The Degeneration game - Nyrva's shower - a simple case study in physics shapes in Mesh Studio

I often come across frustrated builders who have struggled along the right path but for various reasons not quite got to the destination they had hoped. It often reads like a storybook, as our wannabe mesh warrior stumbles into the local inn, seeking solace and with a plea for help.

Nyrva: Hello, question please. If I am trying to build a "sci-fi shower" for RP, that you have to be able to walk inside of, do I have to make it square and boxy in the mesh and physics in order to avoid the "Degenerate Triangles" problem on import? It seems I'm not allowed to do a cylindrical design.

We meet our hero part way through their quest. They've already confronted the uploader troll, and unable to answer the riddle of the degenerate triangle, have retreated for help.


Back in the village tavern, our quester gets a lot of well-meaning advice. It variously consists or perpetuating myths and old wives tales, or valid advice that helped someone once, but does not really help our hero.

helpful soul#1: cylinders can be a pain ... i have found it "cheaper" to make the sides from a number of "box" type prims  for the physics

 helpful soul #2: your physics can be made up of a number of cube prims arrounged in a circle... sounds a pain ...but it is cheaper LI wise ( and i havent a clue why that is so ). I once made a smoke stack for a steam boat .... mesh funnel ... for some reason .... i forget why i need it physical ...... i was lazy and added a normal ( transparent ) cylinder when i added the prim cylinder to my mesh funnel the LI blew through the roof ....???? ( so i made a mesh physics one)

helpful soul #3: Also zeroing out the low and lowest LOD helps lower the LI because you wouldn't be looking at the shower from across the sim

In this case, all good advice in the right place and time but missing the point. Our embattled builder hacks away for a little longer, gets frustrated and gives up, limping defeated to the marketplace to buy something less fulfilling.

So what was the problem?

The MAV errors reported by the Second Life are often considered as dark arts, a kind of voodoo curse that nobody understands, but mostly they are just annoying badly reported errors. MAV comes from Mesh Asset Validation, so this was failing during the validation phase. OK, but what is a degenerate triangle? In mathematics, a degenerate triangle has zero area. In SL and other games use cases a degenerate triangle is one with a very small area. The degenerate triangle check, in SL, goes a step further and penalises "long thin triangles" which are defined as triangles where any one side is more than 10 times the length of any other side.

So the problem is that we have some tiny, probably stretched triangles. This is one of the reasons why I keep repeating over and over that a physics shape must be as simple as possible. If you have a triangle that fails the degenerate check you have definitely not optimised that model.

In the case of our intrepid mesher, they'd not removed all the hidden surfaces and thin edges. This is a common error, people think "this is a physics mesh, not a visible mesh so I don't need to hide the geometry, but it brings us back to rule #1 of physics shapes, every triangle that does not need to be there is a triangle too many.

Right then, how do I find these things?

Once you know what the cause is, it is often quite obvious where the problem lies; however, what many people do not realise is that the much-maligned uploader tries to help you. When it finds a degenerate triangle it will highlight it in the preview window.

Happily ever after?

Does this story have a happy ending? We left our hapless builder being bombarded with advice over a beer in the local tavern, but how did it end?

Having been asleep when this tale started, I caught up with Nyrva when I woke to see how they'd got on. 

Me: Hi, did you get past your problem earlier?

Nyrva: no, never did. just wound up buying something off the MP for 55L$. I couldn't make anything below 5LI. For me, it's just another item on the "What MS can't be used for" list. lol!"

Never one to pass up a challenge I asked Nyrva to send me the item. I was able to get the shower to be 1LI with a full physics shape relatively easily. So what magic did I use? Nothing really just careful attention to that law of physics models, delete every triangle that is not absolutely necessary,

The rest of this blog is a brief step by step guide through the process.

The visible mesh is always a good starting point.

As we can see the structure is very simple, with no obvious reasons why we cannot get a very low LI. The only complexity is that it is cylindrical, in fact, the cubicle is just 3 cylinders, one of which is hollow and 1/4 cut. 

Cylinders are made up of a series of flat edges, a cylinder in SL is by default 24-sided, and in Mesh studio you can step down to as low as 3 sides (where your cylinder will appear as a triangular prism)

For the visible mesh in the High LOD model leaving the default setting will be fine. However, for the physics, we need to economise.  I chose to use the cylinder and set the number of side to 8 in Mesh Studio, with the quarter cut away this results in a 6 sided cut cylinder, which is 12 triangles on the inner face and 12 triangles on the outer. however, there are also two long thin triangles on the vertical edges and 12 small triangles on the top and bottom surfaces. These triangles are extraneous and also quite likely to be degenerate, I have marked them in RED to highlight them. All of these should be made transparent in the model before meshing.

The two "caps" top and bottom do not need to be curved at all. Leaving them as cylinders, even 8 sided cylinders would have resulted in 16 triangles ( 8 top, 8 bottom - assumes we remove the 16 around the sides). Unless there is a very specific need have the physics shape match the shower visual shape using a square and getting just 4 triangles is far more efficient.

Some of you will be shouting, "but you don't need the underside and the inside surfaces. It is true that the inner shower wall and the underside of the shower ceiling are probably superfluous and would have been the next optimisation if this had remained higher. Note that we cannot remove the underside surface of the floor because we need to have at least one triangle there to match the bounding box of the mesh and avoid stretching.

Uploading with the original visible mesh resulted in a 1LI cylindrical shower. 

Bonus feature

There was a curious outtake during the making of this blog. having duplicated the curved shower glass and used it as the basis of my physics, I made the long thin edges and the top surfaces transparent and generated a mesh.

It refused to accept this as the physics, giving a Degenerate Triangle error. Looking at the image in the upload preview it was clear that the problem was that long thin cut edge, but it was equally obvious that there were no triangles there.

The problem was a little more subtle. Sometime during the editing of the original cylinder Nyrva had picked up a rounding error. and the cut was set to 1.2495 instead of 1.25. When Mesh Studio generates the mesh it obeys this. 0.125 is 1/8 of course. the size of one of our segments in our physics, so what Mesh studio was actually generating was 6 full-size sides and a tiny slither of the 7th side, which was of course, degenerate. Correcting the rounding error fixed the issue.