Some thoughts about vehicles in Second Life vol.2

I want to share some thoughts about vehicles in SL again.Something changed in the past few years and something doesn't.We'll talk about optimizing meshes,market,and the future about next generation second life.

Optimizing meshes: Are those details really necessary?

Every mesh creators(Or modeler,content creator,3D artists...) has their own understanding about their polygon and texture usage.Someone prefer low-poly with texture details(professional game developers mostly),someone prefer make every details with polygon(photo realism CGI artists).Polygons usage are widely like from 3000~300000 polygons.That really affects on your SL experience.

Low polygon and texture usage means low quality on graphic,It's a professional way to save the performance but not very effectually unless you are able to do the same thing on most objects in your draw distance.Included your mesh hair ---most mesh hair and sculpted prim hairs has insane polygon counts because they need recycle and re-use those hair parts to keep the quality and save the time.

High-polygons are just like those hairs .I understand people always wants high quality models,just like plastic model cars/figures in real life,we all get amazed by their details when we open the hood or take off the rear bumper.But think about it  :Are those details really necessary?You don't see your engine while you are driving,but they are still eating performance of your computer and server.And how many times you opened the hood and check inside instead of just put the car in there as a decoration for your home?

In my opinion.I would like to take the balance.Like low-poly or use texture for the unnecessary,low priority parts .Save the polygon and use them for the high priority parts such like curvy body, rounded edges.It sounds like Mid-poly for most games which has different LoDs but there are no other LoDs because we need to take care about land impact So actually it's a semi-high LoD. And design the texture usage carefully by adjusting UV, leave bigger texture space for important details,and use same texture for multiple parts(And unfortunately it makes the custom paint very difficult to customer if you don't have good photoshop knowledges,that's why my custom templates comes so slow.)

Market!

No offence but it's a bit funny when you see so many creators release the same design after something new uploaded on GTA mods websites.And it's more interesting because those websites updates when new game releases.I play console only because I'm using a mac. And I'm not interested to download and export those model to check because it's just too troublesome and I'm lazy.

It's their own responsibility to use those models in SL.But I still hope they can learn something to optimize the model ,even start make their own.I'd recommend make your own stuff.Not the "legal" "original" thingy but by my experience. It's just like programmers don't like to read codes written by the others. Make your own isn't that hard and interesting.I learnt most skill by youtube videos and I'm not even a native english speaker.I'm sure some talented people can do better than me.

Future!

The next generation second life is coming.I don't have much details of it,I just want to share some thoughts about vehicles.

Better permission management:
For example, you can change the texture but you can't unlink the object.You can edit the notecard inside but you can't read the script. I don't think it's a hard part but it will be nice if creators can take control about their creation ,it will bring more customizable features without making complex scripts.
Also options for turn off alt zooming please.

Skeleton:
Things in SL needs to be animated.Who don't want to see smoothly working AI bus,flying birds,working cranes and zombies,robots?I hope we can upload custom skeletons for objects in next gen SL.It will brings much more possibility to virtual world.
Think about riding transformable sci-fi vehicles with legs,that will be cool.

Bigger sims:
Or automatically teleporters  like most games.I don't think it's hard because there are 2048*2048 sims in open sims already. why not?

Better land impact calculating:
Land impacts based on the scale is not the best way to control server performance usage.SL is lack of huge details like full sized low poly airplane or something else.Why object size so matters?


Fresnel,roughness and Fake HDRI:
They are the some of secrets about make CGI more realistic.

I might update this post some time, I just finished my rendering ,see ya next time :)