Jelly Dolls - Six Months Later

[Penny Patton]

It's been about six months since LL introduced the "Jelly Dolls" feature to derender avatars with exceptionally high draw weight. I figured this would be a good time to take a step back and see how this feature has impacted our SL experience.

 When LL introduced Jelly Dolls I was frustrated. My prediction was that the feature would have little effect on content creators and most people would simply disable the avatar derendering and just ignore it altogether.  I think I was somewhat right. It seems to me that a lot of people do simply turn the feature off, and I still see plenty of avatars with a draw weight well over 200,000 wandering around. Especially in RP sims. In one RP sim the average draw weight appeared to be around 300,000. And this was only a month or two ago.

As I feared, texture use is largely unaffected and remains the number one framerate killer in SL. Since textures have a very limited impact on your draw weight number, people continue to use excessive amounts of texture data and unnecessary blended alpha textures rather than the easier to render masked alpha.

 On the other hand, I've also seen a general trend towards lighter avatars. No less detailed than older avatars, but far easier to render. So it would seem that there has been some success in influencing content creators with the Jelly Dolls feature. I've found it easier to find content to reduce my own draw weight as well and currently sport a detailed fantasy avatar with a draw weight of 33,890.

I've even seen a thread here on the forum where people were trying the "80,000 Challenge", trying to get their draw weight under that magic number, and sharing tips on doing so. In fact, most of the high draw weight avatars I see are relying heavily on older content. Lots of sculpts and flexi-prims.

Since I do keep the feature on, and tend to keep the cutoff around 80,000, I have been enjoying significantly higher framerates than before the draw weight cutoff was introduced.

How has the Jelly Dolls feature affected you and your experiences in SL? Are you seeing improved performance? Did you find it easy to reduce your draw weight or has it proven a challenge? Do you disable the feature? Has the feature caused you any problems? What are your thoughts so far?

Edited April 2, 2017 by Penny Patton

[Gabriele Graves]

I pretty much have the jellydoll feature disabled all of the time.
I am a firestorm viewer user and I have the option to see the complexity information avatar in the name tag turned on.
In preference to seeing jellydolls, I use the derender feature for avatars I don't want to see for whatever reason.
At extremely laggy places such as shopping events, I switch my settings to "Show Friends Only".

I would say that the addition of the complexity information has been helpful to raise my own awareness of the impact avatars have on other viewer and the sim.
The jellydoll feature not so much for me.  However, I cannot say if it would be different if I was using the official viewer because I don't know how many of the other options I use are available there.

For my own avatar, I tend to float between 40K and about 130K depending on what I want to wear but mostly in the 40K-80K range.
I tend to be more conscious of avoiding high complexity for my own outfits when I know I am going to be in a place with a high avatar count and/or high lag.
I am finding that newer mesh items are more complexity friendly which I do tend to notice when demoing items and will prefer when buying.

 

Edited April 2, 2017 by Gabriele Graves
added missed words

[Marianne Little]

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

It's been about six months since LL introduced the "Jelly Dolls" feature to derender avatars with exceptionally high draw weight. I figured this would be a good time to take a step back and see how this feature has impacted our SL experience.

 When LL introduced Jelly Dolls I was frustrated. My prediction was that the feature would have little effect on content creators and most people would simply disable the avatar derendering and just ignore it altogether.  I think I was somewhat right. It seems to me that a lot of people do simply turn the feature off, and I still see plenty of avatars with a draw weight well over 200,000 wandering around. Especially in RP sims. In one RP sim the average draw weight appeared to be around 300,000. And this was only a month or two ago.

As I feared, texture use is largely unaffected and remains the number one framerate killer in SL. Since textures have a very limited impact on your draw weight number, people continue to use excessive amounts of texture data and unnecessary blended alpha textures rather than the easier to render masked alpha.

 On the other hand, I've also seen a general trend towards lighter avatars. No less detailed than older avatars, but far easier to render. So it would seem that there has been some success in influencing content creators with the Jelly Dolls feature. I've found it easier to find content to reduce my own draw weight as well and currently sport a detailed fantasy avatar with a draw weight of 33,890.

