Summarising the next improvements to Firestorm Mesh Upload

In my last blog, I covered at length one of the changes I have put into the forthcoming Firestorm release. This post is a shorter summary of those changes and two other updates that I think will appeal to many mesh creators. 

1) Materials subset handling and related errors

For a full, blow by blow account read the previous blog, but in summary, the way that mesh "texture faces" are handled has been rewritten to give you more freedom in how your meshes are organised.

As best I can tell, there has been a bug in the Mesh upload parser (the thing that reads your Collada files and prepares them for upload to SL/OpenSim), so in-grained was this bug that most of us never realised it was a bug. We have all become accustomed to having to place empty triangles in every LOD model to represent the full set of material faces. Given a Mesh "house" whose High LOD model uses 5 materials, "frontwall", "roof", "door", "carpet", wallpaper", we might remove all the geometry from the interior faces for the lower LODs as you would never see those from the outside. However, creating "house_LOD2", as the medium LOD model with only the exterior materials present would result in the error, "Material of Model is not a subset". We would grumble that this was a subset, but with no way around this problem, dutifully return to Blender and add 2 stray triangles and assign one of the "missing" textures to each.  This is painful, time-consuming and frustrating but most importantly it is very confusing for new creators. It also has a further serious side-effect. the LOWEST LOD model is notoriously over-priced in SL, by which I mean that the cost of each triangle in the LOWEST LOD is so high as to make it near impossible and at best time consuming to produce a good LOWEST LOD model. For example, a small hand tool which due to its small size will rapidly be reduced to LOWEST LOD, can typically have no more than around 20 triangles before it starts to seriously drive the Land impact up. If you have to give away a number of these precious triangles just to please the grumpy uploader trolls then you have already lost a large proportion of your allocation. 

Form the next Firestorm release this will no longer be the case. With the exception of the high LOD model all the other LOD models can now have any valid subset of the High LOD materials, they do not even have to be a subset of the immediate parent LOD. 

Thus you can have the following structure

8 faces in the high LOD - A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H

4 faces in the Medium    - B, E, G, H

2 faces in the Low           - A, C

& just 1 in the LOWEST  - F

Or any permutation of these. The only requirement is that the superset of all materials used in all LODs must be present in at least one triangle in the HIGH LOD.

2) Ready-to-use physics presets

The physics shape tab on the mesh uploader is generally not well understood. This is in part because it is a technically complex thing, in part because the viewer has not helped as much as it could. I can't do too much about the former, though I've written a number of blogs that try over the years, the latter part I can do more with.

As of the next Firestorm release, creators will find 3 new options when selecting a physics shape.

1) The cube.

2) The hexagonal cylinder.

3) the user-defined mesh.

There tend to be two sorts of people when it comes to defining physics shapes, those that do and those that don't. For some items it is barely worth worrying about, for others it is essential. However, given that in SL it is often hard to predict how an item might be used once it leaves your protective custody, it does no harm to make sure it has a minimal physics shape that is broadly aligned to the volume of the mesh.

Many people will select the "lowest LOD", often some unrepresentative triangle. This will upload, but it means that once the item is rezzed inworld people cannot interact properly with it. A much better option for many items is a simple cube, and a lot of us keep a simple 8 vertex cube on our drives for just this. You no longer need to do this. The hexagonal cylinder is intended for items that are not quite so "cuboid".

I toyed with providing something vaguely spherical but came to the conclusion that any shape I came up with would fail to meet some need. So instead I added the ability to provide a "user-defined" physics mesh. This is a way to have a shortcut to that "shape you always use". It can be configured in the Settings tab on the upload floater. 

Some items require a custom physics shape, walls with doors and windows that you wish to allow passage through, for example. No defaults are going to help much there, but let me know if there are things that you feel would help. 

3) Ambient lighting in the viewport.

A couple of years ago, I changed the lighting in the preview window to make the three-point lighting work "better" but for some reason, things always remained dull and flat. Recently, it suddenly struck my partner Liz why this is. the ambient lighting is wrong. Upon investigation, it turned out that it was not just wrong it was "black". I have no exposed this setting on the "preview settings" tab so that you can change it, I have found a dark mid-grey about 33% grey works well and makes the lighting "pop" properly. It is especially useful when uploading with textures.

At the time of writing, there are two minor niggles that I may change before release. 

1) It still defaults to black. I considered this as a good plan but given that anyone upset by better lighting can change it to dullness again I think I will change the default to something sensible.

2) When you change the control the preview will not update until you either pan the model or reopen the uploader. I may not be able to fix this immediately.

I hope these three sets of changes improve the quality of the uploading experience for you as much as they have for me.

Take care.

Love Beq

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