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Mesh - Basic Knowlege

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Mesh - Basic Knowlege Empty Mesh - Basic Knowlege

Post  Admin Tue Aug 28, 2012 11:31 pm

In one of my visits to Wasabi Pills i came across to a informative notecard. Posting in here to share with yall.


First of all... you might ask yourself: "what the heck is mesh"?

Short answer: nothing new to what you had seen until now in SL.
Technically everything in SL is "mesh": your avatar, prims, sculpties... you name it.

Long answer: A polygon mesh or unstructured grid is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of a polyhedral object in 3D computer graphics and solid modeling. The faces usually consist of triangles, quadrilaterals or other simple convex polygons, since this
simplifies rendering, but may also be composed of more general concave polygons, or polygons with holes.


So what changed, you might ask?
Before August 2011, creators could only use prims created in world or sculpties created in various external programs which had strong limitations in structure and "behaviour" (and they basically were just small images that SL "interpreted as shapes"). Now creators are able to import models created in programs such as 3ds Max, Maya, Blender and so on directly into SL that can look better and behave differently from prims and sculpties.
You, therefore, need a more "advanced" viewer to be able to enjoy these new features.


Here are some helpful informations about mesh:
Mesh can be RIGGED or NON-RIGGED
=======================
NON-RIGGED mesh behaves like a sculpty.
It cannot flex following the movements of your avatar, but can be stretched/edited/modified like a sculpted prim, though retaining more definition in shape and texture display. Also mesh can be more efficient than a sculpty rendering-wise if properly optimized.

RIGGED mesh can flex following the movements of your avatar.
Since you can rig a model only to the SL avatar skeleton, there is no point in rigging a house or a lamppost unless you want to wear them =)
The drawbacks of rigged mesh are that you cannot move it or shrink/enlarge it to change the way it fits you.
It will adapt to your body following ONLY those sliders that move your bones (e.g. height, head size, arm lenght, leg lenght etc...), but won't be deformed by other sliders not moving bones (e.g. body fat, breast size, head shape, forehead angle and so on...).
Rigged mesh can be tinted/retextured only when rezzed (not when worn) and you can change its attachment point and it will always "end up" in the place intended by its creator (hair will always stay on your head no matter which attachment point you choose).

Chances are that your mesh will be a single object even if it appears to be made by many different objects. You need to keep this in mind when you want, for example, to retexture your item.
In the case the mesh is a single object, you cannot use "edit linked parts" to change the textures, but will need to use "select face/select texture".

To make things clearer, let's say we want to retexture mesh hair: if they are made in a single object the strands are NOT many different, separated parts and texturing them strand by strand would be impossible, because the strands are grouped together. Each group of strands have the same texture for a maximum of 8 textures total per mesh, so changing the texture of a strand would, in this case, change the texture of all those strands belonging to the same group.
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