Avatar Complexity?

[Amorenna Bae]

Hey all, sorry if this is a question that's already been asked/answered, couldn't find it.

I use Firestorm.

I noticed that avatar's complexity ratings vary drastically depending on mesh and the like, but it brings to question my own avatar that is fully mesh, jewelry, rings, etc and rarely has a complexity count higher than about 40-45k. 

Can someone possibly help me understand why some of the (usually female) avatars walk about with 100k+ all the time? They take forever to load (I'm not running a potato, mind you!) I have my complexity rendering capped at 350k - Firestorm's default setting, which seemed reasonable - and I run into people even that high every now and then. Do they want to be seen, or what? And what exactly are they attaching aside from clothing/jewelry/hair that makes their counts so high? I'm obviously not trying to emulate that sort of count, but I am indeed curious, lol.

Thanks ahead of time for not biting me for asking. (I'm looking at you, ya meanies.)

[Resi Pfeffer]

No one is going to bite you for a question like this.
High complexity is caused by the use of a lot of attachments, and even more by old and/or poorly created attachments. And because thats all i know, i hope, someone else will tell us more details about

[Blush Bravin]

This can be due to older clothing, hair, and jewelry made from a huge number of prims linked together such as flexi skirts and old style flexi hair, but it can just as easily be caused from poorly made mesh with very high complexity. You can see how the numbers are affected as you dress. Watch your complexity count as you add things to your outfit. Part of my demo process, besides being sure that whatever I'm demoing works well while dancing, is to check how the item affects my complexity. I actually have some flexi hair that is lower in complexity than some poorly made mesh hair (I deleted that mesh hair btw).

[Syo Emerald]

Its not a question of what they are attaching in the sense of what the item is supposed to represent (hair, clothes, jewelry...), but how well the item is made in terms of texture usage. This can affect both mesh and non-mesh items, although you'll find more badly made non-mesh products, because they tend to be older.

Some people chose to ignore that feature, either because they see it as unnecessary, don't understand it or because they don't want to part with certain items. Some may also think of themself as so beautiful and precious, that they believe others will render them, because they are worth it.

Edited November 2, 2018 by Syo Emerald

[Blush Bravin]

1 minute ago, Syo Emerald said:

Its not a question of what they are attaching in the sense of what the item is supposed to represent (hair, clothes, jewelry...),

I used hair, clothes, jewelry as they are the biggest offenders in the older prim based objects. Of course it doesn't matter what the object is that you are attaching. They ALL affect complexity.

[Amorenna Bae]

12 minutes ago, Resi Pfeffer said:

No one is going to bite you for a question like this.
High complexity is caused by the use of a lot of attachments, and even more by old and/or poorly created attachments. And because thats all i know, i hope, someone else will tell us more details about 

Ok this makes sense and didn't even consider it. Thank you!

12 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

This can be due to older clothing, hair, and jewelry made from a huge number of prims linked together such as flexi skirts and old style flexi hair, but it can just as easily be caused from poorly made mesh with very high complexity. You can see how the numbers are affected as you dress. Watch your complexity count as you add things to your outfit. Part of my demo process, besides being sure that whatever I'm demoing works well while dancing, is to check how the item affects my complexity. I actually have some flexi hair that is lower in complexity than some poorly made mesh hair (I deleted that mesh hair btw).

I have gathered from my time in SL that mesh has changed a lot of things about the way SL works/loads for most people.

[Syo Emerald]

55 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

I used hair, clothes, jewelry as they are the biggest offenders in the older prim based objects. Of course it doesn't matter what the object is that you are attaching. They ALL affect complexity.

When I started to write my text, there was no other reply yet (those came shortly before I hit send). I was refering to this:

1 hour ago, Amorenna said:

And what exactly are they attaching aside from clothing/jewelry/hair that makes their counts so high?

Which implied that there must be some sort of obeject out ot the norm that drives the complexity up.

[Alyona Su]

I suspect textures have something to do with it. I once put on a mixed mesh/prim outfit and complexity score shot to over 600,000 (!) After trial and error and investigating it was a *single* flexi arm attachment - a prim (flattened cube) - that one item alone was 525000 (!) And totally optional. This is another reason I won't buy ANYTHING costing more than 25L without a demo first. it's not just how it fits anymore. It's that rendering score. I saw a hair I fell in love with. Score: 160000. Umm, no.

