Full mesh import - what will that be like?

OK, so I see rumors that LL is accelerating development of full mesh object import. I just realized that I have little idea what that will mean for SL. I mean, I can get as far as it enabling import of tons of simple 3D furniture etc. from existing online piles of the stuff, but what else?

*NOTE: THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT AVATAR MESHES*

Will anyone still build kits, like the sculpty kits? I know these are loathed by many, but I personally have a good time piecing together stuff using sculpty maps I've bought. Will it be possible to buy component "meshes" and make stuff that shows me as creator?

Will no one make sculpties any more, instantly?

Will gorgeously detailed 1-prim houses show up, that rez perfectly at all distances?

*sits back to listen hopefully*

Whatever happens, I'll still be the most gorgeous hunk in SL:, so some things won't change

I'm not exactly sure what they mean by all that talk but I think this might be an example of what's to come:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swh6gY_dEH0

Real rumours? I hope so, but I think LL has been talking about this for a year or so.

As far as impact on SL at large, really what it would do would open up tools in the 3D programs that can't currently be used with SL sculpties. For example, one very basic tool is extrusion-- one selects a few faces/edges, then extrude more faces from that area. Terrific for making things such as limbs, stove pipes and tea pot spouts. I honestly can't remember the last time I made something outside of SL in which I didn't extrude something somewhere. But since it involves adding vertices, it can't be used for SL sculptmap creation.

I don't think you'll see more complex shapes, though, just a greater variety of shapes. No doubt LL will limit polygon count, which is a measure of how much the object will impact the game engine. Sculpts are 1000- ish (I think), so if I had to take a guess, imported meshes would be limited to something around that.

As far as selling them, I see no reason why people wouldn't. And who really cares if you use premade sculptmaps? It's just like using a premade texture, for goodness sakes (actually, come to think of it, it IS a premade texture)

Shape making and selling will become a real business proposition, possibly as an adjunct to skin creation. The best results will no longer be achievable by just tweaking the appearance sliders, but by buying a sculpted shape created in an external application by a skilled 3D modeler.

You won't need a zillion attachments to become a nonhuman av...instead, you'll purchase a mesh shape for that av.

It may be possible to include clothing in the mesh. So for those types of clothes that hang free of the body (skirts, baggy cuffs, thick insulated jackets, etc), these items would be a part of the avatar mesh. Exactly how this will affect the clothing makers will depend on HOW they are made a part of the mesh. It may be that you'll have to buy a whole new avatar to get different clothes...but that wouldn't make much sense, as most people don't want to become a different person, just to put on a cool jacket.

Hopefully, there will be enough detail in the mesh so that feet look like feet, and limbs don't look like a cloth filled bag when they flex.

And also, it's likely that nearly every piece of clothing created to date will become obsolete (at best) or completely unwearable with the new avatars (more likely).

I didn't think they were talking about a new avatar mesh (but gods that would be awesomes!!). I just thought they were allowing mesh uploads for prim creation.

That is correct. Multiple avatar meshes would break a lot more than just clothing. Imagine designing a single clothing or skin texture for fifty or more avatar meshes! It's one thing to design textures for a single specialized model, but quite another to deal with morphs, animations, and attachment points on that same model, not to mention fifty or more.

Given that most people are clueless about poly count, and how it affects things, I can see Mesh import being a bad thing, yet a good thing.

I guess it depends on any limits to the meshes being imported.

Heh! If you think Lag is Bad now.... wait till some noob tries to show off his 20000000 Polygon Hat.

Yes, that was my question.

Still fuzzy on details. It sounds like some things will be even lower prim count than now (for example, sounds like one could build a nice hedge maze using one prim?).

I presume, though, that texturing will present the same problems that texturing a sculptie does? Odd stretching, and complex design if you want the texture to highlight or change at a facet edge?

I doubt very much AvMesh will happen any time before two, maybe three years.
As said, there will be far too many problems with existing content if the AvMesh is changed at all. But there will be a huge biz boom.

As for content, it's been possible technically for ages. There are still many problems though or we'd have it. RealExtend had it, it worked well. In fact it was awesome to make any mesh and import it. I don't know what the problems are.

Maybe LL should make importer scripts that do what THEY want or maybe they just haven't really got the talent. Yeah, I think they just can't work out how to do it.

Oh--for a second I thought they meant a new avatar mesh, and knowing how painful this would be short-term for clothing texturers I kind of wish they'd do this sooner rather than later. But anyway....

Love the sound of proper meshes. No more hassles caused by the inconsistencies between sculpties with their bounding boxes. It will be a step towards SL creators being able to use industry-standard tools for 3D design. And non-humans will leap forward with this, and be able to get much more creative with their shapes. Bring it on

I believe someone has already gone in that direction. But we poopoo'd it a while back.

