/sl/ - Second Life

>>7329
>SketchUp
>For anything but architectural drafting
Plz no

A hollow megaprim would be lower land impact but enjoy your camera breaking if you alt-cam on anything.

>>7343
SketchUp seems like it will work reasonably well for stuff like houses and furniture, albeit not much else. What's wrong with it for making stuff in that application in SL?

I'm planning to do my physics mesh in Blender.

Using a megaprim for your walls will result in a 2LI skybox, but it will just be a box.

On the other hand, you could potentially create a mesh for a much more detailed room and still keep the LI fairly low. There's a lot of nice skyboxes out there which cost less than 30 LI.

What's your goal? What sort of skybox are you hoping to create? Do you have a theme or style in mind? How much space and LI do you have to work with?

>>7348
I have about 100 prims to work with for the box and furnishings, and was looking to keep the footprint to around 20x20 to 20x30 or so, but I have enough room to do more than that if needed (a friend is giving me space on their parcel so I don't remember the exact size, probably 40x40 maybe more.)

I was thinking of doing something styled like an attic loft or a city apartment with something rezzed outside the windows for a view. I'm tempted to do something sci-fi themed instead also though.

>>7355

Another question while I'm at it, as a general rule is it more efficient to make as much in one piece as possible or to break things up into smaller bits. For example am I better off making a box with holes for windows and then installing the windows as separate mesh objects, or including the windows as part of the main mesh?

>>7356
windows part of main mesh. Every separate Object in a linkset adds to landimpact.

>>7345
SketchUp is not designed to make traditional 3D models. It will spit out garbage with overlapping edges and vertices and so on.
tl:dr its mesh output will be broken as fuck and require massive amounts of cleaning. Also let's not forget UV mapping.

>>7356
each object is a minimum of .5 land impact (counted as the server space needed to house it) so combining things can have its benefits, however remember that there is a maximum of 8 faces per mesh object, so depending on how many texturable surfaces you need, splitting them up may be your best option.

>>7372
So SketchUp's internal model cleaning won't be enough if I draft something in it? I'll want to double check everything in Blender (or 3dsmax if I want to try and learn it) before uploading?

Does that mean a UVmap only counts as one face?

>>7375
I'm not sure how or if sketchup does UV maps, but chances are you'll have to do them manually. How you do them is up to you. My suggesion for ease of texturing would be to project them per-wall to bounds so that they texture similar to prims.

>>7376
>I'm not sure how or if sketchup does UV maps

It doesn't but there's a plugin available that automatically generates them a few different ways, I haven't played with it yet so I don't know how much control there is.

What I was wondering was, does the 8 faces thing mean that I can have 8 textures regardless of how I map them or that I can only map to 8 different areas per mesh regardless of if I use a full texture on each or a single UV map.

>>7378
Materials are independent of UVs, so basically 8 textures regardless of how the UVs are. You can use this to your advantage if you don't need particularly high-res textures by setting up your UV maps and textures to share materials, but depending on the size of your structure that's going to give you pretty muddy textures.