Weekend Machinima: Demo of 3D Meshes in Second Life

Courtesy Runitai Linden, here's the full demo video of the 3D meshes responding to dynamic lighting in Second Life, an in-development feature unveiled to much geek ululations at last week's SLCC. (A tech demo, it's not machinima in the strictest sense, but definitely a sneak peek at what we can eventually do with SL machinima and other applications in the future.) When I first wrote about this, Lindens graphic developer Qarl offered some very interesting background. It uses deferred shading, for example, and in response to concerns that this technique causes lag, Qarl argues: "[I[t speeds up the rendering by computing lighting ONLY for pixels that are affected by a local light. With a naive renderer, a candle in a cave on the other side of the sim will slow you down. that's why we're able to jump from six local lights to hundreds, without much of a performance hit." The Q man promises to discuss that topic and more during his in-world office hours listed here.

Comments

[Dale Innis]

That is pretty nifty. So I can get out that ancient copy of Bryce and make some weird things, and then import them into SL! Although they'll look awful next to the things that people with actual skills can make in their 3D programs and import into SL.

The "make, export, import, observe, fiddle, export, import, observe..." workflow when an external program is required can be a drag. Has Q or anyone said anything about being able to manipulate the meshes while still inworld, rather than by going out to the 3D program, making what you hope is the right tweak, exporting it again, importing it into SL again, and looking at the result?

[soror nishi]

yes, agreed, even to just be able to "paint" in world would be a great start.

[Morris Vig]

So...ummmm...for the unwashed amongst us: What makes this different than KirstenLee's shadow viewer?

[Vaughan Vendetta]

Very nice looking. However, LL is still years behind modern graphics technology... Always good to see them moving forward, but they're certainly less than top-notch.

~V.

[Gary Hayes]

Yes a long way to go re: comparing with platform or other PC games but actually many other Social worlds still shadowless too.

BTW Heres a video from some months ago demonstrating how Second Life would look with lots of shadows http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZM4piPxF9w using the Shadow Viewer from KirstenLee

[soytico.info La pagina de los ticos]

Re- So...ummmm...for the unwashed amongst us: What makes this different than KirstenLee's shadow viewer?

[Pavig Lok]

The lighting here is quite a bit more impressive than the current wave of shadow viewers. (I think i even spotted some per pixel material shaders in passing.) It's hard for the uneducated eye to tell though in passing. These tech demos folk come out with isolate one particular thing and show it well, but don't show much about what it'll look like in common use.

Trust the geeks though - if this works it will be a LOT simpler to make very realistic builds. The nicest thing about improvements to the lighting model is that they'll improve the visual quality of amateur builds significantly. Much of pro building and texturing is about getting lighting right. Sure pro stuff will be improved by this, but I feel it will be a huge help to hobbyists in creating atmospheric environments.

It's true that it will never look quite as good as current generation games, but there is a reason for that. Much of the lighting plan in modern games is burned into the game levels or generated during off time. Long load times or gigs of content aren't appropriate for a dynamic virtual world, so we trade off eye candy for lower bandwidth and better performance. The movies look better still but you don't find folk complaining that their games don't look like films - sooner or later lag hits and detail gets wound back.

So meshes... woot - great for pro 3d people and folk who want to play with fancy new stuff. New lighting model is great for everyone. The only problem i can see is if the lindies try to give away that hulk model - that resembles a real action figure, and isn't that against the new rules? :P

[Jovin]

There's a brief moment in the video where you see the bounding box for the mesh import and it's huge - even worse than many sculpts. Does this mean mesh imports will be as 'problematic' (read 'useless') for in-world physics as sculpts are? Hopefully this is just a symptom of the beta testing and will be resolved before they ever go live in SL, or they'll be confined to decorative elements only.

[Ann Otoole]

If that hulk model is a copyright issue it is all over the internet for sale on a lot of 3D model resource websites.

OK so they are worried about mesh import while they are trying to kill vertices and scale the viewer back to netbook or less capability.

Is anyone holding the steering wheel? All that neat shadows stuff isn't going to work on anything but the latest and most expensive hardware. What happened to LL trying to force everyone's builds into tinker toy blocks and cones for the cheap underpowered educational and corporate computers?

[Connie Sec]

Nice, but nothing that Cryengine2 (or 3) does better. Shadow and dynamic lighting in a virtual world allowing "home made" Machinanimas?
See here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdH6fz_-LmE

[whiners all the time]

WHINE WHINE IT'S NOT COOL ENOUGH

"modern graphics technologies"...or "Cryengine2 (or 3)...just have nothing to do with total freedom of content creation allowed to Second Life users.

There are no virtual environments that support those technologies AND allow global, realtime user-generated content.

So all comparisons are worthless, ktxbai

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I like it. But I agree that a 3D modeling toolset should be built into the client. That's a huge advantage of Second Life over making mods for other virtual worlds - you can make and refine things in realtime rather than importing from a third-party app.

And while building a comprehensive 3D modeling program may seem daunting, take a look at Blender, which was just an in-house tool before it was released into the wild. The Blender interface needs love, but the tool itself gets the job done.

[qarl]

> OK so they are worried about mesh import while they are trying to kill vertices and scale the viewer back to netbook or less capability.

actually - meshes are vastly more efficient than the existing prim system. if you look at a house built from SL prims, and a house built in sketch-up - the sketch-up house has fewer vertices and renders much more quickly. (you don't have all those hidden surfaces.)

prims are very easy to work with - but are very inefficient to render. this is the single greatest reason SL renders more slowly than [insert favorite game here].

[Connie Sec]

Ahh..so RT content creation within a 3D world wins over grafix tech with creation done outside..fair enough ..each to their own.
BTW, in BM u can import 3d content into a "sandbox" for viewing in conditions found inworld before upload. While some will say this doesn't allow "collaborative" projects, I don't think I've seen anyone build with another AV sitting by their side editing their prims for the same project in real time. I'm sure it may happen, but that would be perhaps 1% of anything made in SL.

[r4]

Its a nice demo of the game "3D meshes". It looks very impressive. I am really impressed with this demo.

[Gary Hayes]

Connie - "I don't think I've seen anyone build with another AV sitting by their side editing their prims for the same project in real time."

It happens all the time with me in most commercial builds in SL :) and many, many educational projects I do too!

I would look at 50/50 vs 1% !

[Arcadia Codesmith]

"Ahh..so RT content creation within a 3D world wins over grafix tech with creation done outside.."

Actually, having the capability to do both wins over either.

And I would love, love, LOVE to have a sandbox mode to create things off the grid. A sandbox that I could invite others to play in? Hah! Who needs real estate scalpers!

[Michael Rowe]

Pretty cool... I did notice in the last part of the video - where the light flows across the sky, there is no shadow on the floor of the Linden....

[computer speakers]

One advantage sculpts have is they require little or no modifications to the SL asset storage/distribution model. I'm not sure how other mesh storage methods would fit into this model, but I suspect some modifications would be required.