Mesh Tips?

[dziugys]

Hello, I'm here with a rather simple question.

When creating a mesh either big and complext or small and detailed. About what Tris count am I looking at to make it best for users in SL and max prim count which i should go for on object either if it's clothing part, object like robot or decayed wall and simple things as small accessories or weapons..

[Monti Messmer]

Not really a simple answer so.

A house or a barn, trousers or a dress ...

Go around buy others products/demos that really impress you and see how many they needed.

Always try to need as little as possible.

Now with all jumping on mesh-avatars, good or bad designed, the prim-count won´t matter anymore ;-)

Monti

[dziugys]

how come prim-count won't matter anymore? Still can't really go as crazy as you want.

[Gaia Clary]

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dziugys wrote:

how come prim-count won't matter anymore? Still can't really go as crazy as you want.

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Prim Count matters only for meshes which are rezzed on ground. As soon as you wear a mesh its actual density only adds to lag, but not to prim count.

So of course it matters. And how it matters is:

 

1. High density meshes take longer to download to the viewer
2. They need more resources on the viewer to get displayed
3. And animation becomes more and more laggy.

Now you might have a really good and fast graphic card on your computer. And so you might not feel the lag. But think of a region where a couple of avatars meet with all of them wearing high density meshes. Then you computer might become a bit warm over time.

And your neighbor avatars who might only have a small notebook computer might suffer much more from this and eventually might start muting high density avatars to get back to reasonable frame rates. Then all your nice appearance vanishes rapidly for others. That might not be exactly what you wanted...

To answer your original question:

For rigged meshes please take into account that the system avatar has about 7500 Triangles. So you can take this as a guideline for your own mesh creations. For example shoes with a triangle count of 120000 each are just insane. Same for hair meshes, dresses, pants, etc...

For static mesh you should take into account the distance from where the mesh will be looked and then you should work with LOD to adapt your mesh to higher distances. And as a rule of thumb:

 

• Optimize your mesh work such that you get out the best of appearance by the fewest possible faces.
• Put as much detail as possible into textures
• Use tilable textures wherever possible to reduce the sheer amount of texture data needed for your creation as it is also not advisable to texturise a low poly mesh with 8 megabytes of texture

All what i said is just my opinion and i might have forgotten essential topics. What i wrote might not be correct for some special cases. So actually you have to get a good experiance on what works best for your special case.

[Monti Messmer]

Of course you right but you cannot set a certain amount for something. Depends on details and type.

With more and more mesh avatars and textures/system clothes replaced with mesh, even underwear socks bikinis ... the load on the servers go up anyway.

Example for an mesh dress. Use the standard SL dress layout then try to change into your design with as little more triangles as possible. Sometimes using the new texture methods applied on a high-count mesh then placed on a low-count model you get the same result.

It´s test, trial and error.

Monti

[dziugys]

Thank you people very much. Got the basic visualisation of how should it be done now. Got some really useful information from you Gaia and appreciate your help Monti.

[seabird7]

After reading this PennyCow Blog I chose repeatable 256x256 for the huge build I am doing (my first). People say it is amazing, though I hope when it is all done it will still be approachable. Perhaps I should further limit the number or intricacy of planned projects, yet frankly, I think we creators today see the panorama of human artistic expressions (especially historical) and find it difficult not to use every celebrated tool.

Yet, greater success follows cooperation. That was proved in a Nobel Prize for mathematics concerning business/social models, and so I feel building with an avatar friendly view would return exponentially in every dimension.