Plants, lag and a new classification system for vegetation

[ChinRey]

This is a crossposting from the forum of a well known opensim grid. It's really supposed to be for one of my blogs but I'm posting it on forums first because I don't claim to have all the answers and hope to get some comments and corrections from others.

Plants are often said to be very heavy to render. People talk about "grass lag" and at a meeting a few months ago opensim developer Ubit Umarov went as far as saying he wished there was no plants on opensim apart from the system vegetation because of this. He was exaggerating a little bit there of course but he did have a point. But I love making elaborate natural landscapes that feel as "real" as possible. That means a lot of vegetation of course, far more than you usually see in an opensim region, and my regions still never have any such performance issues.

There are several reasons for that but the most important one is to use the right kind of vegetation for each job. Fill up your sim to the brink with high poly mesh vegetation and you're asking for trouble. Fill it up with old style crossed prims and it looks cheap and tacky. But it's not easy for the average user to determine which is which. So I've been working on a classification system to help. And while I was at it, I added a few other important points as well.

It's important to note that this is not about quality. All six classes have their place in a well made virtual environment. That being said, Class C and D are by far the ones with the widest range of functionality. As a rule of thumb, if 75-95% of your plants are Class C/D, you be onto something, if not, you probably aren't.

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TL;DR (and some terminology)

This is a long article so I start with a quick(ish) summary of the most important points:

• Triangle (tri) count: The total number of tris the mesh/prims/sculpts are made from. The acceptable number of tris for a plant depends a lot on its size of course. (A single prim will typically have about 12-50 tris, a single sculpt will nearly always have about 2048, a single mesh can have anything from one to 65,536.)
• Megapixels: The total number of pixels the textures, normal maps and specular maps contains. You can increase the megapixel limit a lot by re-using the same textures for several plants since it's mainly the total number of them in a scene that matters. There is a table of various texture sizes towards the end of the article.

Regardless of the functionality, less is always more when it comes to lag so the figures here are approximate maximum numbers - if you can get them lower it's all for the better. On Firestorm you get these number when you right click on an object and select "Inspect". Unfortunately the official SL viewer doesn't have a function like that, leaving the poor user in the dark.

The six classes are:

• Class A For those few extra-super-very-special spots
  • Max tris per plant:
    • Small plants: 100
    • Medium sized plants: 300
    • Large plants (trees): 20,000
  • Max megapixels per plant: 10 for trees,
• Class B For the extra exposed locations
  • Max tris per plant:
    • Small plants: 50
    • Medium sized plants: 150
    • Large plants (trees):  1,000
    • Max megapixels per plant: 2
• Class C The "bread and butter" of SL vegetation
  • Max tris per plant:
    • Small plants: 25
    • Medium sized plants: 75
    • Large plants (trees): 500
  • Max megapixels per plant: 1
• Class D  "Bread and butter" with a quantity discount. Class D plants don't always work but when they do, they give a better visual quality/computing cost ratio than any other classes.
  • Max tris per plant:
    • Small plants: 12
    • Medium sized plants: 30
    • Large plants (trees): 100
  • Max megapixels per plant: 0.5
• Class E For the places people can see but never visit
  • Max tris per plant:
    • Small plants: 10
    • Medium sized plants: 25
    • Large plants (trees): 25
  • Max megapixels per plant: <0.5
• Class F Pure background
  • Max tris per plant:
    • Small plants: <1
    • Medium sized plants: <1
    • Large plants (trees): <1
  • Max megapixels per plant: <0.1

Some other important points:

• Alpha masking is far less laggy than alpha blending and this is even more important than triangle and pixel count for client-side lag. Some plants simly don't work with alpha masking but you really, really, really don't want to use many of those, if any at all. A dozen plants with alpha blending in a scene may well be too much.
• Plants are usually supposed to be visible from afar and unless they are in very secluded places, they need proper LoD. They should at least look good at 128 m distance with LoD factor set to 2 (that's the default draw distance and LoD factor for Firestorm).

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The classes

Class A - Feature plants

Plants that are intended to grab the watcher's attention, either because they are particularly detailed or because they have some special features (such as trees with especially elaborate trunks).

Poly- and pixelcounts

The number of polys and pixels doesn't really matter too much for such plants since you shouldn't use many of them anyway (too many stars in the show only leads to fighting) but you don't want to waste resources either. Some plants only need a dozen or so tris and a single 512x512 texture, others, especially large trees, may require tens of thousands of tris and two, three or even more megapixels.

Physics

Class A trees ought to at least have solid trunks you can't walk through and may even need physics for some of the larger branches. Ideally you don't want medium sized plants you can walk right through either. Small plants should always be phantom.

