Sculpts vs. Mesh && the Industry

[JasonClandestino]

Various people seem to really like Mesh.

Various people have total build kits that have mesh columns & mesh walls. They figure it saves prims. Their mesh column is 0.8 prims & they figure that adds up & when they get to the 4th column, they've only used 3.2 prims.

So, if you like mesh, somebody probably told you about how much they like mesh. Do you develop though? There's a set of mesh Greek letters that I got on the marketplace. I simply needed to open Blender & type the letters & then export them. They look great, huh?! ^.^ Yeah, as long as they're beneath 1 meter in height. I thought to use a mesh letter on a map image icon in the sky, & by the time I got it to scale, it was 30 prims for one letter. So, you like mesh or you like tiny world?

Mesh requires more processes, more RAM, costs more on server load, & requires higher upload & download speeds.

Are you folks that like mesh really the "scientific" types? There are a lot of things within the industry that really need work, though you want to insist that there are fibre optic lines run around the world so you can have mesh?!

I am working on a Composits Engine for my OpenSim Grid. It's got values for the chemical composits for all the objects within my grid, as well as object weight & added Material types. That's hard work!! It's difficult to find other programmers to help with projects like that, while you're hammering away on CONTROL_LBUTTON & insisting that the world upgrade for you to look at Mesh.

It's peculiar to consider the industry & what's really responsible for the industry amidst various others that are so wreckless. It insights a cringe time a various.

If I take a cotton texture & I put that to an Upper skin template & I cut out the neck line & arm line, that's still not a Cotton T-Shirt, not at all. The same goes for the billions of people that want the global population to upgrade their machines & their internet connection line & their video cards so that they can upload their mesh monkey.

The modem of Suzie Q is rattle & hum in constant, talking about the mesh button on her mesh skirt, & the button is 20 prims if you rez it on the ground. Guys gawk, "Your button is that complex?!" & all of that amidst billions of people.

I can't believe that SL would allow mesh uploads if for only Cloaks & Dresses with strict guidelines, not at all. It's wreckless.

People want to see ass in HD, & "blabla, har har", while they haven't figured out much of a thing about Science, & they're hanging on the coat tails of the few with a supposed big proud boast to themselves for request of ass in HD to the global population of requisite.

It's misshapen chaos in heavy internet traffic costs.

So, you like mesh, huh? You have a mesh avatar & did you make that mesh avatar? No? Though you want people to upgrade their machines so that you can have a mesh avatar while people are paying hundreds of dollars each month & programmers are working with a single CONTROL_LBUTTON & coping with GPL, which insists that programmers can't make money on derivative works of things that others put their hands to & "licensed" with GPL, & you want the programmers to upgrade their machines & continue programming cool things so that you can have your mesh avatar? Well, do you want mesh cloak layers, or do you want mesh clothing, & mesh walls, & mesh pillars, & billions of people uploading mesh buttons?

It's detriment to society, in fact, when you think about it.

Edited September 26, 2018 by JasonClandestino

[Drake1 Nightfire]

And yet, you can find a mesh dress that is only ONE  prim.... 

You keep saying science.. I think you mean technology. Also, way to sneak in that plug for your own OS grid.. tsk tsk. 

Why don't you go play there is SL is so bad. 

This smells to coffee.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 hours ago, JasonClandestino said:

I simply needed to open Blender & type the letters & then export them.

If that were the case then there would be no need for the countless tutorials and endless forum posts on the subjects of optimizing mesh for SL and making efficient LOD models.  If your understanding of the process of creating mesh content for SL is limited to a notion as simplistic as this it calls into question the validity of any arguments you may make on the subject.

[Alyona Su]

Why prims still rule and sculpties are a close second.

One giant prim with alpha-textured text image on it. Done.

Edited September 26, 2018 by Alyona Su

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

Not all mesh is created equally, or purposed for the same scenario, thus li will be different, also thats highly dependent on proper optimization. 

Sculpties are awful... Burn them all with fire, just be done with it! ??

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

I'm not sure if I understand this topic correctly.

Is it about sculpties vs mesh? Or is it about mesh vs programming? About consumers not appreciating creators? What is 'the industry'? Is this a manifest against mesh bodies? Wasting band width? What can we learn from the article? Not to do drugs? To stay in school and learn to write coherently? Or that Google Translate sucks? And where does the 'ass' go into all this?

Edited September 27, 2018 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Mesh is objectively superior to sculpties in more ways than one.

1. All sculpties have the same amount of tris regardless of detail or resolution. Mesh can be as low as one triangle.

2. All sculpties require a texture to be downloaded (along with the diffuse), while mesh is just vector data which is more compressable and uses less VRAM. Thus mesh can be much more lightweight for rendering and bandwidth.

