Asset imports

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Asset imports — Legacy Viewer reference

This matrix tracks the imports from disk and their local previews. It is used to check the options, the default values, the protocol and the errors, before the human validation on the grid. A window that is displayed is not enough to consider its import finished.

Scope confirmed on 2026-10-12: textures, materials, meshes, sounds, animations, bulk uploads and local previews. Linksets, EEP and Windlight imports are still later work.

Reference consulted: the Legacy Viewer d942e1118d01c3383ef7d6b64f248af77452b0dc (2026-10-12). The visible choices follow this revision of the sources.

Common workflow

• Choose one or more files; name and description; destination folder per type, including the five existing custom folders. The destination picker offers a filter by name, without changing the selected folder while typing. The destinations respect the inventory protections; their list is cached and virtualised.
• Compact list: one line per file, without a "Ready" mention; progress, success, cancellation and error shown by an icon with a tooltip.
• Upload permissions: next owner (modify, copy, transfer), group and everyone, independently per type in Settings; do not grant rights that the server has not confirmed. Settings contains only this table and payment. Saved common sharing flags migrate as per-type fallbacks until a row is edited.
• Type icons open the disk picker when their list is empty, otherwise their existing draft. Clicking the displayed type closes its inspector while leaving the launcher visible.
• Price taken from the account benefits and the region capabilities; sufficient balance; explicit confirmation before each paid operation.
• Analysis, conversion and encoding in the background; progress, cancellation, errors per file; no automatic retry of an upload whose result is unknown (risk of being charged twice).
• Server response then inventory re-read before declaring success.
• Invalid files, dimensions/durations/sizes out of limits, missing capabilities, refusal and timeout: keep the draft and explain the error.

Sources: llviewermenufile.cpp, llviewerassetupload.cpp, llfloaterperms.cpp, llagentbenefits.cpp, panel_preferences_uploads.xml.

Textures

• Formats of the Legacy Viewer file dialog and RGB/RGBA validation.
• Dimensions before/after resizing, maximum X/Y dimensions, powers of two, 2K and the associated fee; bulk optionally limited to 1024.
• Lossless compression for small textures (area ≤ 128²), LosslessJ2CUpload setting; upload JPEG2000 for the others.
• Detection of an almost opaque alpha channel, removal offered and deliberate keeping after a warning.
• Image preview with pan/zoom; hair, male or female head/body, skirt and sculpted prim with rotation/zoom.
• Former temporary texture checkbox: visible in the Legacy Viewer only without server-side baking, but TemporaryUpload is no longer read by its upload path in this revision. Current SL regions use baking; Block offers no fake free upload. Local previews stay free and send no asset to the server.

Sources: llfloaterimagepreview.cpp, floater_image_preview.xml, llviewertexturelist.cpp, llimageraw.cpp.

Sounds

• WAV: PCM restrictions, channels, sample rate, bit depth and duration; conversion to the Vorbis sound of Second Life, with the Legacy Viewer's parameters.
• Name/description, fee and destination; local sound preview. The Play and Stop controls are placed side by side.
• Block extension requested by the human: edit the selected interval and import gain (0–400%) without changing the source. Amplified PCM is clipped to the digital ceiling, with orange waveform peaks and an explicit indicator. Audition uses the same processed PCM as upload; committing a gain adjustment restarts the current audition with that result.
• Optional maximum piece length creates consecutive _01, _02, … inventory sound assets from the selected interval. Boundaries use sample indices, with no gaps or duplicated samples; the last piece can be shorter. The confirmation includes every piece's fee. Each verified receipt is kept, so restoring a failed split draft does not upload its acknowledged pieces again.
• Long sources up to 600 seconds and 16 MiB can be decoded for editing; sources above the grid limit automatically enable splitting. Each resulting asset retains the grid's 30-second (SL) or 60-second limit. WAV format, mono conversion and Vorbis codec rules are unchanged.

Sources: llfloaternamedesc.cpp, llaudio/llvorbisencode.cpp, floater_sound_preview.xml.

