The importance of low poly count

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, NaomiLocket said:

Did you point him in the direction of the graphics preferences, shaders, state of the opengl implementation, and the asset design principles SL banked on?

Sorry but those factors are not relevant to the render load the polys cause axcept possibly the OpenGL but that's hardly unique to SL.

However, I am beginning to realize this topic is taboo, so I'll stop now.

 

(Edit - since Anna reacted to my post: I've got some responses on this thread elsewhere too, not just the ones posted here. Some of those comments really hurt and I was left in no doubt that this is something we don't talk about.)

Edited January 26, 2018 by ChinRey

[OptimoMaximo]

On 1/25/2018 at 1:32 PM, OptimoMaximo said:

As per polygon count, as i often say you should use the amount of geometry to actually make the object volume clear also from a distance. The fact that Chinrey pushes so much towards optimization is due to the other known fact that people would upload sculpted models straight from ZBrush. A flat shader can help an old machine render a few milion polygons, but it can't when those "few million polygons" is found on each single item in a scene.

Making a good model is a matter of compromises: i need to keep the polygon count as low as i possibly can because a) fewer polygons make easier editing b) too much fine detail modeling makes UV mapping imprecise and more difficult, the model is more prone to modeling artifacts (like non planar/overlapped/too small faces) in areas where textures might have done the job perfectly fine, as long as the detail doesn't need actual "volume". Why wasting time and polygons on polygon detailing if the shape hasn't to really be part of the object's silhouette? Hence it's a matter of general optimization, where polycount gives its contribution in a virtual world where "high poly = high quality" in most of the end users' minds. When i got a reply like "But it looks better, it's not like games where you can see the jaggyness of the polygons, this is Second Life and it has to look life-like, hence i don't care if it's heavier, i choose this. Otherwise, we could just stick with the classic avatar, it doesn't make sense". It's easier to smooth/subsurface/turbosmooth a character and whip it into SL as is, rather than optimizing the vertices locations so to have roundness where needed. So the so called "designer" did: easier and faster. Plus, all the small wrinkles on your skirt/shirt are modeled one by one, which shows you're a professional and a great artist, totally worth those 30K polygons per piece of clothing, not those fake/painted folds those 3D noobs make (sarcasm here). Assets so much better than those from the "3D noobs" that people can't rez them for something like five minutes. Should i remind of the famous high quality mesh head with a brain model inside, to show people that it actually attached but it's just taking its time to rez? (more sarcasm here).

@ChinRey This kind of hurt comments, aren't they?

[ChinRey]

8 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

@ChinRey This kind of hurt comments, aren't they?

Not at all. I didn't find anything posted in this thread offensive. But some of the feedback I have got elsewhere have been personal attacks on me for daring to bring up this topic.

So, my conclusion is that this is something people do not want to know.

There is even one reason I may have to accept and agree too. In a discussion on another forum, I was told that it's quite common for texturing in SL to be so heavy the viewer has to keep swap textures between RAM cache and disk cache. That took me by surprise since I can only remember to have seen that twice myself (and that was at sims crammed full of items from some of SL's heaviest texture (ab)users). But obviously, if that really is something SL'ers experience regularly, any other cause of client side lag is trivial by comparasion and trying to do something about geometry related lag would be like trying to fix the plumbing while your house is on fire.

Edited January 28, 2018 by ChinRey

[OptimoMaximo]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Not at all. I didn't find anything posted in this thread offensive. But some of the feedback I have got elsewhere have been personal attacks on me for daring to bring up this topic.

How dare you inform people of the good practices that make general 3D modeling skills necessary instead of letting us free to whip in any sculpted model and be praised for the "quality" by the customers! How dare you say the smooth curves the item i just bought was made out of bad practices, it doesn't look like your petty 90's game models!... i know what you mean, i was being sarcastic there...

[Codex Alpha]

On 1/21/2018 at 6:16 PM, ChinRey said:

It was too late at night for useful work so I decided to do a some simple testing instead.

Here is a wall made from plain prims - 32 of them in the picture. Each visible face has 18 triangles and 16 vertices, the whole picture 576 triangles and 512 vertices.

The frame rate reading at the top right corner is barely readable but it's 70.4.

Because of some peculiarities in how cube prims are made, if I taper the cubes, the triangle and vertice counts drop to 2 and 4 per prim - 64 and 128 for the whole set. It looks pretty much the same:

But the frame rate goes up to 74.4 - that's more than five percent improvement.

I was really surprised by this myself. I did hope to get a measurable difference  but five percent improvement from eliminating 512 triangles and 384 that's crazy. There are single meshes with more than ten times as much geometry as that.

I did several tests and this was the one with the biggest difference but they all showed an improvement far better than I expected from such a small reduction.

So to all content creators who really want to give SL users the smoothest and most pleasant experience possible: Remember that every vertice and every triangle counts.

Yet if you upload an item to be used that is under 1m in size but has 3200 vertices, the Land Impact is less than a 8-vertice cube at 10m....

It appears as though the viewer cares more about the SIZE of the object, and not necessarily the vertice count  (at least on LOD1, and LOD2)

LOD4 seems to count more, but no matter how I optimize a mesh, anything larger than 1m is penalized severely. Got any ideas why? Thanks