Building Idea: VERTEX EDITING

Hi
i am a novice builder within sl, but i do not only build there. i am commonly reffered to or known as a mapper within the unreal tournament game community.

this simply means in your terms i am a builder. i not only build the objects but the world that is being played in. though not as vast in scale as sl but non the less a world,map, battle arena.

the way a person builds within sl is almost the same as unreal tournament or ut.
only the interface is harder or easier depending on which side of the building track you grew up on.

as i struggle to learn all the possible editing things i may do within sl to the prims one idea still remains. VERTEX EDITING....

i have talked with some instructors about this idea. some believe this to be a good idea and be very usefull within sl.

to tell you what vertex editing is: vertex editing simply means that within the sl world there would be no more PRIM TORTURE for odd shapes. will explain it this way...

if you had a square and and wanted an odd shape in sl... you would tweek size, twist ,cutt bend, hammer, chisel, pull hair, try warping it, turn it inside out, hammer, pull hair and maybe even give up before you get the right shape. im not talking about a spiral im thinking a gas tank for a motorcycle.

ok in ut vertex editing does this.
i have the same square as in sl i want an odd shape. say maybe i want the sqaures three corners to stay the same but i want one corner to meet itself. ok think how this may be possible within sl.. damn near not unless your a rocket scientist... in ut vertex editing you grab A CORNER VERTEX. VERTEX= a given point on an object a square has 4 magor vertexes ...the corners.
ok so i simply grab a corner and pull to the bottm corner vertex and done. i have what i want. it didnt take a half hour tweeking and prim torture it took maybe 2 sec's! i not only could make it meet itself i could say pull it straight out or up or diaginal way.

ok one last example. i want to make a simple cup. in sl you would make a circular prim hollow it make another prim for the bottom and so forth.. this is how a beg to int builder might do it so now you have at least two prims being used. given the state that each land owner can only have so many prims why not... have a sphere lets say which might have 6 to 8 vertex points. drag a few down inside itself and hey that even creats a curved edge to drink from and put a handle on done cup. two prims not three.

for more information on vertex editing please look up 3dbuzz.com and head to the video tutorials. many there to choose from. from ut to maya and photoshop and more.

i understand the builder interface is a bit lacking and not as many features as say the ut one where its a program designed for building but... common given the nature of the beast and the things you can do vertex editing is possible.

thank you for reading and support all the building teachers within sl
ty anna adamant for all your help and patience with me.
PEACE!

Havok 1 would cry if we had this.

I have previous experience making maps in Hammer (half-life) And the functions for building and texturing in SL would be really great if they were like unreal editor or hammer.

The problem is that primitives are not real polygon objects. They are more like nurbs models that can be morphed partially. They do this because it is very small in code size and can be uploaded to the clients at decent speed. Im not sure how much bigger the code size would be for map editor objects but remember that maps have to be compiled before use and SL objects do not.

For vertex editing, you might have to wait a few years more, or maybe never to be implemented. We also have to either adapt everything everyone has ever built, or chuck all the data away for a new SL.

In the meantime, its best to just get used to building with prims. Here is a definition of a prim. They are closer to parametric objects than NURBS.

http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=Prim

Yes but at some point, a poly mesh would be smaller in download size and more effective than 500-1000 prims. A video card can handle a 1000 poly mesh with one texture UV map much easier than 500-1000 prims textured and overlapping each other. Prims are ok for houses but for avatars meshes are much more usefull.

Just some quick maths:

1000 polygons in a contiguous mesh... lets say that it has roughly 1000 vertices

Each Vertex has 6 values associated with it (Spacial Co-ords, Texture Co-ords) and assuming're keeping it similarly size-restricted to prims, we could get away with fixed point math, meaning 16 bits per value. That's 96 bits for one vertex or 96000 bits for the whole mesh.

Now, I'm gonna go ahead and make a guess that each prim has about 45 values associated with it, and that these values are also fixed point (because floating point math uses twice as much data)

(I'll be happy to revise my calcuations if someone can provide the correct values above).

So, going with the formula (VertexData * 2 bytes * TotalVertices) / (PrimData * 2 Bytes) or (6*16*1000)/(45*16) we get 133.33, meaning that in the same bandwidth used for one 1000tri mesh we can stream 133 full prims.

So long as the mesh doesn't animate in any way.