3. Sculpties have a spherical collision shape regardless of the sculpt map. Mesh has much more flexibility and can be much simpler.

Nice bait, but it's fake news.

Edited September 27, 2018 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

I like mesh because it lets me make things that aren't possible with prims. I like prims because they are awesome. Sculpts, they have their uses but not much for what I want to do.

Use the resources wisely and everyone benefits.

[Love Zhaoying]

Is troll?

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

1. All sculpties have the same amount of tris regardless of detail or resolution. Mesh can be as low as one triangle.

Unfortunately "can be" is the keyword here.

Sculpties don't have to have all those tris btw. SL does support low poly sculpts. It's just that LL forgot to mention it, so very few people know about it.

 

5 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

2. All sculpties require a texture to be downloaded (along with the diffuse), while mesh is just vector data which is more compressable and uses less VRAM. Thus mesh can be much more lightweight for rendering and bandwidth.

That is not correct. A correctly made sculpt map only requires slightly more than 16 Kb of uncompressed data, less than all but the smallest compressed mesh asset. The compression ratio is about the same. Sculpt maps uses lossless JPEG 2000 compression while meshes depend on good old gzip. Both these typically manages a 2:1 ratio.

As for VRAM, there is no reason whatsoever why sculpt maps should be stored there but even if it is (and it may well be the way LL did programming back then) 250 sculpt maps equals one 1024x1024 - it's peanuts.

Sculpts are very heavy on the cpu though (mainly because of poor programming but that's not gong to change). But so is fitted mesh, maybe even more so - it would be interesting to do a comparasion test there.

But sculpts nearly always have 1024 vertices and more than 2000 triangles (exactly how many depends on the stitching) even if it only needs a handful of them. That is definitely a problem. But it's not unsual for an SL mesh to be just as full of superfluous triangles and vertices so that's not a clear advantage mesh either.

 

5 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

3. Sculpties have a spherical collision shape regardless of the sculpt map. Mesh has much more flexibility and can be much simpler.

The collision shape of a sculpt is the convex hull of a torus with curve resolution 6 or 7 and the size of the bounding box.

Edited September 27, 2018 by ChinRey

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

And here I was, silly me, thinking that everything in SL, prims, spheres and mesh alike, were all just mesh. #gonurbs!

Edited September 28, 2018 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Fionalein]

19 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

And here I was, silly me, thinking that everything in SL, prims, spheres and mesh alike, were all just mesh. #gonurbs!

Ahh the good old what I call mesh is not what you call mesh debate... you forgot the classic avi, SLs most widespread "mesh body"

 

[Love Zhaoying]

Traditional prims obviously aren’t mesh. Create a fresh prim and you’ll see, they are wood!

[Fionalein]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Traditional prims obviously aren’t mesh. Create a fresh prim and you’ll see, they are wood!

...as are mesh avatars, just run into them to proove by sound they are made of wood.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

And here I was, silly me, thinking that everything in SL, prims, spheres and mesh alike, were all just mesh. #gonurbs!

I'm not sure if a serious explanation is appropriate in this thread.

But to clear up a few things.

Everything is mesh and textures as far as the graphics processor is concerned - those are the only things it knows about. The difference is in how the mesh is generated. There are basically three different principles:

1. Procedural objects. The mesh is generated by the viewer from a mathematical formula. The concept is gaining more and more ground in the 3D industry (and especially in game design) since with good algorithms it can be very flexible and exceptionally efficient. Avi Bar-Zeev's prim system is a very good early example of procedural objects and even the seriously nerfed version LL chose to implement for SL gives us a climpse of the possibilities.
2. Polylists. That is what we usually mean by "mesh" in Second Life. Every single detail of the geometry is stored in one big list of data. The advantages of this are of course that it gives the creator detailed control over the looks and the viewer doesn't have to do much calculation. The disadvantages are that there is a huge lot of raw data to downlaod and process, it's very inflexible when it comes to LoD models and on-the-fly modifications and it takes a modeller with a lot of technical skills to make it render efficient.
3. Template based objects. You start with a ready made preset mesh and then reshape it according to a few parameters. Sculpts, the system avatar and the system ground are good examples of this principle. SpeedTree and system vegetation (our cheap SpeedTree clone) may be other examples although I'm not sure if they should count as purely procedural. This is in every way the middle ground between procedural and polylist and a principle I feel is very much underused not only in SL but in the 3D industry as a whole.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

I'm not sure if a serious explanation is appropriate in this thread. 

