Wireframe?

I'm just wondering about the uses of wireframe viewing for building... I hadn't really thought of it as practical at all until today, I needed to see through a curtain to place something, and used wireframe to do it... so now I'll remember I can use it for things like that (If its not a complex mesh place usually anyway...) But what other practical uses have people come up with?

not a single one, ever time I've tried to use it my client freezes and crashes =(

Aww that sucks.. I like how it looks in general lol... especially since even the wires have the lighting of the normal world lol...

ive never really used it but i guess it could be handy on figuring out uv maps on screwball prims

being able to see the real triangles would be much quicker than ploping on a grid texure and making an educated guess

It also comes in handy when you accidently place an object inside another object, especially when used in conjunction with "beacons".

I switch in and out of wireframe view during building all the time. Wirefreame is really handy for alignment, as you can see precisely where every vertex is.

Osgeld, as for texturing, I've never really found wireframe to be of much use for that. Unless you want to do a ton of math, it's not a quick task to divvy up a canvas into the number of triangles on a prim, and then translate that into the decimal system used for repeats and offsets. Each prim type has a different number of triangles per face, and none of them divide decimally. Using the tris as texture guides is way more trouble than it's worth, unless you're a computational masochist.

I must say I'm a little puzzled why you refer to using a grid template as "guesswork". Are you perhaps not using a numbered & color-coded grid? If you haven't tried it already, I'd encourage you to use the one I posted a couple of months ago. It's divided clearly into easy-to-recognize tenths and hundredths, to show you precisely where every spot on the canvas falls onto your prim, no guesswork involved whatsoever.

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well DUH i am, i thought you knew me better


i cant really stand those maps, eventho yours is one of the better ones ive seen in a cupple decades, but at some level it is guesswork all being dependant on your machine visual settings, but the same could be said about using the rendered tri's

course the end all be all would for the Labs to just to allow a uv export option, but thats something that would be usefull and something we want so theres a fat chance in hell we would ever see it

Or when you need to extract the "hidden" prim from Lost Furrest Creatures avatars that prevent you from making them smaller LOL.

Haha. My apologies, sir. Yes, I should have paid better to mind to just who I was talking to.



Yeah, I guess it comes down to personal preference, really. Me, I like the grid style patterns (I hesitate to call them "maps", as I find them to be very intuitive, but I can definitely see how one might prefer to look at the actual polygons. I'm wondering if a good solution might be to make maps that have the poly edges drawn right onto them. It wouldn't be possible to make enough of them to cover every possible twist, cut, and taper for every prim type, but it would certainly be doable to cover the basic shapes, and maybe some of the most common modifications. I'll add it to my "when I get around to it" list.


That would be fantastic, yes. I can't quite see how a map could be exported automatically with much intelligence though. Somehow the system would need to be able to detect occluded faces, and remove them from the map accordingly. You undoubtedly know a ton more about the programmatics of this than I do, so correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that seem like it would be a pretty tall order?

Wire frame can be handy in just the kind of situations you mentioned (moving around objects behind other objects you don't want to move). It's also good to get a feel of an object's dimensions and parts in of itself...which is typically what it's used for I think...although SL doesn't allow vertex-level manipulation, wireframe in other 3d applications is used to manipulate unseen vertexes, edges, and faces.

Really not meant to inspire more off-topic discussion but...why? They are used to determine points on an object, correct?

I've used wireframe when I've wanted to know how many vertices appear on different types of prim at different levels of detail. It's very useful for figuring out exactly what sculpty maps are doing.

Heh, now that you ask, I really don't have a good reason. It's just a matter of semantics in my own mind, I think. I'm finding it hard to put into words. Map probably is just as good a word as any. I'm not sure how to explain why I'm a little uncomfortable with it. Sorry if I'm confusing anyone.

lol yer silly =P

tall yes, what we need is someone smart enough to make a virtual world or something

it should work just like any other uv unwrapper, which theres a ton of those already opensource it really should not be that much of a pita to do

I found it really usefull building a huge underground cave, was about it. Actually should say found it crucial, it's dark underground, even at high noon.