How taxing are mesh bodies on resources?

[Ultima Cloud]

Reason I ask is I wonder if it would be possible to develop clothing that has similar capabilities as bodies where they could have gridded out areas that you could alpha in order to match them with other outfits. For instance you find a nice coat but cannot find a shirt to match with it since the coat is well rigged and tight to the body making parts of the shirt stick through it where you don't want it to. If the shirt had a similar alpha grid to mesh bodies I could just hide the portion or portions of the shirt that I don't want to be visible.

So how taxing are mesh bodies on resources and would something like this (if possible) just be another cog in the wheel that is SL?

[Gabriele Graves]

Each mesh object can only have a small number of faces (8 I think) and needs a face for each individual section that can be set to alpha.  That means mesh bodies that support individual alpha sections are comprised of a bunch of linked mesh objects to give enough faces to alpha.  A mesh body that doesn't support those alpha sections might have only a couple of faces and be a single mesh object.  I would imagine from a memory perspective the impact is minimal.  It would be process and graphics card performance that would be impacted but to what degree, I could not say.  I suspect that with one such linked mesh body being rendered there isn't a much of an impact but with many it would become to be noticeable at some point.  Obviously if then those mesh bodies were wrapped in mesh clothing layers that were similarly setup, the impact rises somewhat but to what degree, I could not say.

Currently with the Maitreya mesh body, there is the core body and up to three layers that can be worn.  The body and layers each have many sections exactly for the purpose of being able to alpha out parts of the body.  In a previous version of that body, all of those layers were linked and you had to carry all of them around whilst wearing the body.  So that was pretty much normal for many users of that body.  That seems pretty similar already to your idea except in your idea, you would potentially add, what? say another two or three layers of clothing that have sections?  Maybe clothing would have less sections than a mesh body though?

Everything is relative to the capabilities of the computer being used though.  There is a huge difference between the processing power of the worst and best computers being used for SL.
Hopefully, while it doesn't give you a definitive exact answer, maybe this information is useful to you to decide the potential impact it might have.
 

[Ultima Cloud]

Oh okay. I never thought they were linked meshed objects. Ive always assumed they were just faces made alpha. Ya I can't imagine someone wanting to do that for every piece of clothing they crank out.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

15 hours ago, Ultimo Constantineau said:

Oh okay. I never thought they were linked meshed objects. Ive always assumed they were just faces made alpha.

They are faces made alpha. But one object can only have 8 faces. For this reason, big-selling brand name mesh bodies are assembled from multiple linked objects (or are multiple separate objects worn together, I guess) so they can have more than 6 or 7 alpha panels across the entire thing.

To answer your original question: yes, clothing can have alpha panels. There's no difference between rigged mesh clothing and a rigged mesh body from SL's perspective.

(BTW: making a face invisible by setting Transparency to 100% flags the object as "an object that uses alpha blending", which quadruples its rendering complexity rating. If the object does not actually use partial transparency anywhere, you can avoid this quadrupling by setting the face to a transparent texture and using Alpha Masking mode with a 255 cutoff.)

Edited November 9, 2020 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[Ultima Cloud]

3 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

(BTW: making a face invisible by setting Transparency to 100% flags the object as "an object that uses alpha blending", which quadruples its rendering complexity rating. If the object does not actually use partial transparency anywhere, you can avoid this quadrupling by setting the face to a transparent texture and using Alpha Masking mode with a 255 cutoff.)

This is actually very useful information. Thanks so much for your response.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Note that those many separate sections are still not free compared to a "single piece" mesh.

Models are fed for rendering one by one but there is some incompressible overhead to each onbe of them, think of it like carrying drinks in glasses, it doesn't matter how much of each drink you are carrying, they all need their own glass, even if it's just for a single drop.

Computers generally prefer data they can treat in bulk, it is faster to copy a single 10mb file than a thousand 10kb file.

[Ultima Cloud]

8 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Note that those many separate sections are still not free compared to a "single piece" mesh.

Models are fed for rendering one by one but there is some incompressible overhead to each onbe of them, think of it like carrying drinks in glasses, it doesn't matter how much of each drink you are carrying, they all need their own glass, even if it's just for a single drop.

Computers generally prefer data they can treat in bulk, it is faster to copy a single 10mb file than a thousand 10kb file.

Yes this is what I figured. Maybe some day we can have grids on our clothing as well. xD. I think it's possible now but if it became a fad I can't imagine what life would be like in a crowded sim.