But you gave a good one!

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

[Love Zhaoying]

In Hinduism, an upside-down triangle is said to represent a “Yoni”.

[ChinRey]

21 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

But you gave a good one!

Sorry

 

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, ChinRey said:

Sorry

 

Maybe an ignorant person will argue with it. Or, “but the INDUSTRY...” it!

[ChinRey]

14 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Maybe an ignorant person will argue with it. Or, “but the INDUSTRY...” it!

I especially love the "but the industry" argument - or "cutting edge" as it is called in Sansar. For those not familiar with the terms, they both mean: "This is how others did it ten years ago. If it was good enough for them back then, it's good enough for SL and Sansar today."

Edited September 28, 2018 by ChinRey

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

LL just need to hurry up and introduce voxel terrain and in-world voxel building tools.  That way we can finally move on from all the tired old mesh vs prim arguments and start listening to people complain about something new!

[JasonClandestino]

I just bought a 1 prim bomb.

It's 1 prim if it's 40 meters tall.

It's 1 prim if it's 1 meter suggested "small".

It's a 1 prim bomb!!

I noticed there's a 1 prim sculpted keg on the marketplace as well. Can you imagine the volume of beer in a 40 meter tall 1 prim keg?! I'm not sure the Meshed Up Brewers could handle all the beer contained in a 1 prim keg!

"Duh" would fall out of their mouths a few times, huh?

^.^

 

What do you think?

Edited October 7, 2018 by JasonClandestino

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

On 10/7/2018 at 4:20 PM, JasonClandestino said:

Can you imagine the volume of beer in a 40 meter tall 1 prim keg?! I'm not sure the Meshed Up Brewers could handle all the beer contained in a 1 prim keg!

[...]

What do you think?

Here's what I think:

I think the beer is only imaginary, and it definitely won't get me drunk.

Here's what I also think:

Mesh object land impact sucks big time at a larger scale. Sculpties can change shape by scripts, and they are faster to render on slow computers (together with low-poly mesh objects). But those are the only advantages of sculpties.

Sculpties are limited to 1024 vertices, the UV topology sucks bigtime (everything has to be mapped to a rectangle or a square). A mesh object has only 1 face. Complex shapes such as branching structures texture really badly, having multiple holes in a sculpt is almost impossible. They have a fixed physics shape, most of the time not corresponding to the visual shape.

Mesh is limited to 65536 vertices, the UV topology can be anything the creator desires. A mesh object has 8 faces to texture. Shapes can be infinitely more complex than with sculpties. Mesh objects can also have up to 12800%* more detail per land impact. The physics shape can be anywhere from simple to having the same complexity as the visual shape.

Consequently, sculpties are less detailed and for most purposes uglier than mesh objects, they are harder to make and harder to texture. Although mesh has not been a blessing for people with very old computers and creators who refuse to learn to make mesh, it is a blessing to the majority of SL creators and customers alike. It has dramatically increased the overall visual quality of Second Life. The visual quality of many of the avatars in SL in particular, is better than those of avatars in top-level computer games.

* ((65536/1024)/.5 LI (minimum) per upload) x 100% = 12800%, percentage unit chosen for dramatic effect

Edited October 8, 2018 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[ChinRey]

8 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Mesh object land impact sucks big time at a larger scale. Sculpties can change shape by scripts, and they are faster to render on slow computers (together with low-poly mesh objects). But those are the only advantages of sculpties.

There is one more. I mentioned it earlier in the thread and it may actually be significant under certain conditions.

A 1024 vertice sculpt shape requires about 12.5 Kb of raw data to be transferred from servers to client. (That's for the shape itself, not including rotation, scale, location, texturing, and any special prim property effects -these are the same for sculpts, meshes and prims). It actually only needs about 3 Kb - the rest is due to dodgy programming - and it usually uses a bit more than 16 Kb since sculpt maps tend to include alpha channels.

I'm not sure how much raw data the same shape would need as mesh but it's at least 120 Kb - almost ten times as much as the sculpt - probably considerably more.

Any prim shape can be defined by 14 bytes - 0.014 Kb of data although it probably uses a few bytes more.

That's uncopressed data but as I said earleir in the thread, the compression rate should be about the same for sculpts and for mesh.

When I joined SL in 2013, I was told by somebody who seemed to know what they were talking about that SL used very little bandwidth. These days I hear it uses more bandwidth than streamed video. I can't imagine that change is only due to the icnreased use of mesh but it must have been important and in any case, it means bandwidth limits can be a significant limiting factor on the performance. When that happens, more sculpts and less prims may well be the medicine.