[Nalates Urriah]

There is an official explanation of ACI here: Avatar Rendering Complexity ACI & ARC are about the same thing. The change in name is just an over time thing. The calc's did change with the name change.

We now have ARCTan coming. This is a change in how avatar rendering cost will be calculated. Development of Animesh increased awareness of how ACI/ARC has gotten out of touch with real rendering cost... again. Hardware improves and what was hard and time consuming is addressed and becomes fast and easy. Other things are then the target of what to improve next. The Lindens will be revising the algorithm to reflect those changes. 

You'll see a number of things are in the calc of ACI, number of polygons, texture count and size, and size of the item. One big contributor is sculpties. These are an oddity to SL that preceded mesh. They were often used for making hair, clothes, and jewelry. Mesh is a more efficient replacement.

Hidden from the user is the LoD factor of clothes. LoD is Level of Detail, a serious factor in 3D graphics performance. SL uses 4 Levels of Detail. 1 for close up, 1 for 'normal', 1 for further away, and one for way over there... The close up needs lots of polygons to look correct and show detail. Your viewer needs very few polygons to render an earring on an avatar across the region, 200+ meters away, which would be the way-over-there level of detail. Pro modelers know that and build 4 models of anything they put in a virtual world. Each model has fewer polygons and less detail. 

The current LoD calc doesn't handle the LoD of clothes on avatars in a realistic way. The result is way more polygons are used than are generally needed. Often the hi-poly LOD is used for all 4 levels. That means those 100,000 polygon finely detailed earrings have to be rendered by the viewer even if the avatar is so far away the earring uses only 3 pixels on your screen. A total waste of rendering time. Supposedly this will be improved in ARCTan. This should push designers to make better LoD models for levels 2 to 4 and improve our performance.

[Panteleeva]

everytime i see people with complexity more than 200.000 i leave sim for a bit,hehe

[AyelaNewLife]

This thread reminded me to check my own complexity; it's normally fine, but I was wearing a bit of a quirky outfit (think Mad Max). Turns out my goggles have five times the complexity of my mesh body, and three times that of my mesh head, and fourteen times that of my mesh hair. At least according to the LL/Firestorm complexity count; Black Dragon's alternative rating (which is much closer to ARCTan) rates the goggles as what they actually are (relatively insignificant), and slams my mesh body/head/hair for the actual rendering impact they have, rather than pretending that some jeans are more taxing than hair. It was however also penalising the bits of armour I was wearing pretty highly, which is fair, it's exceptionally detailed with chains and spikes everywhere.

Edited November 7, 2018 by AyelaNewLife

[Lindal Kidd]

8 hours ago, Panteleeva said:

everytime i see people with complexity more than 200.000 i leave sim for a bit,hehe

Don't do that!  If you set your Complexity slider in Preferences/Graphics to 200,000, those high-complexity people become colored jelly doll "avatar imposters" and stop affecting your viewer's performance.

Make the fashionistas pay for their insensitivity, don't let them drive you away from places you want to be!

I have mixed feelings about that Complexity slider, myself.  I have some really pretty things that I used to wear often...but when Complexity became a thing, I found they were awfully Complex, and most people couldn't even see how cute I was!  One of the worst offenders was a beautiful set of blue and silver jewelry from Chop Zuey.  Some of my beautiful formal gowns were also way up there, and some of my favorite hair styles (both mesh and flexi!)

Nowadays, because I want everyone to see me in all my glory, I keep an eye on complexity when dressing, and try to keep everything below 150K.

[Madelaine McMasters]

My little devil avi runs around 120K. 68K of that is my trident, made of 34 standard prims.

My human avi, in a typical outfit, runs around 120K. 68K of that is my hair, made of 255 sculpties.

[Phorumities]

9 hours ago, Panteleeva said:

everytime i see people with complexity more than 200.000 i leave sim for a bit,hehe

set your max avatar render limit as low as possible, then unjelly people one at a time, judge them, then either keep them rendered or rejelly them. It will give you something to do beside reading all the gesture spam that floods local chat in some clubs.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

My little devil avi runs around 120K. 68K of that is my trident, made of 34 standard prims.