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Class B - Foreground plants

Plants you have to cam in on before you notice any lack of details and even if you do, they don't look too bad.

Poly- and pixelcounts

Small Class B plants shouldn't have more than about 50 tris per plants, medium sized ones (bushes etc.) may have 100-150 while big trees can have 500-1,000 and still count Class B. Usually you don't want more than 0.5-1 megapixels for a Class B plant but you can get away with a little bit more if textures are re-used for several plants.

Physics

When it comes to physics, Class B is pretty much the same as Class A.

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Class C - Standard plants

I sometimes call them "playground plants". Less laggy than class A and B but still detailed enough you have to look at them fairly closely to really notice. If you're involved in some other activity (chatting, role playing, driving a vehicle, watching the scene as a whole...) you'll never notice anything missing from them. Class C and D plants make up the bulk of the vegetation in any well optimized region.

Poly- and pixelcounts

Small Class C plants shouldn't have more than about 25 tris per plants, medium sized ones (bushes etc.) may have 50-75 while big trees can have 250-500 and still count Class C. Usually you don't want more than 0.5 megapixels for a Class C plant but you can get away with a little bit more if textures are re-used for several plants.

Physics

Class C trees ought to have solid trunks although it's usually not a disaster if they don't.. Medium sized plants may or may not have physics.

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Class D - Volume plants and accentuation plants

All plants - and all other objects too - benefit greatly from an effective context but Class D plants are the experts.

When it comes to effective visual quality they are about the same as Class C plants but by taking full advantage of the "context bonus" they can do this with much lower triangle counts. Grass and flower fields are perhaps the most obvious examples of volume plants but the concept can be taken much further than that. Trees in a dense forest and bushes in a dense shrubbery for example, don't need nearly as complex shapes as free standing ones.

As for accentuation plants, flowers around a rock or a tree stump are perhaps the best example. They don't need to be very complex because they are not the focus point, they are just there to support the real feature.

Poly- and pixelcounts

Small Class D plants shouldn't have more than about 10-12 tris per plants, medium sized ones (bushes etc.) may have 25-30. Big trees can have 50-100 and still count Class D but ideally no more than 25-50. Usually you don't want more than 0.5 megapixels for a Class D plant but you can get away with a little bit more if textures are re-used for several plants.

Physics

Ideally Class D trees have solid trunks but having that throughout an entire forest may be too much to ask for. Medium sized plants can have simple physics if the server has capacity to spare but it's not too important.

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Class E - Background plants

So low in lag and land impact you can have masses of them with no problems at all and still looking good at a casual glance or at a little bit of distance.

Poly- and pixelcounts

Small Class E plants shouldn't have more than about 5-10 tris per plants. Larger plants can have 10-25 and still count as Class E.

Physics

Class E plants should always be phantom.

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Class F - Surround vegetation

Flat billboards with pictures of plants on them. The "good old" privacy screen is of course the most typical example but it is easy to add a 3D effect simply by using several layers of billboards. It looks much better than 2D screens and hardly adds anything to the cost.

Physics

Class F plants are usually phantom but if they have simple physics, they can do double duty as blocks to discourage (although not prevent) unwanted visitors from entering. That can be a nice little bonus sometimes and physics as simple as that isn't likely to cause any issues worth speaking of.

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Some additional points

Waste not, want not

No matter what use a plant has, you don't want to waste resources; keep it as simple as possible, not more and not less. That means among other things that the same plant may well fit several classes. In extreme cases it's quite possible for a plant to be low enough in lag to qualify as Class F and still visually detailed enough to be a Class A.

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Reusable resources

Second Life and opensim don't support object instancing but it is still possible to save a lot of resources by reusing the same meshes, sculpt maps and textures for multiple objects.

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Plant groups

All the recommended tri and pixel numbers are per plant. You can save a lot by using groups of several plants combined into a single mesh, sculpt or prim.

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System vegetation

From a resource usage point of view, system vegetation tend to be Class C or D although some are pushing the limit upwards and a few are low enough to qualify as Class E. Whether they look good enough to be used today is another question. It depends much on the textures they use and they are of very varying quality.

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PMS (Prims, Meshes and Sculpts)

Plants today are mostly about mesh for very good reasons but we shouldn't completely rule out the other options:

• Polylist meshes (what we usually simply call "mesh") is by far the most useful material for vegetation nowadays but don't rule out the other two options entirely. All three have their pros and cons:
• Prims have exceptionally low bandwidth requirements, usually fairly low triangle counts and eminent LoD and are easy to handle even for fairly inexperienced content creators. Also, the sofware we use is very finely tuned to handle them as efficiently as possible. Their main downside is the limited number of shapes they offer. You often need to assemble a lot of them to construct the shape you want and that can put a lot of load on the poor assets server who has to search and find them one by one in its database.
• Sculpts give you a lot of tris at an amazingly low cost of bandwidth. Their two main disadvantages are that they give you a lot of tris whether you need them or not and that the code that handles them is very, very poorly made.

