LoD models swapped inworld

[arton Rotaru]

2 hours ago, mikka Luik said:

@arton Rotaru "disillusioned" well not quite the right word. Shrug, just  another chip in the fun part of making stuff. Maybe go back to scripting although I remember why I gave up that apart from personal satisfaction and the odd custom job.

Yes right, actually I just copy/pasted the wording from Chics post to show my companionship with her. And as can be seen in other posts from me, I can get lazy at typing, and keep things too short. For example, instead of elaborating on why that Outhouse is a perfect example of gaming the land impact by nixxing out LODs, I just have put it in a rhetorical question along with a snapshot.

Sorry about that either.

Edited February 6, 2018 by arton Rotaru

[arton Rotaru]

44 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T reports...

And 2 materials even.  Lets hope these are mapped onto a texture along with some other stuff at least.

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, Callum Meriman said:

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T reports...

I SO didn't want to know that. I use 1024 textures but I DO put a lot of info on them normally -- sometimes a complete house exterior. Now and then I go to the dark side (on textures more than polycount ):D.  Yesterday with that potting  bench "clutter" I TRIED to get all those textures on one texture plane. I DID actually. But they looked SO BAD (to me) that I couldn't deal with it and redid all the mapping and baking  -- a FEW TIMES.  We all have our faults. LOL. 

 

[Beq Janus]

9 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Want to be fair though. I was over at Babbage last night taking a photo for a blogger meme thing and found one of the only mesh buildings there (I found two) had zeroed out all but the top level. Amazingly it was SO LARGE it actually worked well there.  So sometimes very odd choices can be OK in CERTAIN situations. 

yes... that's actually why I try to stay out of the witch hunt type aspects because there are legitimate reasons. The LOD calculation actually caps at 256m IIRC, so once you hit a certain scale the lower LODs will never show. In those cases, you can argue that zeroing the LODS that cannot ever be seen is correct as it reduces the overall asset size. That is one of the edge cases though and one reason why the lab will always struggle to come up with a new equation that fits, there are just so many different uses of their technology. 

I hope you never found my buildings :-) My Babbage builds are always on my list of rebuilds and never quite reach the top. 

Quite a lot of Babbage is mesh. Victor's builds are all meshed, mesh studio creations typically, then Hattie Panacek's buildings get used a lot. 

[Beq Janus]

8 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

And 2 materials even.  Lets hope these are mapped onto a texture along with some other stuff at least.

This is the thing that the tools tend to be bad at reporting. a 1024 on there is a lot more legitimate if it is the same texture sheet being used on all the rest of the clutter. Baking complex scenes into a single sheet and reusing that sheet is an important technique. What we probably ought to have in the tools is something that says "object uses 15 instances of textures consisting of 2 unique UUIDs" or something like that. 

[Callum Meriman]

We need a "Common mistakes and how to do it better" thread, hijacking the bug OP makes me feel sad 

1 hour ago, Beq Janus said:

This is the thing that the tools tend to be bad at reporting. a 1024 on there is a lot more legitimate if it is the same texture sheet being used on all the rest of the clutter. Baking complex scenes into a single sheet and reusing that sheet is an important technique. What we probably ought to have in the tools is something that says "object uses 15 instances of textures consisting of 2 unique UUIDs" or something like that. 

Oh yes, there are many examples of good, efficient UV mapping on these forums. Great information I have been poring over to improve my noob work.

Without passing judgement, just as a very interesting learning exercise - and only inspected so I can improve my technique; this object has seven unique 1024x1024 UV mapped textures, one of those is a custom 1024x1024 100% alpha. Density wise, about 40% of this texture space is mapping the undersides (and in the case of the ashtray, the inside base) of the items at full resolution. 

Showing from under and inside the matchbox.

One of the seven 1024x1024s is dedicated to the matches, and each match is individually mapped onto that texture, giving each match a unique woodgrain. Pretty, but not kind to our collective VRAM.