I've even seen a thread here on the forum where people were trying the "80,000 Challenge", trying to get their draw weight under that magic number, and sharing tips on doing so. In fact, most of the high draw weight avatars I see are relying heavily on older content. Lots of sculpts and flexi-prims.

Since I do keep the feature on, and tend to keep the cutoff around 80,000, I have been enjoying significantly higher framerates than before the draw weight cutoff was introduced.

How has the Jelly Dolls feature affected you and your experiences in SL? Are you seeing improved performance? Did you find it easy to reduce your draw weight or has it proven a challenge? Do you disable the feature? Has the feature caused you any problems? What are your thoughts so far?

Hey, I thought about bringing back the 80 000 challenge thread, but all the pictures there are gone. So we can just continue here and forget that one.

I was taking pictures inworld today (my timezone) and I was under 50 000. Way under. 28086. Mesh body, eyes, hair... I looked at a couple in the other end of the sandbox, and she was at 35000 and the man a bit over 100 000. Not bad.

I was also checking my male alts for what their mesh bodies was drawing in weight, and only male Slink came out as a lightweight body. The difficult part is the braided hairstyles. I had one hairbase that took 60 000 itself. But you know what, I went to the store and took a free update, and they had cut the render weight back so much, it was insane. It was still no superlight hair, but it was reasonable.

Bigger image and a list of what I'm wearing: https://www.flickr.com/photos/27764102@N02/33649187191/in/dateposted-public/

 

Edited April 2, 2017 by Marianne Little

[Marianne Little]

It's harder for the men to look good and maintain a low draw weight. Men love watches. And they are some detailed work of art, but oh so heavy.

But when a new male body is released now just a few weeks ago, and it is 88000 in itself, then I really hope the updates will fix that.

 

[Penny Patton]

2 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

I was also checking my male alts for what their mesh bodies was drawing in weight, and only male Slink came out as a lightweight body. 

I also noticed all the pictures from old threads were gone.

As far as mesh bodies go, I'll continue to tell people to avoid no-mod bodies because the easiest way to drastically cut your draw weight is to remove the clothing layers from your mesh body and only wear them separately  as individual pieces of clothing. That's definitely a part of why my own draw weight is so low.

I'd also strongly encourage any mesh body makers to reconsider selling their bodies no-mod. There is absolutely no benefit to a no-mod body, not for the seller and certainly not for the customer.

Each clothing layer is exactly the same as wearing a whole extra body by itself, and most mesh bodies come with at least two clothing layers and one tattoo layer. Removing those will cut the body's draw weight down to about 1/3 or 1/4th. I believe the Niramyth Aesthic body is modifiable, I don't know it's draw weight offhand but if follows the trend of multiple clothing layers then I'm sure it can be reduced substantially using that trick.

[Marianne Little]

Well, if I have to choose between buying nothing at all or a modifiable mesh body I don't like, who is not supported by any designers, and a have to make all content for it... that is a lousy deal for me.

I am not sure if we can name creators here, I notice that positive naming is ok by the moderators. But just stating the numbers for bodies, hair, clothes, just saying: "This is x from y design, and the render draw weight is ...." Would that be acceptable, I wonder? I read your very positive review of a harness in your blog, and I thought that could be an excellent example of good craftsmanship. I have that harness on one alt, by the way. Wondered if I should test some more stuff, their newer outfits is light draw weight, so they say.

So I don't know how far we can go. Positive naming and neutral "this could be better"?

[Penny Patton]

I tend to get in trouble with some people for being critical, even though I always try to make my criticism constructive. But I do it anyway. Someone has to. I often think we are too careful in trying to avoid hurt feelings when discussing how content affects performance. We are all affected by poorly optimized content so I think it should be fair to point it out so that the creators know where they need to improve.

If you don't want to step on any toes, I'm sure no one would object to being held up as a good example of optimized, low draw-weight content.