Mesh will always require far more bandwidth per tri than prims and sculpts. This is the reason why SL and openssim didn't implement them right from the start. The load they add to the rest of the system depends a lot on the skills of the creator so it's hard to give any general advice there.

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Transparency

Nearly all plants need alpha textures (that is textures with transparent parts). Opensim and Second Life support two different alpha modes: blending and masking. The difference is that with alpha masking each pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque whilst alpha blending also supports up to 254 levels of semi-transparency. Normally you want to use alpha masking since it is much less laggy and doesn't suffer from the dreaded "alpha sorting bug". Unfortunately there are some plants that only really work with alpha blending and ideally you want to avoid those. A few of them won't do any harm but it won't take many before you get into serious performance problems.

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LoD

Plants are normally supposed to be visible from afar. That means with any standard graphics setting they should look perfectly OK even at extreme view distances and never vanish before the viewer's draw distance limit. At least they should look good at 128 m with LoD factor set to 2 - that's Firestorm's decault graphcis settings. (My own standards are a lot higher than that: 1024 m with LoD factor 1 but other plant makers may argue that's overdoing it.)

However, plants with poor LoD may still be useful in secluded spaces (indoors, in narrow valleys, in walled gardens etc.). Also, it's not always realistic to expect sculpts to hold up at long distance. This is due to a mistake LL did when developing the sculpt system and something we just have to live with.

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Animation

Wind animation is a very important factor for realistic vegetation but unfortunately SL and opensim do not really have any way to do this. We can do a little bit with the animation function we have though:

• Flexiprims are the ones that can give the best wind animation. When set up right they can be very convincing. The method has three serious drawbacks though, it's hard to find the right values, it only works for prims (of course) and you can't have many flexiprims in a scene before you start getting serious performance issues.
• Ping-pong texture animation is the method I've found to be the most useful by far. It works with any texture and any prim, sculpt and mesh and it doesn't require any scripts to run (you need a script to start it but it can be deleted once the work is done). It's essentially lag free too since it's low priority work the gpu simply skips if it's too busy. The downside is that you can't have much of it before it looks "mechanical" and unnatural. Still, even the faintest hint of flickering of the leaves can do wonders for any scene and since the method has no other disadvantages, it's worth trying for everybody.
• Other more elaborate methods include slideshow texture animation, script controlled animations and animesh. I wouldn't usually recommend any of those. They typically require specially made textures and/or meshes, they add significantly to the server's and/or client's workload and you can get away with much more animation than ping-pong rotation before it becomes mechanical and unnatural. There are some situations where these elaborate animation methods do work well but they are very few.

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A few notes about textures

For those not familiar with the term, a megapixel is 1,048,576 pixels of texture. So:

• a 1024x1024 texture is 1 megapixel
• a 512x512 and a 256x1024 are both 0.25 megapixels
• a 512x1024 is 0.5 megapixels
• a 256x512 is 0.125 megapixels
• a 256x256 is 0.0625 megapixels

Don't forget that normal and specular maps are textures too. They may not be quite as heavy to render as regular textures but they still take up jsut as much badnwidth and VRAM.

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Watch out for the bottom line!

All the numbers here are just rough guidelines. To keep it simple I have not taken into account the positive effect good LoD models, object-object occlusion and quasi-mip-mapping can have. Nor have I considered the file size difference between alpha and non-alpha textures or the number of draw calls.

Most important though, is that it's the sum of it all that really matters. A few "misplaced" heavy objects are perfectly fine if the rest of the build is light enough.

A scene made from 5,000 unique meshes/sculpts, 1,000 megapixels and a million tris isn't likely to cause anybody any problems (as long as there aren't other heavy lag factors involved of course). Assign one tenth of that to your plants and with a little bit of thought and care it should be more than enough to fill a region with lush, dense vegetation and still allow everybody to set their draw distance high enough they can admire it all as a whole.

Edited December 17, 2020 by ChinRey
Correcting some formatting issues (text being autoconverted to emoticons)

[Prokofy Neva]

I recently bought some lovely trees and put them out and discovered to my horror that they were a whopping 265 prims together. And separately they were whopping as well. I couldn't understand how this can be. Shrinking it helped a bit but it was heavy to start with. So you've explained that although I will never be able to master any of this.