On a side-note;

I recall Torley's ancient blog post about Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T to expose UUIDs, and how it rightly angered creators, leading to it's nerfing (in the git record). It could though still be improved to give useful information, maybe instead of the current 1 line per link, with no indication of shared texture, a sorted format like

Texture 1 1024x1024 NOALPHA
link 1, sides 0, 1
link 2, sides 2, 3, 4 ,5
Texture 2 1024x1024 ALPHA
link 1, sides 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
link 2, sides 1, 6, 7, 8

I really should do that myself and submit the patch for acceptance. 48 hour days are needed

 

Edited February 7, 2018 by Callum Meriman

[Chic Aeon]

I remember when mesh was VERY new. I went to a then very popular full perm mesh creator (furniture) and got one of the monthly group gifts. It was -- let's say a chair as I don't really remember and never used it. It came with something like FIVE  1024 alpha maps (likely AOs too but I don't really remember clearly) and ONE of them was the SMALL LEG of the chair. 

OMG!

And because this was THE most "popular" Full Perm H and G guy I assumed (oh my) that this was the right way.  I am not sure I ever did anything like that -- at least if I did I have blocked it out. But it has taken me a long while to learn all the tricks to packing that 1024 texture full. AND (to be fair again) I could have NEVER done what I now do without a hefty computer.  So there actually ARE issues related to hardware.

 

MEANWHILE and what I came here to mention is the new (I believe) INSPECT pane. I noted that it was bigger and wider the other day but didn't really look all that closely until this evening. There seems to be a lot of extra info added. I am not sure how it all translates though ^^.

 

While this IMHO is one of the better mesh creators around (not a huge name) and a small 1 meter object --  I decided to go check out my new Fantasy Faire Medium building. This is 35 x37 in all (insides are the official size :D).  My aim as always when I make a sim for a busy location is to have the highest framerate, no lag square in the area LOL.  Lots of other tricks of course go along with that. VERY happy I am able to do this!  It is looking good and been much enjoyment. 

As depressing as all this new info has been, I am feeling good about MY stuff -- so maybe that was the point -- for ME LOL. 

 

Edited February 7, 2018 by Chic Aeon

[Callum Meriman]

Oh yes! There is more information, that is another great improvement! Thank you Chic for pointing it out.

(Texture count seems wrong, but meh.)

 

More bouquets to the developers giving all these new, useful, shinies.

[Chic Aeon]

 

So we have spent a lot of time talking about things that AREN'T good as "Best Practices", but I think we should also be explaining what "we" think (sure there are some variances in opinions there :D) can be done to work towards making low lag, long LOD meshes. 

What I uploaded just now is about as good as I can do at the moment -- or perhaps it would be more correct to say "the choices that I am MAKING at the moment" , so wanted to post with a bit of explanation for new mesh makers and maybe NOT so new ones that just haven't tried to make "game asset" meshes. 

This is a fairly large with LOTS of surface wall unit. It will have two partner units with one being larger and one smaller and I am guessing (depending on the number of shelves and such) that I will need to use two textures on the larger one (some can overflow into the texture for the narrow one so that there will be two textures for two items that will in theory be used together).  I really can't make myself lower the texture clarity any more. This is pushing it for me, but trying :D.

My personal goal is to make low poly (and yes I do go over to the dark side now and then although after this thread I think maybe it is just "dusk" but whatever) items that hold their LODs very well and still look PRETTY and not flat. I DO have a tenancy to use large textures as I love details and DO cam in close to things ALL the time. Just who I am.  BUT I am getting much better with that, especially on things like houses. 

Others of course will make different choices. Hopefully not too many along the lines of what we have discovered here this week  

 

Most of the poly count is in the handles even though I went for pretty darn simple. Without the handles the unit is 250.  In this case I used the same area of the texture plane for ALL the handles. Sometimes that works and sometimes not so much and I give them separate places in the layout. 

And this is my UV bake at 400.

 

And with that I am heading back to bed :D.