Animations

• .anim: validation without altering the data, in particular the constraints. Negative loop markers and other finite time values from exporters are accepted as by LLKeyframeMotion::deserialize.
• BVH: hierarchy, channels and axis order, reference pose, translation of the joint names, removal of fixed tracks, key reduction.
• Priority 2 by default; loop disabled; in/out as a percentage or in frames; fades of 0.3 s; hand poses and expressions.
• Local preview: standing/walking/sitting/flying, play/pause/stop, time slider, camera, reload of the file, statistics and parsing errors. Clicking an animation in the list restarts its playback from the beginning, including if it had already been played or stopped. "Also play on my avatar" is shared by all the animations and saved in the viewer settings, enabled or disabled. The checkbox is placed below the playback controls. Pause and the slider also drive the preview on our avatar; the ends of these local motions produce no network stop.
• Bulk imports: .anim accepted, BVH excluded like the Legacy Viewer.

Sources: llfloaterbvhpreview.cpp, llcharacter/llbvhloader.cpp, llcharacter/llkeyframemotion.cpp, floater_animation_bvh_preview.xml, floater_animation_anim_preview.xml.

PBR materials

• glTF/GLB: choice of the material or import of all the materials of the document.
• Base colour/RGBA, normal, metallic/roughness (G/B channels), emissive, factors, opaque/mask/blend, alpha cutoff and double sided. The texture transforms are reset to zero for the inventory asset as in sanitizeAssetMaterial; they belong to the overrides of the faces.
• Removal of the alpha of the technical maps and separate occlusion resized then merged into R in ORM; R is 255 without occlusion. An occlusion map alone creates an ORM map that is white in G/B.
• External/embedded/local textures or inventory UUIDs; maximum resolution, removal/replacement, detailed cost of the textures.
• Reuse the shared textures; send the textures before the material, then replace their references with the confirmed UUIDs.
• Material with no fee of its own; creation and saving as a material asset, LLSD envelope version 1.1 / GLTF 2.0.
• Local preview and saving of the imported material with the permissions. The properties are placed next to the preview; the four maps use aligned columns in a window fitted to the content; long names are truncated, with their full text on hover.

Sources: llmaterialeditor.cpp, panel_gltf_material.xml, llprimitive/llgltfmaterial.cpp, lllocalgltfmaterials.cpp.

Meshes

• Collada and glTF/GLB according to the filters of this Legacy Viewer version; instances, materials, coordinates, units, transforms and rigging.
• Four LODs: file, generation, reuse; counters and validation of the faces/instances, suffixes and search for the associated files. The window shows the preview to the right of the name, description and destination fields; three sections, LOD, Collisions and Upload, sit below. The High LOD is shown by default, without a second level selector. Help texts, counters and statistics use the normal text size. In Upload, the options of the model and those of the upload take two columns; the five suffixes are aligned below in a grid fitted to the available width. The physics preset stays on a full line. The camera controls are shown when hovering the model. Each LOD has a framed block with title, source, file and number of triangles; clicking its level shows it in the preview. Changing a source, a mode, a threshold or a budget also shows the LOD concerned. Hovering the counter shows its proportion of triangles relative to the original. Dragging the numeric fields stays continuous at the edge of the screen, with the cursor kept near the field; a click still allows typing. The visualisation tools and the advanced settings stay accessible without hiding the model. The fee calculation is in the window footer. The checkboxes are square and contrasted; the menu rows keep their size on hover and when the selection changes.
• LOD generation: methods, triangles, error and smoothed normals; values and presets of the reference window. The triangle mode uses an internal threshold of 100% like the Legacy Viewer; the saved error threshold only applies to the error mode. AUTO welds the identical exported vertices in both modes, like the Legacy Viewer, then removes the unused copies before simplification so that they are not still treated as locked seams. The threshold is shown as a percentage of the model size; its help explains the trade-off between fidelity and simplification. It limits the deformation, without imposing a number of triangles; preserving the normal and UV seams can leave almost all the triangles, even with a high threshold. The fast method accepts more simplification at the seams. AUTO also progressively reduces the normal and UV seams, then uses the fast method if necessary, like the Legacy Viewer when the budget is exceeded by more than 80%. The faces keep their material slot. The "File" choice opens the picker before changing a source that has no file; cancelling keeps the old LOD. Loading a valid file or changing level unblocks a preview that had failed, without accepting an old result. During the recalculation, the old model stays displayed and the slot keeps its height; changes close together are grouped before the worker is started. The type and section tabs use those of the inventory. A mesh refusal keeps the HTTP status, the code and the validation messages provided by the server, in a bounded area. Only these fields are read; URLs, paths and control characters are removed. The four MAV validation codes explained by the Legacy Viewer are also explained in French and in English. The mesh import rights are reported separately. A failure after the transfer keeps the unknown-outcome warning, its available details, and triggers no new upload.
• glTF palettes: recognised joints, weighted joints first then unused joints of the active groups, limit of 110 like the reference.
• Physics: file/LOD/preset, convex analysis, simplification, parameters of the methods, progress and cancellation; limits of the hulls, vertices, degenerate triangles and thin objects.
• Scale/dimensions, inclusion of the textures, joint weights, joint positions, scale lock and pelvis offset.
• Preview: LOD, edges, textures, UV guide, exploded physics, weights, joints and overrides; camera and colours saved.
• Degenerate physics triangles: ll_is_degenerate tolerance, diagnosis and highlight colours; quote refused as long as the raw physics stays invalid. The instance parameters keep the LODs and hulls cached.
• Prior server calculation of the weights and of the price, breakdown of the price/streaming/physics, authorisation state of the account, reset and log.
• Upload of the asset and of its instances through the Legacy Viewer mesh protocol.

