AV Mesh

this is kind of a follow on from a reply on another thread, didn't want to hijack it with another question ... grins

I am wondering if there is a tutorial or something on how to clean up the linden av meshes in, well for me 3ds.

I hold my hand up to not been anywhere near the best there, have finished the tutorials and can find my way around kinda, still looking at help a lot ... grins... so prefereably a simple explanation with small words and big pictures ... grins

I've only just started experimenting with baking clothes in 3ds and I always sem to get odd shading at the edges. have used turbo smooth to get rid of most of the hard edges, but doesn't seem to do it all, sp please, help someone???? ... looks hoeful

One of the problems with the provided OBJ is that it is broken up into pieces. The geometry itself isn't exactly continuous. Smoothing groups need continuous geometry to be... smooth. You can't have smooth across broken pieces.

To fix all that, you will have to weld the vertices. Go into Sub-Mode Vert, area select some verts that should be welded together, and click the Weld button. The verts become one vert, faces are joined, and smoothing groups work again.

One short-cut to doing this is to select a tons of vertices, and click the Weld dialog button. It's the one next to Weld with a little window icon. A little dialog pops up that tells you how many vertices are selected and how many verts you will have after the Weld operation. There is also a Threshhold spinner. If the Threshhold spinner is too high, you will weld verts that shouldn't be welded. It can be fast, but it can be tricky - you will have to keep a close eye on the verts that you are welding or else they will collapse.

I noticed another shading problem with the provided OBJ. There a few places were the edges need to be turned. Near the front/side of the rib cage, there is a funky shading error and it's caused by edges that need to be turned. The tris are getting squished and the normals are getting funky. I think there is a spot on the back as well.

And, if I remember correctly, some of the neck needs to be flipped. Well, the normals need to be flipped. The element there is 'inside-out'. Sub-Mode Element, select it, and click on Flip. If you need to do this, do this before welding any verts.

thank you thank you thank you .. grins.... I haven't used welding before, so would never of occurred to me, and the areas you mentioned are the ones I'm getting weird shading from. Have just been using turbo smooth and attaching all the parts for top and bottom uv's, but it sounds like this welding will work a lot better.

the one thing that does really surprise me is that no one has released a good mesh for SL like chosen and robin have for the UV maps

The mesh and the UV map are the same. I created the UV template from those same downloadable meshes (we "ch" people are easy to get confused).

A couple more tips on prepping the models in max. When you import the obj files, set the vertex scale on the importer to a high enough value so that the imported model doesn't end up tiny compared to the viewport contruction grid. I don't remember what value I used, but you'll probably need to do it a few times until you find a good value. Start with 150% and work your way up from there. You want the resulting mesh to be large enough that using a weld threshold value of .001 will only end up welding the duplicate vertexes along the seam breaks and not accidentally weld together verts that just happen to be close together in areas of fine detail, like around the eyes and fingers.

You'll also need to fix the smoothing groups or else you'll still end up with visible seams even though you've welded the verts along them. Select all the polygons of the model and assign them to the same smoothing group. That will give you smooth shading gradients across all polygons in the model.