Blender Mesh
I could not make the Office Hours Meeting Thursday to hear the discussion on the coming Open Beta on Collada Meshes. I went through the transcript today. I’m excited. Here are the highlights.
Clothes
It will be possible to make mesh clothes that move with the avatar. One will attach the mesh to the avatar skeleton. You’ll hear the skeleton referred to as an armature and attaching mesh to it referred to as rigging.
This means one mesh can make up a jacket. The sleeves can be attached to the upper and lower arms and move with the avatar.
Cloth will not be dynamic. So, a skirt will not swish.
Falcon Linden: But I would like to add support for full cloth simulation someday.
Meshes are Assets
These are a new type of object in the asset server. Unlike sculpties, they do NOT depend on OpenJPEG or Kakadu (KDU) to decode the image an render it. They will behave much like other inventory items and attachments. (binary encoded LLSD run through gzip)
Vehicle Complexity
Meshes should allow more complex vehicles to be built. The limit is going to be in the complexity of the physics mesh. So, we could see vehicles made of more than 32 parts.
Vir Linden: All those details about limits are still under active development
Mesh Code Release
When code for meshes will be released is important to TPV Developers, as you might imagine. It is also important to developers of OpenSIM. The estimate for code release is October this year.
Mesh Cost
Cost is still way up in the air. However, word is well made meshes will reduce your cost below that of basic prims, poorly made meshes… ouch.
Falcon Linden: One of the driving forces behind the new costs will be ensuring a correlation between efficiency and cost. That way if you have a high cost object, you can make it cheaper by making it more efficient.
The important thing about costs is this: there will be tools to let you generate a physics representation for your mesh that is not itself a mesh. Use it. Choosing NOT to use it (and choosing to have a mesh for the physics representation) is an advanced feature and may be costly in prim resources if used incorrectly.
Cost is related to density – so scaling it *smaller* makes it cost more, scaling it larger makes it cost less.
The take away is: “Don’t use a mesh for physics unless you know what you’re doing.”
Temp on rez meshes will count against your land limits
Maximum Mesh Size
This also is undecided. But, they think may be 64m.
Vir Linden: believe we’ll be starting at 64m
Summary
The Office Hours meeting was packed to SIM capacity. Lots of questions and some good answers. People are excited about meshes.
Lots of information is being added to the wiki regarding meshes.
Wiki Mesh Category