Linden, they have been wanting to do this for a very long time but haven’t managed, these days they want to attach the OBJ’s to sculpties trying to get meshes accepted that way but I think there will be a lot more needed than a sculpted prim hack.
Xenki in a week is nice, how about meshes by this friday?
Virtual
31 Aug 08 at 10:59 pm
Huh?
No, the Rex work is continuing (we’re actually doing the work there at DeepThink), however official support is always a good idea since it raises the bar on what everyone can support.
I’ve spoken with Avi (actually had a chat with him yesterday in person), but what Linden is doing is important on it’s own, even if it takes 6-9 months to get into place.
Adam Frisby
4 Sep 08 at 7:09 pm
That’s good to hear because of your post I concluded the efforts with RealXtend on this subject didn’t work out so because of that your call to vote for this on Jira.
Linden would like to have this feature but seems to have difficulties with it. I’m convinced this is something complex after reading Avi Bar Zeev’s post on prims. I hope to see progress for this in the next few months.
Thank you for clarifying
Virtual
5 Sep 08 at 3:27 am
Getting meshes into Second Life will not detract from RX work with OpenSim it will only open up virtual worlds in general more to enterprise applications more by allowing for use of existing 3D assets.
I am using http://www.digitalspaces.net now for product demonstration but it has no social tools. If we could use OpenSim and Second Life for displaying meshes both platforms would benefit overnight.
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