Here's the harness in question, from Dark Prophet Designs. A fantastic mesh harness perfect for ancient settings like Rome or Greece mythology. Some of their older content was extremely unoptimized, with dozens of textures and overuse of sculpts, but they really stepped up their game as they continued making new pieces.

I wish the marketplace had a space in listings for content creators to put the draw weight of the content for sale. Of course, as draw weight is subjective to your own computer's graphics power (Why did you do it that way, LL?) there's currently no universal metric.

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

I personally try to keep my draw weight under 50,000 and usually have my slider for others around 80,000.  Occasionally I will turn it up just to see what interesting avatars are around me and then turn it back down.  The downfalls on my draw weight are women's hair and shoes.  When storing new hair in inventory I put the draw weight in the description.  I take a low draw weight as a challenge because I have a slightly older computer that i would prefer not to fry.  I did see an avatar several months ago with a draw weight over 1,500,000.  I turned off jelly dolls out of curiosity and it was just a normal looking female avatar wearing a dress with medium length mesh hair.

[Klytyna]

I leep hearing this stuff about how we should all get mod bodies and strip the clothing layers because... "it cuts down their excessive renderweight", and I have to laugh.

My no-mod Maitreya has a render weight of about 6.4 kb, stark naked in just maitreya body, hands & feet, a modable exxess hair (yeah i de-blended it), and a couple of mesh piercings, and my system head with mesh eyes, I weigh in at just under 22.5kb. Clothed is another matter, from 60ish in heels and a minidress, to 270kb in some of my kinkier gear. I mod what I can, every little helps, changing my bondage cuffs (prim build and no you cant get mesh versions) from old system shine to materials specular shine dropped the rci per cuff by 12-15%.

I have stopped wearing one of my favorite hairs, it's no mod, and has an rci of 60 kb.

What I've seen in the whole autoblob era, is people panicking like headless chickens, screaming about ARC (render complexity is not the same as ARC) and demanding a return to the caves because "mesh is evil", and generally behaving like damn idiots.

My biggest regret about autoblob? That there is no Minimum Renderweight Draw Slider, to set an ACI below whci people are autoblobbed for making your retinas bleed.

Some vendors are updating their products to reduce renderweight, which is great but... some are going at it way way too hard,to the point where in the frantic drive to get rci below some arbitary number picked out of the blue, they are de-detailing products to the point that the product isn't worth wearing.

And the real irony... Nobody is paying attention to non worn renderweights.

I visited a store last week, the owner makes mesh items, some are very nice but their store is a damn nightmare, expecially on an older machine like mine.

Example... You make a mesh top in 7 colours for Slink and Maitreya, so *obviously* you display it by...

1. Making a high rci mesh sign saying For Slink in 3d letters

2. Making a display dummy torso, thats the right shape to fit in side slink fit mesh, and rez 7 of them on a detailed mesh shelf under the sign

3. Rez 1 copy of the slink fit top in each colour and position it on one of the torso dummies

4 Make a 'for Maitreya' sign like the slink one

5 See 2 but 7 maitreya shaped dummy

6 See 3 but 7 maitreya fit tops

 

This guys WHOLE store is like that, cluttered from floor to ceiling with such displays, every damn product in every damn colour, rezzed on a shelf with a 3d Font-extrusion sign. With just you on the sim, it's like wandering into a 40+ avatar convention of the "Campaign For Laggy Avatars", and the gpu-based lag is crippling.

Frankly we, collectively have bigger problems to deal with than complaining that people don't pass the "stuck up idiots 80k challenge".

 

[Marianne Little]

Not wanting to say more about mesh bodies, but I just hint to 88000 draw weight (cough) that can be done better, I should think. This body has just one of the layers, not three.

It is a hopeless way to find out draw weight. Is there really no other way than wearing the item? Squinting at the screen and calculate 68765 before....74982 now... leeeeetss see... where is my phone with the calculator? And what was that before number? Pen. I need a pen. Take off item, starting over.

Please, it must be possible to just click that thing and get a number just for it? Worn or rezzed on ground.