Sources: llfloatermodelpreview.cpp, llmodelpreview.cpp, llmeshrepository.cpp, llprimitive/llmodel.cpp, floater_model_preview.xml, menu_model_import_gear_default.xml.

Bulk uploads and other imports of the reference

• Mixed bulk upload: textures/sounds/.anim/materials, announced exclusions, total before confirmation, 1K limit, progress and individual errors.
• Local loading of textures, materials and meshes in a single picker, without changing mode; glTF/GLB documents are recognised by their content. Shared commands: apply to the selection, remove from the selection and place a support prim. Textures and materials apply to the chosen faces (or to all the faces), without changing the server data; the removal restores their current state. Refresh after a change to the file and no charge. The Close button of the window footer is removed. The preparation uses the staging pool kept by the scene and the GPU publication goes explicitly through the render loop, including when the interface does not hold the graphics context. The removed slots are freed by this same loop.
• The local library stays saved between launches in local_previews.json, inside the private profile of the viewer. It keeps the references to the sources, their identifiers, the texture/PBR/LOD settings, the custom maps, the watching and the preview camera; no pixel and no source mesh is copied. The applications to objects are separated by account and grid and are restored when the objects arrive. A missing file stays in the list with an error and keeps its settings. "Remove" deletes its reference and its saved applications, without erasing the source file. The changes are grouped on a dedicated writer, replace the file atomically and are flushed at logout or normal closing. An unreadable library is preserved. This persistence is a Block improvement requested by the user.
• The build picker exposes the published local diffuse textures and PBR materials. Choosing their row applies the overlay without a network command; OK keeps the link, Cancel restores the previous local appearances, including on a mixed selection. Switching to an inventory asset removes the overlay from the faces concerned only. These links follow the same persistence as the commands of the import window. The pickers of technical maps, sculpt and projector stay reserved for inventory assets.
• Local mesh: choice of the model, optional units in metres, imported dimensions, application to/removal from the selection and support prim; watching disabled by default, period of 3 s adjustable from 0.1 s like the Legacy Viewer. The preparation and the installation of the mesh data are independent of the graphics context held temporarily by the render loop: applying, reloading or placing a support prim also works from the interface.
• Environments: EEP settings and old Windlight presets, multiple imports.
• Legacy Viewer linkset backups: rebuilding of the prims and of the contents, reuse/upload of the assets, temporary texture options, offset. This workflow also relies on the build tools and their acknowledgements.
• The existing CSV imports of parcel access and AO imports remain separate workflows and must keep their behaviour.

Sources: llfloaterbulkupload.cpp, llviewermenufile.cpp, lllocalbitmaps.cpp, fslocalmesh*.cpp, llsettings*.cpp, fsfloaterimport.cpp, floater_fs_import.xml.

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Deeper protocol, offline-validation, and contributor-depth sections are omitted here so this page stays readable.