 

Edited February 7, 2018 by Chic Aeon
lots of grammar mistakes. Getting sleepy again :D

[Beq Janus]

11 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

I remember when mesh was VERY new. I went to a then very popular full perm mesh creator (furniture) and got one of the monthly group gifts. It was -- let's say a chair as I don't really remember and never used it. It came with something like FIVE  1024 alpha maps (likely AOs too but I don't really remember clearly) and ONE of them was the SMALL LEG of the chair. 

I think that (with appropriate caveats) in general if I wanted full perm mesh I would also be expecting the maps in 1024, ideally an external link to the PSDs. If I provided template mesh I would probably do the same. That said...the examples that I provided I would ensure were appropriately scaled to the object to give the correct behavioural guidance. When I texture I tend to work at 2048 then scale down, so exporting those at 1024 makes sense. of course, most people will just use them as is, and again we come back to education and incentivising good behaviour. 

3 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

What I uploaded just now is about as good as I can do at the moment -- or perhaps it would be more correct to say "the choices that I am MAKING at the moment" , so wanted to post with a bit of explanation for new mesh makers and maybe NOT so new ones that just haven't tried to make "game asset" meshes. 

I like the choice of words. I've been variously accused of "dictating" good behaviour and best practice and I try to be quite careful with my words because I am not anything special when it comes to design and artwork. I give advice on what I have learned on my own journey and that really is all that we can do. I am constantly learning new things, it is really what keeps building in SL interesting. In a lot of cases when I blog or write things down in other places it is as much for my own use in clearing my ideas from my head. 

Sharing our journey and tips is what SL was built upon. 

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

(sure there are some variances in opinions there :D)

Maybe not as much as it seems because:

5 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

...

perhaps it would be more correct to say "the choices that I am MAKING at the moment"

That is a crucial point. Good building practice is not about skimping and saving polys and vertices, it's about making the most out of them. What is a reasonable amount of resource usage, depends on context. If you have a fully furnished big house and every single piece of furniture has 1000+ triangles and a unique 1024x1024 texture, you're asking for trouble. But for the one centerpiece of the room, it can be quite appropriate. In the end it's not how much load a single item causes, it's the sum of everything in the scene that matters.

I like to talk about spruces. The spruce is the second easiest tree to make in SL (after the palm) so it's a good measuring stick for a plant maker's skills. Here is one by a well known mesh faker:

It's 4 LI, about 5,000 tris and has a render weight of 2393. This is actually surprsingly good compared to other builds I've seen by the same person.

Here's one by another famous faker:

3 LI, about 1,700 tris and 1767 render weight. That seems very good but look at the mid resolution model:

It's gone. The builder has zeroed out the mid LoD model for a big outdoors item that should have been visible at quite some distance.

 

For comparasion, here is one by a competent mesh maker. I suppose I can mention the name here, it's Eldowyn of United Inshcon:

4 LI, about 1000 triangles, 2577 render weight and at least in my eyes a much better looking tree. She too has cheated a bit on the LoD, the mid level looks good but the low is zeroed out. That's not really ideal but even so, compared to the first two, it's like night and day.

No, since I'm likely to get flamed for this post anyway, I might as well show one of mine:

6 LI, about 1,600 tris and 5238 render weight. No LoD issues whatsoever. It's not quite finished yet btw. I need to find some better textures and also take the land impact down to 5. I too cheated a little, using a sculpt for the branches, and that increases the render weight quite a bit but this is a forest of 87 trees covering 1/16th of a sim so I think 5238 rw is acceptable here.

My point here is, the difference between Eldowyn's tree and the first two is all about quality. She is a far better builder than the other two, so she is able to give her customers more for less.

The difference between her tree and my forest is purpose. Eldowyn's tree stands on its own, right in the foreground, asking to be studied and admired. My forest has a different purpose. It's not pure background (I have a slightly simpler 2 LI variant for that) but middle ground item - or perhaps I should rather say playground. You can run among the trees (and bump into the trunks - they do have physics), you can hide in the forest, you can fight battles and bury treasures in there. It's in every way a game asset (and of course, also a sim filler), it sets the stage but it's not the game itself. If Second Life was a band, Eldowyn's tree would play the lead guitar, my forest wuld play rhythm. We need both of those, there shouldn't be any conflict or disagreement there, But what we don't need, is... oh well, never mind,

 

Edited February 7, 2018 by ChinRey

[Chic Aeon]

We forget how horrible the Linden trees were (and are since they are still in the library and I doubt that they fixed them). I can remember all the triangle trunks and also how they would "tip" for some reason (still don't understand that part). So we have made progress. 

