LOD Models Voodoo

[Bloodsong Termagant]

okay, i was banging my head against this for THREE WEEKS... and i still haven't figured it out.  so i have a couple of poll questions.

 

A:  Have you ever built a lower-LOD version of your model from scratch (and had it work/upload)?  IE: for some reason you didn't take the full-res object and decimate it somehow or other to get the lower-res version.

 

B:  Does the SL mesh importer stretch the lower-LOD models so that their bounding box matches the full-res model's bounding box, the same way it stretches/squashes the physics model?

 

 

tl;dr-------------------------------------------------------

i made a simple cushion/beanbag chair, and then i built a really low-res physics model for it.  (if i had been older and wiser, i would have had the foresight to just have saved the original box model i started with, but.  oops.)

the automatically generated lower res versions were... crappy.  and had more triangles.  'i know!' i said, 'i'll use the physics model as the lowest res model!'

but all i ever got was 'material is not a subset' errors.  and yes, i worked through all the fixes on this page:
http://www.pader.world/fixing-errors-on-mesh-upload.html

 

  i took the physics model and i put the three materials of my object on it.  my 'object' was also technically TWO objects in a linkset.  (one with 2 materials, 1 with 1 material.)  so i divided off the 3rd material's faces into a separate object, also.  this is where i got the weird result of this square, which was supposed to be the flat bottom of the mesh, ending up as a diagonal plane through the seat of the chair.  (leading me to suspect some bounding box thing was going on, though i could not find any reference to that, anywhere.)

 

since i can't get, by hook or by crook or by ImportLegacyMatching, this thing to recognize my other model's materials as a 'subset' of the original model's materials (yes, the same exact materials, no .001s)... i'm starting to wonder if the actual VERTICES need to be... i dunno, actual vertices that were in the original model somehow.  :/

 

OR...  maybe it can just never work on two separate objects uploaded as a single mesh thing?  looking for clues, so that's why i'm asking those with more experience in mesh than me.

 

[Pamela Galli]

I don’t understand most of your post.

LODs must all have the same materials.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Bloodsong Termagant said:

A:  Have you ever built a lower-LOD version of your model from scratch (and had it work/upload)?  IE: for some reason you didn't take the full-res object and decimate it somehow or other to get the lower-res version.

Yes.  It can be a bit touch and go and not normally recommended. As Pamela said, all LoD models need to have the same number of materials and the uploader is also a bit sensitive to even minor differences in the dae syntax.

 

 

1 hour ago, Bloodsong Termagant said:

B:  Does the SL mesh importer stretch the lower-LOD models so that their bounding box matches the full-res model's bounding box, the same way it stretches/squashes the physics model?

It does, yes. Not only the LoD models but also the physics model.

 

1 hour ago, Bloodsong Termagant said:

(if i had been older and wiser, i would have had the foresight to just have saved the original box model i started with, but.  oops.)

I suppose you still have the dae file for the main model or you wouldn't be able to reupload with new LoD models anyway. So the easy solution is to import the dae file to a new Blender document and create the LoD models from it. Just to make absolutely sure, create a new dae file from the new Blender file for the main model too.

If you don't have the dae file and you use Firestorm, export you mesh as dae with Fs, import to blender, apply location, rotation and scale (this is *very* important!) and off you go.

 

Edit: This case is of course a reminder to us all of the one security question everybody forget every now and then: Is there any doubt whatsoever that you may be doing it wrong?

• If yes: Make a backup
• If no: Make a backup

Edited October 28, 2018 by ChinRey