My human avi, in a typical outfit, runs around 120K. 68K of that is my hair, made of 255 sculpties.

Found what looks like your devil on the MP, I guess you have the male (red eyes) vs. female (pink eyes)?

[Madelaine McMasters]

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Found what looks like your devil on the MP, I guess you have the male (red eyes) vs. female (pink eyes)?

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Oops sowwy

[Madelaine McMasters]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Oops sowwy

...sets you on fire.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

...sets you on fire.

Wonders if you are “Random Person” who sells li’l debil!

*burns*

[Alyona Su]

57 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

If you set your Complexity slider in Preferences/Graphics to 200,000, those high-complexity people become colored jelly doll "avatar imposters" and stop affecting your viewer's performance.

Isn't the default like 125k or 150k or something?

(For everyone else not familiar): Also - even if you set it to zero (or whatever minimum is) you can turn on the checkbox to always render friends and if you see a JellyDoll (some are lime, other are strawberry, I don't know why) - you can always right-click on them and choose to render if you're that curious.

[Lindal Kidd]

Yes, I think most people's default is a bit over 100K, but that may vary...I think some viewers set the default depending on one's graphics card.  The use of "Unlimited" should be avoided, to protect against graphics crashers (which have complexities in the millions!)

[HarrisonMcKenzie]

On 11/2/2018 at 11:46 PM, Amorenna said:

Can someone possibly help me understand why some of the (usually female) avatars walk about with 100k+ all the time? 

Because those people don't know what they're doing and/or are using old *****ty garbage and full attachment points. I run at around 60k, and got booted from a sim once for having too high of a complexity.

I brought this up with some friends and had everyone strip down and slowly add their hair and such back. The older guys were really surprised that they had some heavy items like flexy hair and old jewelry but never really though about it.

Edited November 9, 2018 by HarrisonMcKenzie

[Fionalein]

5 hours ago, HarrisonMcKenzie said:

Because those people don't know what they're doing and/or are using old *****ty garbage and full attachment points.

as  @ChinRey pointed out the complexity calculation is broken, mabye you are wearin the straining stuff and don't even know about it. Outdated stuff? yes "*****ty garbage"? needs to be prooven...

Edited November 9, 2018 by Fionalein

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Fionalein said:

as  @ChinRey pointed out the complexity calculation is proben, mabye you are wearin the straing stuff and don't even know baout it. Outdated stuff? yes "*****ty garbage"? needs to be prooven...

Oh yes.

Here's the explanation:

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/419469-rigged-mesh-lod-bug/

and

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/419469-rigged-mesh-lod-bug/

I know, those are long threads and rather technical too but to sum it up, that "old *****ty garbage" isn't nearly as laggy compared to fitted mesh as the complexity numbers indicate.  To compare the two fairly, you have to at least double or even quadruple the compexity number of the fitted mesh. That is 60,000 ARC worth of citted mesh equals 120,000-240,000 ARC worth of "old *****ty garbage". That's not an exaggeration, it's actually a very conservative estimate. Some 60,000 ARC mesh avatars may well be laggier than any classic avatar ever seen in SL.

[Amorenna Bae]

7 hours ago, ChinRey said:

 

I know, those are long threads and rather technical too but to sum it up, that "old *****ty garbage" isn't nearly as laggy compared to fitted mesh as the complexity numbers indicate.  To compare the two fairly, you have to at least double or even quadruple the compexity number of the fitted mesh. That is 60,000 ARC worth of citted mesh equals 120,000-240,000 ARC worth of "old *****ty garbage". That's not an exaggeration, it's actually a very conservative estimate. Some 60,000 ARC mesh avatars may well be laggier than any classic avatar ever seen in SL.

It seems so interesting to me that the avatar complexity counts are so inaccurate. Why have the number at all? Is there perhaps some aspect of this number that can't be calculated or recorded with the so-called "onion avatars", ie with the appliers and such? Appliers seem to take the longest out of anything to load anyway when all is said and done.