*********************************

I have only one tree I am using at MOSP.   It has excellent LODs and is OLD (I bought it for the last MOSP LOL). I am going over to see what's up with it. 

This is an example of how things can get confusing even with the new tools. This tree's mesh info doesn't look all that impressive, but they apparently used the "impostor" technique for the mid distance. You can see the shift inside my full sim surround but the tree still holds together nicely. I have bare ones down on the ground that work well too.  

For me, this is the best "full sim installation" tree that I have seen. It also is animated and tintable and comes in a pack with Fall  Winter and Spring versions.  Anyone who wants to see and inspect it can at : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA6/148/82/1002   There are three styles of the trees and some are more land impact but still very reasonable. 

 

Trees are the framerate killers and so I have very few in this instance of MOSP and will have NONE at Fantasy Faire. For SL14B I made some stylized topiary and will likely do that this next year (perhaps more impressively). 

[ChinRey]

27 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Trees are the framerate killers...

Hmmm....

 

 

 

[ChinRey]

40 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Trees are the framerate killers...

Hmmm...

 

[ChinRey]

41 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Trees are the framerate killers...

Oh yes, here it is!

 

 

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

We forget how horrible the Linden trees were (and are since they are still in the library and I doubt that they fixed them).

Before you judge them too harshly, take a look at this:

A friend of mine, Sanfroggy, builds only with good old twisted prims, basic textures and Linden vegetation and she comes up with installations like this.

But yes, they really, really, really should have upgraded those.

The irony here is that procedural vegetation is a must for all modern 3D engines and with the Linden vegetation LL was one of the pioneers in that field. But then they forgot about and completely missed it for Sansar.

Edited February 7, 2018 by ChinRey

[Chic Aeon]

LOL. It's all relative but the places where I have seen 5fps were all VERY TREED. Agree that some are better than others.

Happily I like minimalism. Oh this IS with shadows on, I just forgot to change my "building lighting" to something prettier :D.   

Edited February 7, 2018 by Chic Aeon

[Beq Janus]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

Trees are the framerate killers

As they say in showbiz, "you ain't seen nothin' yet"

Forests of Animesh trees swaying in the breeze are likely to be "a thing". On the plus side, lower triangle count cos no alpha cycling, but the viewer will be doing a lot more transforms each frame too. It will be interesting to see whether there is a net benefit.

[ChinRey]

19 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

LOL. It's all relative but the places where I have seen 5fps were all VERY TREED. Agree that some are better than others.

Happily I like minimalism. Oh this IS with shadows on, I just forgot to change my "building lighting" to something prettier :D.

But we know you have a much stronger computer than me so we can't compare those figures. Mine won't manage anything near 100 fps even on a flat megaprim with a 4x4 texture and no object in sight. I know - I've tried.

I'm too modest to say who made the low lag trees in the first two pictures and I'm not going to tell who made the one in the last either - only that it's one of the few famous ones who actually deserve their fame even though her plants tend to be rather laggy.

With alpha masking, well optimized mesh and some very careful use of sculpts it is perfectly possible to make SL vegetation with only a fraction of the lag you usually get. It's just that none of the established plant makers - famous or not - are doing it. Whether there's a market for something like that remains to be seen, only one way to find out.

Edited February 7, 2018 by ChinRey

[Chic Aeon]

Framerates certainly differ from computer to computer and day to day and sim to sim. I have seen up to 270 fps (OMG) on a good day. Today wasn't one of those (hate Wednesdays)  and my computer while I believe is better than yours is now almost two years old so not as spiffy as it once was for sure. Still I HAVE on THIS computer had reoccurring times with 5fps on the same sim when I was the ONLY one in the sim. And in that sim (so not going to say what big event) it was ALL TREES. Almost nothing BUT trees.  And when I had a bunch of trees at MOSP 2.0 it got below 15fps (older computer) and THAT isn't good.  I am most always running three avatars too which sort of evens the playing field a bit. Happy that I can do that now with LOD2 settings LOL.  

