Good suggestions/questions from an active realxtend builder(s)
Jani Pirkola
I think especially the building guidelines doc could be really needed by world builders.
Best regards,
Jani
Building side, some things i would like to see/know
-Rex Mesh Tool: able to load and set the centers to many meshes at one time, just like bulk upload option we have in rex. Select all the mesh you need, choose the centers points to set, click and it saves the changes for all. (if i need the x y z axis centers as minimum, minimum, minimum for 50 or more objects..and this happened already.. i would like to make it with few clicks and not opening selecting the 3 centers and save-closing the program 50 times!!)
-Boxes/Meshes: We have now "z" key in edit mode making us able to select the mesh clicking on it and not on the box.. can this be setted as default mode for everything? -outside edit mode, left and right click, touch, sit, camera zoom and camera movements, selection square in edit mode etc? And maybe set Z key to switch to "box mode"
-Metal and Glass material (not much to say here, I think they are the most important material to have.. SL had only the metal/shiny material.
-Undo!! That would be a great step!
-Rex tab for objects. IE like windows/second life inventory approach, with folders etc for mesh collision mesh and materials, preview for the materials can be very useful too. The drop down menus we have now are pretty boring.
-Rex tab 2: When a mesh is selected in rex tab, rex select automatically the same mesh for collision.
Function to align the boxes/prims on a certain axis
Building standards: I have no idea of the load time for the different kind of meshes. How much additional materials cost in terms of bandwith, how much size of texture matters, how much polygon count matters.
Is better to have a mesh with many material that reuse textures already in the sim or to have a mesh with less materials but having its own texture to load. What is the optimal poly count for a mesh?
Is better to use one 1024x1024 texture or 2/3 512x512? Is better to have two meshes with 150 poly each one or one with 300? etc etc.
What is the maximum poly counts suggested for a mesh? If i reuse the same mesh many times, how does that weight on the bandwith/graphic engine?
I have absolutely no idea about all this issues and I dont know where to find answers. Of course I know that the less textures, polygons objects count I use the better is.. but is not a really a useful information :)
Peter_Quirk
I've considered writing a test harness to understand some of the mesh
issues, but it didn't seem like a high priority. These questions may
provoke me to look into it. For some of my signs, I write multiple
lines of text on a texture and use the offset and repeats per metre to
control which line appears on the assumption that this is cheaper than
having to download and cache multiple textures. Is this so?
Re making the object the default collision mesh - that could be very
expensive. Wouldn't it be preferable to have a default of "convex
hull" and have the simulator calculate it.
Can we have some cheap pseudo materials for colors? There are plenty
of objects in the Google 3D warehouse which contain dozens of
materials, but they are just solid color swatches. I'd like the
ability to define a color texture on the fly using RGB values or a
color wheel without having to load a small square texture of the right
color.
-- Peter
> Function to align the boxes/prims on a certain axis
>
> Building standards: I have no idea of the load time for the different
> kind of meshes. How much additional materials cost in terms of bandwith, how
> much size of texture matters, how much polygon count matters.
>
> Is better to have a mesh with many material that reuse textures
> already in the sim or to have a mesh with less materials but
> having its own
> texture to load. What is the optimal poly count for a mesh?
>
> Is better to use one 1024x1024 texture or 2/3 512x512? Is better to
> have two meshes with 150 poly each one or one with 300? etc etc.
> What is the maximum poly counts suggested for a mesh? If i reuse the
> same mesh many times, how does that weight on the bandwith/graphic engine?
> I have absolutely no idea about all this issues and I dont know where
> to find answers. Of course I know that the less textures,
> polygons objects
> count I use the better is.. but is not a really a useful information :)
> -
Toni Alatalo
> ability to define a color texture on the fly using RGB values or a
> color wheel without having to load a small square texture of the right
> color.
>
the ogre material system supports this (of course) fully, so should not
be too difficult .. of course there are many other things in the
material system too that would be nice to have, i don't know what the
roadmap / design is with regard to getting there, but am curious to hear.
> -- Peter
>
~Toni
Heikki Törmälä
> Good sugestions and great questions.
>
> I've considered writing a test harness to understand some of the mesh
> issues, but it didn't seem like a high priority. These questions may
> provoke me to look into it. For some of my signs, I write multiple
> lines of text on a texture and use the offset and repeats per metre to
> control which line appears on the assumption that this is cheaper than
> having to download and cache multiple textures. Is this so?
It's usually a good idea to use as few different textures as possible.
Unfortunately questions like "Is better to use one 1024x1024 texture or
2/3 512x512?" and "Is better to have two meshes with 150 poly each one or
one with 300? etc etc." are much more tougher to answer. It really depends
on many things. At the moment it seems the viewer performance is limited
by number of primitives, so tentative answer is to have fewer models with
bigger polycounts. On the other hand downloading big models from the
server takes a while and you get annoying popup.
- Heikki / RealXtend developer