Mesh poly madness

[ChinRey]

There's this persistent myth that we need complex meshes to get good visual quality. Do we?

This is not a test and probably not a very good illustration, it's just something I stumbled across yesterday. I was adding some rowan trees to a parcel I have on an opensim grid and one of them ended up in front of some trees on the neighbor parcel. Here's how it looks at the moment:

I should probably recolor my rowan a bit to make it blend in a little bit better but apart from that, I hope you agree that is doesn't look particularly low on details or out of place compared to the trees.

The rowan is a mesh with 24 triangles. The trees in the background add up to about 30,000. Here is how they look when selected:

Of course a group of large trees needs a more elaborate mesh than a single small one but 30,000 is absurd. 1,000 is what we should expect given the looks and amount of details. To make matters even worse, the creator of the trees is actually known for her low lag meshes and with good reason. Compared to what most mesh plant makers in SL and opensim deliver, her plants are actually very well optimized.

Now, if those trees had been made by a beginner or a casual mesh maker, it wouldn't have been understandable. But they weren't. They were made by a "skilled" creator with tons of experience and one who claims to know how to make efficient mesh. It's ridiulous and I simply can't understand why. Optimizing mesh for a good performance-vs-appearance ratio requires some skills and relevant info isn't always easy to find. But it's hardly rocket science.

Edited April 6, 2019 by ChinRey

[sirhc DeSantis]

Ah. Another " All your stuff is awful and everything you do is rubbish " post but with an OS twist.

Makes me wonder why I bother making stuff any more - then again the number of active users versus the usual suspects in this corner reminds me

[ChinRey]

55 minutes ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

Ah. Another " All your stuff is awful and everything you do is rubbish " post but with an OS twist.

And it won't be the last.

But perhaps you can explain your opinion about this. I can't remember to have seen any good arguments why it's perfectly ok for experienced content creators to load down the grid with high poly mesh. I'm not talking about beginners or casual builders, that's a completely different topic.

 

55 minutes ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

then again the number of active users versus the usual suspects in this corner reminds me

Careful there! How about the number of former active users who gave up because SL became too laggy for them to enjoy?

Edited April 6, 2019 by ChinRey

[Kikkos]

On 4/6/2019 at 10:28 PM, sirhc DeSantis said:

Ah. Another " All your stuff is awful and everything you do is rubbish " post but with an OS twist.

Makes me wonder why I bother making stuff any more - then again the number of active users versus the usual suspects in this corner reminds me

It seem to me pretty reasonable to be appalled by the fact that this particular model is using 30k tris when it could of gotten away with far far less.

Keep in mind that most of the performance issue that SL have been plagued by through the years stem from the very fact, among others, that a lot of user uploaded content are ill-optimized.

It's good to showcase examples of what is considered bad to future prostective content creators so that we all are not forced to have to render the lag inducing abomination that they produce.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 4/7/2019 at 1:09 AM, ChinRey said:

Careful there! How about the number of former active users who gave up because SL became too laggy for them to enjoy?

I'm a firm believer that this is also the kind of thing that condition secondlife usages. Residents used to be a lot more "mobile" years ago, but as content became longer and longer to load, we've been moving less and less.

It's a miracle that sailing and driving is still somewhat enjoyable. So yeah, we could have a lot more activities around the grid if it wasn't so punishing to partake in them.

[BiroIsHere]

true is - trees in sl cause HUGE lags lol. I bet its cuz alot textures and complexity there + alot alpha channel usage there. I bet it aslo possible to retopology it so it would use less trins. 

[ChinRey]

On 4/27/2019 at 5:08 PM, BiroIsHere said:

true is - trees in sl cause HUGE lags lol. I bet its cuz alot textures and complexity there + alot alpha channel usage there. I bet it aslo possible to retopology it so it would use less trins. 

It definitely is. Take a look at this fairly typical SL birch:

It's a quickie, I'd have to tweak both textures and meshes a bit to finsh it but I'm not really into finishing bulds these days so I probably won't. I dare say it already looks just as good as the similar style trees that are for sale in SL today - it only has proper LoD and less lag - so it should be enough to prove my point.

75 triangles, 88 vertices and two 512x512 textures. Alpha masked but still quite windlight resistant. Looking good at any view distance with any graphics settings. Stays at 1 LI even when scaled up to 16 m height , 2 LI even at ridiculous sizes.

It's not even difficult if you're a skilled SL content creator and I think this is the quality the commercial SL plant makers should have delivered.

Edited May 4, 2019 by ChinRey

[BiroIsHere]

On 5/4/2019 at 9:42 PM, ChinRey said:

It definitely is. Take a look at this fairly typical SL birch:

It's a quickie, I'd have to tweak both textures and meshes a bit to finsh it but I'm not really into finishing bulds these days so I probably won't. I dare say it already looks just as good as the similar style trees that are for sale in SL today - it only has proper LoD and less lag - so it should be enough to prove my point.

75 triangles, 88 vertices and two 512x512 textures. Alpha masked but still quite windlight resistant. Looking good at any view distance with any graphics settings. Stays at 1 LI even when scaled up to 16 m height , 2 LI even at ridiculous sizes.

It's not even difficult if you're a skilled SL content creator and I think this is the quality the commercial SL plant makers should have delivered.

Sad is that most customers cares only how stuffs looks. They dont care about polys and textures and lags at all. 

Edited May 6, 2019 by BiroIsHere

[Kyrah Abattoir]

They would care if only LL instated hard limits.

At least animesh was a step in the right direction.

[Dean Haystack]

On 4/7/2019 at 12:09 AM, ChinRey said:

Careful there! How about the number of former active users who gave up because SL became too laggy for them to enjoy?

I know several.
I also know people that come into SL, set all preferences to max because that's what they do in every video game, drop their jaws when they see that gives them 15 FPS, go away and don't come back.

The problem is, content creators end up in [censored] contests and to exacerbate the issue, users will "give the crown" to the one that goes more over the top and label that as "high quality."

Here's an example of a little prop that even in the most modern best looking video game would have a fraction of the geometry and texture detail shown here:

 

[Coffee Pancake]

That's called "Oh look I found a model .. I will upload it to SL and make easy money."

There is zero chance the creator of those had SL or any real time platform in mind. But who cares !

[Kyrah Abattoir]

9 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

That's called "Oh look I found a model .. I will upload it to SL and make easy money."

There is zero chance the creator of those had SL or any real time platform in mind. But who cares !

To me this is what we call a portfolio piece. A perverse kind of exercise some modelers partake in, thinking that this demonstrates their skill.

All it does is demonstrate that they do art that "looks" like game art but doesn't function as that.

[BiroIsHere]

but cant say those cigs looks rly nice, its aslo looks like made for render visualisation than for game from 2003. Aslo i think 90 % of ppl wont zoom at it so much 

[ChinRey]

36 minutes ago, BiroIsHere said:

Aslo i think 90 % of ppl wont zoom at it so much 

That's the point. Hardly anybody will ever see those details because they are only visible at point blank distance. But they still use processing time, bandwidth and VRAM - resources that would have been better used on detais that are actually visible. Not much - one such item isn't going to make any noticeable difference - but they do tend to hunt in pakcs and it adds up fast.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 5/15/2019 at 4:52 PM, BiroIsHere said:

but cant say those cigs looks rly nice, its aslo looks like made for render visualisation than for game from 2003. Aslo i think 90 % of ppl wont zoom at it so much 

2003? Or a game from 2019, or even the (distant) 2030.