When approaching anything you want to build, you can use the same methods employed by 2D and 3D artists alike. All things complex can be broken down into simple forms.
If you look at a lightbulb, you can do a sphere for bulb. While it often curves into a more cylindrical shape at it's bottom, we could take liberties and just use a short tapered cylinder going into a smaller, but longer tapered cylinder which is the metal part from which the glass protrudes. It can be rounded on the bottom, so a small, thinned-out half sphere can work. For the threads, the torus, when used with radius and revolutions, can give us something akin to what we seek.
For this example, I don't want to mess with alphas. In SL, it's not absolutely critical. You could create a material face so the bulb part could change to a whitish yellow when lit and it gives a very nice effect, especially with glow and light.
We now have a bulb composed of 5 prim parts. I made any parts that are not going to be seen set to 100% Transparency. I used two textures out of this glass and metal 4-in-1 texture image to texture the bulb as explained in my previous post.
Using the Object2JoinedMesh script, I generated the bulb mesh with defaults and it was 1.9 LI. I decided to try and make the lower LoDs with the menu settings. I generated the mesh again, this time setting to the Low Poly setting, and once again, using the Low LoD setting. I used the first one I originally made for high LoD, the Low Poly as the medium LoD, the Low LoD version for the Low LoD setting and zeroed out the lowest with physics using the lowest settings. This bulb came in at 0.6 LI (rounds up to 1). And, of course, when I put the 4-in-1 texture image on the mesh, it matched the prim linkset.
So when you see something complex, remember, it's just a bunch of simple shapes put together.
Happy Meshing!
~ele
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