Mesh at Lowest LOD

[animats]

High fashion at low LOD. This is what an SL fashion event looks like at LOD factor zero. In Firestorm, go to the Firestorm menu in the bottom bar and set "LOD Factor" to 0 to see this.

I've been looking at the rigged mesh bug LOD Beq Janus reported, to see what was possible in that area. One reason SL chokes when too many avatars are in view is that every worn rigged mesh item, no matter how small, is rendered at the LOD appropriate to it being the full size of the avatar. Every detail on your bracelets and rings is rendered if you're way across the room. That's no good.

So I'm looking at clothing at the lowest LOD. I was worried that clothing would drop out and expose too much skin if the LOD algorithm was tweaked to not show every attachment at highest LOD. But what seems to happen is that both the clothing and skin mostly disappear, leaving random triangles like those above. Looks awful.

These were just random avatars that happened to be at a fashion event. I went to the main store of a Big Name Skin Creator, and it wasn't any better there. It looks like the skin vendors aren't even trying to create lower LODs. Which, since they're very rarely displayed, is not surprising.

I've seen only one item of clothing that looks good at lowest LOD, and it's a red dress by Exotic Mole, a sculpt I think.

What an avatar should look like at lowest LOD. See the one in white and the one in blue in the windows? Barely visible, but clearly characters, not jaggy triangles.

 

What those two really looked like at lowest LOD. The viewer is at LOD factor 0 here, so we can see them at lowest LOD in close-up. These are actually animesh, constructed to have somewhat reasonable lowest LODs. Animesh don't get the LOD boosts of avatars, so they need better low-detail models. Lowest LOD skins and heads ought to look at least this good. No reason they can't. This shows what's possible.

This is part of why SL chokes in crowded spaces. It would be easy enough to fix the viewer's excessively high LOD settings for avatars; both Beq and I have looked at the code for doing that. People would scream at the results.

Arctan was supposed to be a LL project to fix this, but they hit the same problem.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 23, 2020 by animats

[Wulfie Reanimator]

I kind of prefer the floating triangles, honestly...

[animats]

12 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

I kind of prefer the floating triangles, honestly...

It looks awful in close-up, but when it's tiny on screen, OK. You'd never get that close-up a view in normal use.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

On 5/22/2020 at 8:23 PM, animats said:

These are actually animesh, constructed to have somewhat reasonable lowest LODs.

How so? I thought "animesh" referred to mesh items that have their own custom skeleton. An animesh sweatshirt wouldn't bend with the avatar as it moved its spine or arms.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

54 minutes ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

How so? I thought "animesh" referred to mesh items that have their own custom skeleton. An animesh sweatshirt wouldn't bend with the avatar as it moved its spine or arms.

I think you missed the part where he said "this is what avatars should look like." They aren't avatars, that wasn't the point.

As for my previous comment, it was very tongue-in-cheek. I agree with everything that was said but this is also kind of preaching to the choir.

[OptimoMaximo]

8 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

How so? I thought "animesh" referred to mesh items that have their own custom skeleton. An animesh sweatshirt wouldn't bend with the avatar as it moved its spine or arms

You're missing the fact that you can't get anything like custom skeletons, it's still the same base avatar skeleton as your regular user avatar, just flagged as a different class of object that enables the animesh feature. Indeed if you turn off the animesh flag and wear the animesh, it starts deforming along with your avatar. When turning it on and attaching it to yourself, what you're basically doing is to attach a second avatar to your main one.