And I am getting really afraid that I post a render weight that is wrong, and now you tell me that the number I see, depends upon my computers powers?! *Head explodes*

[Penny Patton]

11 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

My no-mod Maitreya has a render weight of about 6.4 kb, stark naked in just maitreya body, hands & feet, a modable exxess hair (yeah i de-blended it), and a couple of mesh piercings, and my system head with mesh eyes, I weigh in at just under 22.5kb.

And it would be even lower if you could remove the clothing layers you aren't using.

Look, I'm not saying you can't enjoy the Maitreya body. It looks fantastic and I understand why it's so popular. I'm not setting out to shame anyone for using the mesh body they enjoy, I'm just pointing out that there is no reason for the Maitreya body to be no-mod. If it were modifiable it would change nothing about how you enjoy it. You wouldn't be trading off any convenience or feature, it wouldn't change how it looks. For you it would be the same exact experience.  You'd simply have the option to modify it, if you wanted to.

Same for the creator. They would lose out nothing by selling the body as modifiable. They would be entirely unaffected.

So why sell it no-mod at all? That's all I'm saying.

12 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

What I've seen in the whole autoblob era, is people panicking like headless chickens, screaming about ARC (render complexity is not the same as ARC) and demanding a return to the caves because "mesh is evil", and generally behaving like damn idiots.

I do agree there's a lot of misinformation but that has always been the case. I've seen sims which banned mesh avatar attachments because they believed those caused more lag. You cannot effectively optimize your avatar if you are misinformed about what affects performance and how. I think this is a problem LL really should try to address head-on, by providing more documentation for residents about the issue.

That said, I do feel compelled to point out that ARC literally stands for "Avatar Render Complexity"

13 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

My biggest regret about autoblob? That there is no Minimum Renderweight Draw Slider, to set an ACI below whci people are autoblobbed for making your retinas bleed.

Draw weight has no correlation to the quality of the avatar's appearance. You can have an exceptionally detailed, great looking avatar with a low draw weight standing next to an ugly or bland avatar with a draw weight over 300,000.

16 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

And the real irony... Nobody is paying attention to non worn renderweights.
 

Yes and no. Land Impact restrictions force people to be more effective with mesh models for objects rezzed on land. The performance issues you experienced in that store probably had far more to do with the excessive amount of textures in the sim. There is literally nothing preventing an avatar or a sim environment from crushing your framerates down to single digits simply by throwing literally gigabytes of texture data at your videocard and choking up your VRAM. Stores tend to be particularly bad about this because of all the high-res vendor art in addition to the environment textures.

21 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Some vendors are updating their products to reduce renderweight, which is great but... some are going at it way way too hard,to the point where in the frantic drive to get rci below some arbitary number picked out of the blue, they are de-detailing products to the point that the product isn't worth wearing.

I have not seen this, but I'd say that in most cases a content creator should be able to optimize their work without reducing the visual quality. Using materials instead of increasing geometry, not increasing the geometry beyond what is visually discernable, etcetera. Of course, the more practice a content creator has with this, the better they will get at it. If they have to stumble a few times first to get it right, that seems acceptable to me. We all benefit from better optimized content.

26 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Frankly we, collectively have bigger problems to deal with than complaining that people don't pass the "stuck up idiots 80k challenge".

I think it's important for those who do want to see better optimized content not to harass regular residents who just want to enjoy the content they purchased. The onus of this whole issue is on LL and content creators and I'd argue the bulk of it is at LL's feet for not encouraging optimized content better and sooner. They really should have known better. It's simply unrealistic to expect the entire SL userbase to educate themselves on videogame content creation issues. When you're expecting the average SL user to have the professional understanding of videogame asset design required to make good decisions about how they dress their avatar, you've screwed up something awful. Even moreso when you don't even give them the tools to make informed purchasing decisions if they do happen to have that knowledge. And this is exactly what LL has done.

If we're talking about SL I think it would be very difficult to argue that performance problems are not one of, if not the biggest problem SL has. 

