I wasn’t able to participate to the closed beta of the meshes, so i figured this would be the occasion for me to test what will probably be the biggest change in SecondLife history since the introduction of custom animations (yeap, THIS big)

Linden Labs aparently settled for the Collada format which is a good thing, it’s a widely supported format, flexible and easy to work with, altho i did have some trouble with 3dsmax2010,  it seems that the official Collada export plugin doesn’t export the texture coordinates properly, while the 3dsmax collada exporter doesn’t have such issues. (I would have expected the opposite frankly…)

I’ve been making a couple of nice furnitures for a side project and decided that they would be perfect quandidates for secondlife.

The “weight in prims” system is kind of weird as some of my objects are rated really low, while some others rate much higher, but that might be related to how i’ve setup the LOD.

The mesh viewer seems to have it’s own adaptive degradation tool to generate the lods for you, but i wouldn’t rely too much on it, especially for the physic mesh, whenever possible you should make your own physic mesh, hell for most objects, a couple of boxes usually do the trick.

Physics meshes created through the degradation of the Visible mesh are going to be glitchy in some cases, you can count on it, so take the extra 30 seconds to piece together a proper physic mesh, the less detailed, the better!

Also the sl mesh uploader consider ever part of a mesh as a separate object, so unless that’s what you want, you should probably merge all the parts before export.

SL Meshes also support Multi sub object Materials, which basically means you can setup your own “faces” like if it was a prim, but i think the limit is 6 or 8, or something.

Another interesting thing, a simple cube from 3D studio actually weight LESS prims that an SL cube, i know why but i thought it was funny, it’s actually more efficient to make everything in your mesh than to rely on external prims, a simple cube weight 0.3 prims for example.

I’m sure we will see peoples making “low primcount prim-like meshes”

But enough chit chat, a few screenshots!

I forgot to mention, this new prim type will completely bury the sculpted prims in the “kludges of the past” of SecondLife. It takes me 10 minutes to make something that would take me 1-2 hours to create with sculpted prims. This is just great.

Of course there is the bad side of it too… The last roadblock to massive copyright infrightment in SL will effectively be lifted, so we can expect to see all sort of illegitimate content coming from every video games of the past and present being sold in SecondLife.

This part is bad, but it’s unavoidable, i actually kind of wish that Linden labs require some sort of “registration” for peoples who want to use meshes, maybe restrict it to verified accounts. You obviously should lose the ability to use meshes if you are caught in a copyright violation.

Otherwise i’ve no idea where this will lead us.

But meshes are AWESOME!