Full mesh import - what will that be like?

I'd like to see support for standardized meshes such as .obj and whatnot, as long as LL implemements a smart poly/vertice limit along with it to prevent high-poly griefers from abusing it.


I tend to think it would be more beneficial for LL to revamp their existing build stuff to include functions like intersect, deintersect, and invert. That would allow current building techniques to still be used to make high detail, single prim meshes from multiple prims inworld, and also preserve texture info for each face. You could also create a series of objects that were one invisibly-linked prim, like you can do now with a sculpty but a zillion times easier and more render cost effective as well. I'm quite sure it would be a *bigger* asset and boom for building than 3rd party mesh import would be. Nobody would have to learn another piece of software, and anyone smart enough to link a few box prims together could make top quality stuff. Not a pipe dream either.. these relatively simple-to-include functions have been part of other game-based build tools for nearly 20 years now.

Imagine how nice it would be to take that sweet 60+ prim piece of furniture you made, surround it with a box prim, set the box to a zone, and hit deintersect on it. Now you have a box with a hollow in the middle of it that's the shape of your furniture and fully textured on the inside. You can hit invert and it'll turn itself inside out to make a perfect one prim copy of that furniture piece, or use that block mold and intersect it with another box prim to make the other prim a perfect copy. I personally have been doing these things in the Unreal editor for over 10 years. It's very much time that LL pull it head out of the sand.

I like this proposition a lot. I think I like it better than sculpts. I suppose they'd have to rethink how real estate revolves around prim counts. Maybe they could start counting textures instead of prims?

Well, as long as they put a reasonable upper limit on the number of subdivisions any one prim could have, they wouldn't have to rework the prim counts any more than they did with sculpties. Yes, texture usage per prim could get out of hand since intersect/deintersect uses true "texture per face" info, which LL does allow on some prims like certain types of cut prims, but not on others like spheres. That would have to be limited per prim as well, but I don't see it as a huge drag on the servers unless totally abused. Those textures would still be displayed if the item was made out of individual prims anyway.

All that the functions of intersect/deintersect do is subdivide the overlapping faces of one prim to match the vertice and edge count of the other prims overlapped part. It assigns either a 3 point triangle or 4 point quad to each new face depending on the shape it's trying to mimic. It then copies the texture, scale, and alignment info of each face copied and applies it to the matching new face. Lastly, it moves those newly created faces to the same position as the ones it copied from. It's the same exact process as when you shift->click drag to copy a prim right now in SL, it's just modified to handle making subdivision changes to *part* of a prim instead of the whole thing. And that kind of code may also already be a part of SL with the current hollow and dimple functions, as those too make new edge and face changes to part of a prim. If so then it shouldn't be a massive undertaking at all to make it happen. Ever wanted to dimple a hole in a square prim but off center? cross-axis? corner to corner? more than one? This method is how but I suspect, like most things in SL, it would never be considered by LL because they want to charge for everything they can.. and 3rd party mesh uploads they can easily charge for.

As someone who enjoys wearing a lot of non-human avatars, I am very excited about this.

I weewee on your poopoo.