[Klytyna]

10 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

That said, I do feel compelled to point out that ARC literally stands for "Avatar Render Complexity"

See, I first encountered the term ARC, about 5  years ago, long before auto-blob and RCI were being talked about, as an ill defined measure of how hard it was to throw your avi across a sim border when flying or sailing in the Blake, a mix of proto RCI, with a lot of attention to script counts, script memory, cpu time, and inventory size.

The HARDCORE "ARC Nazis" would only own 2 outfits, both 100 % system, no prim attachments at all, and the only things in their inventory were calling cards, the two system outfits (daywear and swimsuit), and the folder filled with their 32prim vehicle chassis bases and the 400 prim wearable 'vehicle body shells'. 
That being said I don't dissagree that mod mesh is better, but I also dont get hung up repeatedly whining about it in every damn thread claiming that ripping 2 or 3 layers off my 6.4 kb rci body will somehow miraculously compensate for the 20kb boots or the 10 kb hair, or the earings etc... its small potatoes, better to find a way to drop 30% on the boots than 75% on the body. this iswhat I meant by certain vendors going mental for example taking a hair with an rci of 2.5kb (not too bad) and in a fit of autoblob panic stripping it to 0.650kb and making it look bloody awful, worse than the LL Fuglymesh starter avi hairs of a few years back.

Yes performance affects us all and is important And THAT is why it angers me seeing people rant on and on and on about "dont use a body with a tattoo layer", but doing nothing about really really bad builds by people  who still dont get the problem with bad trees or bad grass or putting seperate alpha blend strips in the corners of mesh rooms to add 'ambient occlusion baked shadows' that look so unreal I want to send the makers to remedial-rendering classes, AND cause excessive gpu-lag.
 

Edited April 2, 2017 by Klytyna
The posting editor really sucks and often fails

[Penny Patton]

It's come up multiple times. I still remember when ARC was first introduced and the insanity that caused. Some sims had rules about maximum ARC, and people had all sorts of crazy beliefs about what affected ARC and heated debates about whether or not ARC actually meant anything at all as far as performance was concerned.

This is why I really find it frustrating when LL throws something out there like ARC or the Jelly Dolls features without clear, accurate information for the residents.

Wait, scratch that, residents shouldn't have to worry about this kind of thing at all. The ONLY people who should have to worry about ARC/Draw Weight/whatever you want to call it are content creators and LL themselves in how they could best guide content creators.

Nobody strains their brain over the draw weight of a chair or a car or a house because we have Land Impact. An easy understood pool of points for the objects we rez on our land. Every object has an LI cost. Typically this cost is displayed in the vendor or marketplace listing so we can make an informed decision and not purchase a chair that will eat up half our land's Land Impact pool.

Content creators don't need to have a professional understanding of realtime environment asset creation, they just need to know "My chair will sell better if it's 1LI instead of 100." So they will aim for that.

 Avatars should have been the same way, from the beginning. And textures should have factored into both, from the beginning. Then we wouldn't be having threads like these on the forum and SL wouldn't have such high hardware requirements. And I guarantee, SL would look better, too. When the content is more optimized, you can get flashier with the environments, avatars and effects without as much of a performance hit.

[Klytyna]

Yeah that's great except... LI is NOT really a good indicator of an objects renderweight. LI for a mesh object is more dependent on lod levels and physics hitbox complexity, than on render complexity, BUT non worn objects STILL have a renderweight. 

Complaining at people that their renderweight is voer 60k or 80k is kind of pointless when you are standing in a lag-forest of bad trees with a rci of 5 million, looking at The Castle of AlphaBlend 10m Prims, with its rci of 7 million, just across the Bridge of Lag, with an rci of 2.7 million.

There's a checkbox in my viewer under the autoblob slider, offering to auto-un-blob all avatars with in 20 m chat range, so I can set it to blob a hand full of people on the other side of the sim with rci's of 90, while autorendering the 750k fossils in chat range. How cool is that.

Autoblob was dreamed up by, and implemented by people with rci's of 5k on empty sims, during their weekly 5 min login to a remote LL only corner of the beta grid. And for the record, it's been here for more than 6 months, some viewers had it last summer, so we had time to realise just how bad it was before the public launch.
 

