Avatar Rendering Complexity

[Qie Niangao]

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Anita61 Anatine wrote:

 

If you want to complain at all, go to the creators who made the items that make your complexity count way up and ask them if they can maybe remake their items. 

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Yes, if it works, that would benefit everyone who is still stuck with those inefficient old items.

In fact, to do a real service to the platform, also gripe about any objects -- especially Mesh -- that are no-mod. There's a whole class of items with ARCs that could be cut in half with a single bit of rescripting (to switch alpha modes instead of alpha level) -- but of course we can't fix their no-mod junk, which those creators made no-mod for reasons of self-importance and superstition. Too bad now they're stuck in such embarrassing obsolescence.

[Tawny Tomsen]

Hi all, i checked out all your posts in this thread. I know, my post didn't belong to the original question but to many statements in this thread.

I am a content creator and i wanted to give our customers many design-options and play-functions with our products. Therefore we minimized all non needed prims/meshes to their minimum value and set them to invisible.  I thought this will set the rendering effort to a minimum. But i noticed, that i thought wrong. Invisible prims have 3-6 times higher complexity compared to visible prims.

I understand, that a prim with textures which contains alpha parts are complex to render.
But i think there should be a difference between textures with alpha parts and total invisible components especially when they are minimized.

So i had to reduce the number of possibilities in my products to reach an acceptable level of complexity.

regards

Tawny

[Qie Niangao]

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Tawny Tomsen wrote:

But i think there should be a difference between textures with alpha parts and total invisible components especially when they are minimized.

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First, I don't know your products so perhaps you're already in the "good creator" group and all your avatar attachments are delivered with Modify permissions. If not, please, please consider doing so, thus giving your customers the ability to adapt items they buy from you to changes in Second Life as they occur.

Now, about alpha: There's a signficant difference between surfaces that have been set to alpha=0.0 (the way normal, off-the-shelf scripts work) and setting it fully invisible using Alpha mode = masking and a high cutoff that defeats visibiity of the entire texture. Even though this means the texture must contain an alpha channel (so 32-bit, not 24), compared to the other kind of "invisibility" it can reduce the object's contribution to Avatar Rendering Complexity by up to half (maybe more?) because items made invisible this way really aren't rendered (you can't even see them with "highlight transparent"). A script can toggle visibility either by changing the cutoff or toggling the Alpha mode between masking and None.

Because alpha-masking requires those 32-bit textures, there may be some work involved, and the payoff depends on geometric complexity, so better to test first and make sure it will be worth the effort, but I've seen it make a big difference.

(I know this really belongs in the Building & Texturing forum, so apologies for the techie details.)

[ChinRey]

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Tawny Tomsen wrote:

But i noticed, that i thought wrong. Invisible prims have 3-6 times higher complexity compared to visible prims.

I understand, that a prim with textures which contains alpha parts are complex to render.

But i think there should be a difference between textures with alpha parts and total invisible components especially when they are minimized.

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Yes, that is a serious flaw in the render weight calculation. It's fairly easy to overcome though, just use a full transparent low res (I use a 4x4 pixel one myself) texture and alpha masking. Alpha masking is completely ignored by the render weight formula so you won't get the credit you deserve for it but at least you don't get penalized and you can reduce the actual render weight quite a lot this way.