So I am very careful of trees. Since most of my installations NOW are my stuff, I know exactly what is going out. And if there are items from other creators and they are outdoors I carefully watch what happens to the framerate on placing and taking back up a few times. For things inside it doesn't matter so much as less in the scene. 

I just checked three places -- the screenshot, the Fantasy Faire Build and my building pad and the best I can do now is 80 and there are no trees at all (really not all that much of anything. So an up and down journey.   

Edited February 7, 2018 by Chic Aeon
adding info

[Callum Meriman]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

With alpha masking, well optimized mesh and some very careful use of sculpts it is perfectly possible to make SL vegetation with only a fraction of the lag you usually get. It's just that none of the established plant makers - famous or not - are doing it. Whether there's a market for something like that remains to be seen, only one way to find out.

The choice for Alpha masking/blending has a huge hand in lag, it's significant. The calculations in placing one alpha over another are incredibly expensive, I saw someone explain why in one of Penny's discussions about mod/nomod and changing everything to alpha-masking, now i can't recall who  Along the lines of a blended alpha needing four multiplications while a masked only needed one - or so.

But, there is a wiki http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alpha_Modes_Do's_and_Don'ts that clearly, and I think properly mentions:

Quote

alpha blending should be used very sparingly, and avoided wherever possible.

Yet, it's the default in the viewer. So people will never learn.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

On 2/4/2018 at 2:02 PM, ChinRey said:

This is a hook for a hanging planter:

I thought it was a hook to hang your restrained subs from! Oops, I’m projecting again.

[Chic Aeon]

I absolutely love this new release (not shown for obvious reasons) but I cannot in good conscience feature it on my blog. I may be blogging a lot less in the future and that might be OK too :D. The extremely creative item  completely falls apart at 3 meters with the SL viewer, 6 with FS. It is a meter by almost a meter so not a size issue. 

VERY SAD.   I can't ever remember having the medium level less than half of the high level on any of my things. We all make choices of course and for the folks running on LOD4 this will likely work.  They WILL be able to see it up close and personal. 

 

Before our new tools  I could only see the numbers up top in build and just going by the information on the "more info" tab -- I assumed (ASSUMED) that the creator simply used the SL defaults which actually work quite well for small house sized objects, but not for small things.   Well now I know they actually chose these settings and somehow that makes it harder for me to be a fan. 

No blog post today :D. One in the queue. We will see how it goes. Getting to 5000 posts might be a bit slower than I suspected LOL.  

 

Edited February 8, 2018 by Chic Aeon

[ChinRey]

7 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Framerates certainly differ from computer to computer and day to day and sim to sim.

Indeed.

For comparasion, here is a pic with same settings but at a different location:

 

 

The furniture in that store is heavier on the fps than the trees in my first two pictures so please, don't blame the plants for the lag.

Edited February 8, 2018 by ChinRey

[ChinRey]

17 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

Forests of Animesh trees swaying in the breeze are likely to be "a thing". On the plus side, lower triangle count cos no alpha cycling, but the viewer will be doing a lot more transforms each frame too.

I don't know of any makers who use alpha cycling for plants.

LAQ uses frame animated textures for their birches and tree house. Those trees are uber-laggy of course but that's LAQ. Brice Bonetto used the method for some prim grass long before LAQ came along and his animated vegetation didn't seem particularly laggy.

Those eerie slowly rotating branches that is the latest fad in realistic vegetation is done with scripted texture rotation. Use only half the texture height so the center is at one edge of the surface and then rotate it in steps with eietherllSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(); or llRotateTexture();. It's essentially a door script except it affects texture rotation rather than object rotation and it's set to endless repeats.

Edited February 8, 2018 by ChinRey