I poopoo that poopoo.

How will the collision boundaries work with imported meshes? Will they be phantom or use a collision surface that doesn't match the objects appearance, like sculpties do, or will the collision boundaries match the object's appearance?

One of the things I find annoying about other virtual worlds and 3D games is that object's appearance and collision boundaries don't match. They are determined independently of each other by the creator, and the creator may not do a good job of making them match, possibly because of limitations of the physics engine and collision detection system, or because the creator doesn't think it important, or perhaps the creator is just lazy. I find this to be quite immersion breaking. Sculptiesoften do this for me; you see a bunch of rocks, go to jump on them, and they are phantom. The creator didn't add regular prims to compensate for the phantom sculpties. One of the nice things about the good old SL prim system is that collision boundaries match the object's appearance pretty well without any action being needed by the creator.

Sales will move off site and a lot of existing product (sales) will decline rapidly.

If you wanted a prediction.

Why, Melita? I don't get the connection.

I agree, as to the good and bad part. It would be good for me, bad for Second Life.

It's a good thing for me. I can create an object to export to something like an .obj file easy enough in Blender. Creating objects in Blender for export into a sculpt map was just too steep a learning curve and I gave it up. Mesh import would be great for me.

But just like unnecessarily huge textures and inefficient scripts contribute heartily to slowing Second Life to a crawl, a lot of inefficient meshes will choke it to death.

On which part?

It does not make sense for people to pay to rent/buy land in world or ads on XStreet in this case. If they are creating the items off world they can sell them from their own site or another site off world as well.

Sales of items perceived as inferior to the new items will likely decline.

Would that be practical? Wouldn't the buyer have to get both the object mesh(es), and the surface textures, and then put them together themselves? Or, does the imported mesh include surface texturing?

Also, that would only work for one-prim objects, yes? Isn't that all that a single imported mesh could include?

As you can see, I'm rather clueless about 3D design ... sorry!

all i've seen so far is static sculpts..
i don't have much faith in them getting it right..to me it just looked like someone checking out their sculpts they made and showing off shadows in that hulk video..

I'm more inclined to believe it's just another little thing to keep people that may want to be leaving to stick around a bit longer to see what it will be like and it never showing up..

I hear them talking a lot about things but haven't seen the walk yet on a lot of those things..

If SL is to have full mesh support wouldn't it be logical to have mesh building in-world as well as being able to import objects? Sculpties are good as far as they go, but if something better comes along.......

Yeah, I really, really hope they'll create an in-world mesh editor, but I don't think that's the direction they're taking first, anyway. In practice, an in-world editor could never be as feature-rich as dedicated-purpose programs for this, but having some way to do it would make the world much more compelling (and much more distinct from Blue Mars).

I'm pretty sure that meshes will also come with LODs, such that distant and partially-rezzed meshes will have fewer vertices shown--but that's not unlike curve shaped regular prims. Yes, it looks like hell, but it improves FPS and gets *something* on the screen while all the textures compete for space in the pipe.

Surface textures remain a problem for meshes, as with sculpties. Might be a little easier to be precise with meshes, but it poses a real problem for an in-world mesh editor (please, god, let us have Materials soon!), remains a limitation for scripts (assuming just one "face" of a mesh, as with sculpties, so retexturing any part means a whole new texture asset), and forces the fixed-resolution surface texture to be smeared across the entire surface (hence surface textures have limited detail--forcing the shapes themselves to have limited detail if the textures are going to look sharp).

If in-world mesh build/edit isn't possible, maybe LL could supply an offline builder, perhaps contained within the viewer, accessible through the login screen, which would work the same way as in-world building, but obviously with more functions.

ive delt with meshes in couple other places. if LL does it right they will use a standard for importing. There is a popular sony standard, which i wont name just incase i am guessing right. Most meshy importers combine the surface tex and geometry (even scripts in some cases)in one neat file, as well as creating the needed levels of LOD. this whole inclusive file is then ported into your game somehow.
Be great if LL follows this standard. But i expect something politicaly proprietory mixed in there to halt mass uploads of preexisting mesh junk.

I somewhat doubt that LL will develop an inworld mesh editor, as they didn't do that with sculpties. Besides, there's a fair number of free 3D programs out there that can create meshes. They range from easy (Rokuro has .obj support, iirc), to moderately powerful/requires some study (such as Wings3D) to Blender.

Textures are generally created offline, I don't see meshes (if they show up) being any different.

I'd predict limited polygon size with no animation support.

And whilst we're wishing, it would be nice if we could create our own custom bumpmaps (aside from fiddling with brightness/darkness which is a tad clunky). Normal maps would be even better, of course, but the bumpmap capability has been there for some time.