[Whirly Fizzle]

2 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

It is a hopeless way to find out draw weight. Is there really no other way than wearing the item? Squinting at the screen and calculate 68765 before....74982 now... leeeeetss see... where is my phone with the calculator? And what was that before number? Pen. I need a pen. Take off item, starting over.

Please, it must be possible to just click that thing and get a number just for it? Worn or rezzed on ground.

 

Yes this is possible.

Either wear or rez on the ground the item you want to check the draw weight of.
Edit the item.
Click the "More Info" link in the edit window.
Under "Weights of selected", the Display weight is the draw weight/complexity reading of that object.
The display weight is  the amount that object will add to your avatar complexity when it is worn.

 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Aside from the occasional shudder when I stumble into poorly made content, I haven't changed anything really about how I dress my av and my complexity numbers run under 10k. I generally have to work to get it higher and why do that? System body, good skin, short mesh hair, my favourite shoes (which are probably simple sculpts) as standard. Current clothes are mesh jeans and a lovely poncho top with a Mongolian textile print from a Genre event. Mentioning the latter because its visual interest is from the print, at least to me. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if the low complexity of my av has offended anyone's retinal health they've been sufficiently mannered to avoid mentioning it to me inworld.

I keep jelly dolls on inworld and usually have it set low. CoolVLViewer handles the jelly dolls notices via a shirt icon in the menu bar rather than a pop up window.  A yellow shirt icon appears (explanatory text available as mouseover) when your av isn't rendered by someone else. It's present but not intrusive. That sort of notice in the mainstream viewers would probably reduce a lot of the social tension around jelly dolls.

The only thing I miss is watching some of the amusing things mesh body parts and clothes get up to when lag makes for slow rezzing. Sorry fashionistas, all of your stuff hanging about in mid-air can be more interesting to me than the finished product.

When it comes to creating, the new ARC information has further increased my efforts to minimising render weight in everything I make. (This includes wearables, decor and furniture, both pre-made FP mesh and my own work.) I'm glad to do that but unfortunately it multiplies the already complicated processes of creating for SL, at least at this stage. At this point, I'm comfortable enough with Blender to be able to make and texture most of my objects but the endless process of optimising 4 level of detail (LoD) and keeping all of them playing nicely with each other can be a bit of a nightmare. It's proven to be too much during times of poor health for me. Jelly dolls and ARC isn't the real issue here, it's how complicated the process is to begin with. My experience is that optimising render weight tends to be multiplicative rather than additive for many of those steps. In short, changes necessary for optimisation can lead to having to redo a lot of that work depending on how far back in the process you need to go, including having to remake each LoD model depending on the nature of the changes.

Other people who know more about the insides of these things have suggested that LL could do better with aspects of LoDs and their side of the mesh testing/uploading process. If that's true, and LL broke form to address these issues, it could go a long way towards making it easier for SL's creators to make better render-friendly mesh.

I really appreciate the ideas, suggestions and information you share with us, Penny. Seeing how someone else does something, especially when it's thinking outside the box and looking at things in a new way, is great stimulus for my own efforts. Thank you for taking the time to do this.

 

[Marianne Little]

3 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Yes this is possible.

Either wear or rez on the ground the item you want to check the draw weight of.
Edit the item.
Click the "More Info" link in the edit window.
Under "Weights of selected", the Display weight is the draw weight/complexity reading of that object.
The display weight is  the amount that object will add to your avatar complexity when it is worn.

 

/me kisses you

[Marianne Little]

But can anyone tell me why a pair of eyes should have a display value of 20 488??
Of course, the eyes were the last thing I tried to take off, after hair, ears, body, clothes, piercings, jewelry.
O yeah, they are no mod. I think I let those 300 L go. I am just happy that I bough only two pairs. I am not sure how I could mod them anyway. Must be a layer for ever color detail plus a layer for every reflection?

Name of designer hidden in the image.

 

Edited April 2, 2017 by Marianne Little

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

post removed lest it further contribute to misinformation on the subject.

