LOD on wings

Any good advice on LOD(Level of Detail) with wings? I would really love to know how SL reduces the veritices so i could make a material that illustrates. I hate a nicely shaped prim that goes ugly when you zoom out a bit.

Thanks

The short, but not quite precise, answer is that at each LOD level, every other row and column get removed, until you get to LOD 0, where things change and you get a sample of 6x6 instead of 4x4. This isn't quite precise because it omits the details about how stitching between opposite sides is handled. If the sculpty type doesn't stitch together opposite edges, then the last row/column is retained, even though the first sentence says it should be dropped.

There is a more detailed, if not totally clear, description in the the Wiki (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_Technical_Explanation)

I read the wiki, mmmh anyway with WIngs3d there is soem trick to avoid LOD problem on complex scult?

ty
Zerlinda

I guess it depends on what you mean by complex, but chances are, your best bet is to use multiple sculpties. If you want more specific suggestions, you can post screenshots.

Hi and ty for your answer
well for me complex is a single sculpt made form a 32x31 sphere tweaked a lot with magnet.. for exaple an hat (i'm a novice)
i see that when i zoom out some part change the geometry... so i try to export sculpt map in 64x64 instead of 128x128 bmp. and work a little better.

what is the option "allow rescaling" in the sculpt export menu?

ty
Zer

Zerlinda,

There is no way to "avoid" LOD problems. What you need to do is to learn how to "manage" them. That is, you need to build with the realization that as the SL camera gets farther away from an object, the object is going to be approximated by dropping many of the vertices. You need to learn to think about that as you model, so that the vertices that never get dropped form a crude approximation of your shape, the vertices that get dropped only at the last stage form a better approximation, and so on.

There are differernt ways a modeling application can help in this process, and Wings does not shine in this respect. What would really help the Wings builder is if someone would create textures that, when applied to the model in Wings, would color-code the vertices according to how important they are for LOD management. There would need to be a total of 6 variations to cover all the mlost common cases -- 3 for the differernt topologies times 2 for for modeling ar 32x32 (vertices) vs 64x64 (vertices).

I should mention that for Blender, which is also free software, Domino Marama has created scripts that allow you to interactively change the LOD as you model. The drawback with Blender is that for most people, it takes a lot longer to get comfortable with.

As to the "Allow rescaling" export option, that is important for objects whose size differs greatly in different dimensions, such as a sword.

I still had updating my sculptie grid texture on my todo list when I read this. So I've just added a new script to the blender rc scripts that creates an appropriate texture on demand. Just go to the uv image editor in Blender, and select "Image - Bake Sculptie LOD" to turn the current image into the grid.

The red and green channels are baked as a sculptie plane, and the blue channel is the vertex priority. For each LOD that a pixel is used on, the blue is increased by 0.25, so the most used pixels end up with a blue of 1.0

It uses the image size as the base, so just create the size of sculpt map image you want before doing the Bake Sculptie LOD.

http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts_git.html


16 x 32 example

ty so much for your answer... blender is for me very difficult to learn the interface

i've made some test on wings and without "allow recentering" feature and with 64x64 my sculpted hat not loose his structure

don't know why but works better without recentering :|

xoxo
Zer

That seems odd. The only reason I know of that you would want to un-check recentering is if you purposely wanted your sculpty to be off-center from its bounding box. You initially asked about the "allow rescaling" option. You're not confusing those two, are you? If not, you may have found a bug, in which case I would be grateful if you would post (or give me in-world, if you would rather) the result with and without recentering.

Hi Omei,

lol i'm not in a confusional states
Anyway yes if i disable the recentering the LOD effect is very low.
If i enable it after soem meters away the sculpt LOD is very visible.

How i can send you a sample?

Can u contact me in World?

xoxo
Zer

@ Omei

I've sent you 2 example of the same sculpt with and without recentering feature.

Ty
Zer

Zer, I got them and replied with an IM in-world. Did you not get that?

yes i got it ty so much... well probably as u wrote the non centered version give less lod of the size reason .. well i will keep that trick

Zer