Edited April 3, 2017 by Bitsy Buccaneer

[Nikolai Warden]

One practice quite common among male avatars with the Niramyth Aesthetic body is to wear two or three of the bodies at the same time, to get all layers to show. If a fellow wants more than one tattoo as well as body hair, there are often not enough layers built into the body to accommodate that. So they will make a copy of the body with one tattoo on it, then put another tattoo on another copy of the body and wear both at the same time. I have been astounded to see naked fellows at the beach with render weights in excess of 300,000, though I think a lot of that may be the HUD they never take off for the avatar. Complex, braided hair, mesh eyes, body hair, tattoos, jewelry ... it is amazing to see the weight of these fellows. When there is a party and a place is lagging, they all complain as if the sim is being mismanaged when it is 20 people with render weights enough for 60. 

As for the jellies, I do not see the point in them, as they look so odd. I always have my avatar complexity to the maximum, but if someone is over the top in regard to weight, or well, just plain unsightly (with mesh body hair all over and say, pixel private parts flopping about or worse), I derender him. My render weight averages slightly less than 47K most of the time. I do not go to many parties or events, and rarely put on more than a plain white mesh tank or tshirt and a pair of shorts.

[Lexbot Sinister]

2 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

(...)

Most likely culprits are someone making them too round and not handling the lowest LoD decently. At least that's my guess based on what looks to be a very high polygon density in the picture and my own experience in working with LoD levels.

(...)

The other common mistake is with LoD, level of detail. You know how some things break down visually as you cam away from them? Done well, it won't be all that noticeable and it saves a lot of rendering work for distant items. Sometimes creators handle LoD poorly and it turns ugly quickly. (...)

Well, the problem is that most of the mesh clothing makers have discovered a very handy workaround for rigged clothes, giving themselves superlow ARC they don't deserve.

Non-rigged mesh attachments don't have that same "benefit".  So if the eyes in the photo aren't rigged, they might be getting problems with collapsing LoD's instead, when someone zooms out+cams in onto a head, for taking a photo of a portrait. (Zooming out and then camming in removes most of the frog-lens effect, but LoD's collapse like if being far away)

[Whirly Fizzle]

12 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

But can anyone tell me why a pair of eyes should have a display value of 20 488??
Of course, the eyes were the last thing I tried to take off, after hair, ears, body, clothes, piercings, jewelry.
O yeah, they are no mod. I think I let those 300 L go. I am just happy that I bough only two pairs. I am not sure how I could mod them anyway. Must be a layer for ever color detail plus a layer for every reflection?

Name of designer hidden in the image.

 

 

Pretty sure I know which mesh eyes they are.
They were my favorite mesh eye creator and I had lots of their eyes. Their complexity wasn't too bad until they updated all their eyes.  After the update each eye was >10k complexity.
I just about died when I saw that & went to buy my eyes elsewhere.

[Chase01]

As someone else pointed out earlier in the thread—all of this has helped me to be more self-aware. I think a lot vendors either pass the buck or are unaware themselves how their creation is just adding to the problem. Since we really have no control over what LL decides to publish to the community, the best weapon we have is to continue talking about it and getting more people aware. 

 

[Klytyna]

8 hours ago, Nikolai Warden said:

 I think a lot of that may be the HUD they never take off for the avatar.

The idea that HUDs add to renderweight, really bothers me, I've heard quite a number of people mention this, and I can understand why but...

It simply is not so, items attached to HUD locations are NOT rendered inworld for others to see, so they do NOT add to your RCI, unfortunately some idiot involved with the developement of auto-blob chose to add an annoying message warning you that your HUD uses textures, so tech illiterate people assume they add to RCI, however, in my prefered viewer at least, if you open the appearance panel and switch to the 'current outfit' tab it lists the RCI  for every item you are wearing, HUDs are always ZERO.

 

Edited April 3, 2017 by Klytyna

[Whirly Fizzle]

5 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

 

The idea that huds add to renderweight, really bothers me, I've heard quite a number of people mention this, and I can understand why but...
 

HUDs do not add to the avatar complexity reading.