What I would like to know is:

o are the original Linden plants good or bad within your system?

o how about the newer Mole plants in the Bellisseria sims?

o Is mesh automatically worse?

 

[ChinRey]

Please keep in mind that the classification system is mainly about how much render resources and bandwidth it's worth to invest in plants with different functions in a scene. There are also several other objective quality factors and of course also a matter of taste and context. With that being said:

 

14 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o are the original Linden plants good or bad within your system?

In terms of resource use, they are all good for classes A-C and most also for D and E. Appearance is a much more complicated question. Linden vegetation was cutting edge back in 2003 but a lot has happened since then. 10 m max size isn't really enough for proper trees and the textures those plants use are of varying quality to put it mildly. Today we are overwhelmed by masses of plant alpha cutouts, back then they were very hard to find and LL really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with even this limited selection. The base pictures range from 19th century hand colored book illustrations to modern high res digital photos and there's no rhyme or rhythm to the range as a whole. There are some I would be quite happy to use even today while others are way outdated.

It's a bit of a shame because plants really need a special asset class like Linden plants but 17 years with no updates has taken its toll.

 

14 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o how about the newer Mole plants in the Bellisseria sims?

The trees are pure rubbish: class C visual quality at best yet with resource use fairly high even for class A. You can make them yourself if you like (but please don't). They're just straight output from a free tree generator program - I think it's this one -  uploaded with dodgy, bloated autogenerated LoD models and no regard for the physics. If they spent an hour "making" those trees, they wasted their time.

I haven't studied the other plants there but I seem to remember some serious alpha blunders and none of the Moles are very good mesh makers (except possible Silent Mole but she's mainly a scripter and doesn't build very much).

The only good Mole plant I've seen, is the Horizons cypress. But a tall, dense cypress happens to be one of the very few plants that are easy to make, even the second worst mesh plant maker in SL has a fairly decent one of those in his product range.

 

14 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o Is mesh automatically worse?

No. Since we lack a proper modern dedicated plant asset class, mesh is usually the best option. Prims and sculpts still have their place but only for some very special purposes.

For all the torturing options, prims are still euclidean geometric shapes and although those tend to be very suitable for human made objects, they don't usually work well for natural shapes.

A sculpt will nearly always have 2048 tris so if you make a single plant from a single sculpt, you're well and truly into class A feature plant territory in terms of resource use. Are they really worth that much? I think some are actually; Lilith Heart's lovely oaks for example and also many of Nadine Reverie's old sculpt trees. Sculpts can also be useful for big groups with lots of plants made from a single sculpt. But it really has to be a lot. The smallest sculpt group I have in my product range has 87 plants. That means 23.5 tris per plant, perfectly good for medium-sized and large class D volume plants and also appropriate for large class E background plants.

But there is mesh and then there is mesh. Most plants have far more complex shapes than anything else a 3D modeler usually is asked to produce. On top of that, they are chaotic shapes which are always harder to do well than more systematic ones. You have to be very conscious about what details to do as mesh, which to do as textures and which to leave out completely. It's a highly specialized skill and some of the best professional and semi-professional mesh makers I know flatly refuse to do plants because they don't feel they can do them well enough.

I can understand why. My plants, whether they are simple crossed sheet ones or elaborate trees, have a visual appearance vs performance way beyond what anybody else can match. People like Teresa Matfield, Alex Bader, JubJub Forder, Ozwell Wayfarer, Reid Parkin and Eldon Inshan make plants that are far more performant than the regular SL plants but even they can't match my plants in that respect. But when I think about how much time I've spent learning those specialized skills with such limited use, it easily adds up to two whole years of full time work. Has it been worth it? The only honest answer is of course no.

Edited February 9, 2021 by ChinRey

[Prokofy Neva]

10 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Please keep in mind that the classification system is mainly about how much render resources and bandwidth it's worth to invest in plants with different functions in a scene. There are also several other objective quality factors and of course also a matter of taste and context. With that being said:

 

In terms of resource use, they are all good for classes A-C and most also for D and E. Appearance is a much more complicated question. Linden vegetation was cutting edge back in 2003 but a lot has happened since then. 10 m max size isn't really enough for proper trees and the textures those plants use are of varying quality to put it mildly. Today we are overwhelmed by masses of plant alpha cutouts, back then they were very hard to find and LL really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with even this limited selection. The base pictures range from 19th century hand colored book illustrations to modern high res digital photos and there's no rhyme or rhythm to the range as a whole. There are some I would be quite happy to use even today while others are way outdated.

It's a bit of a shame because plants really need a special asset class like Linden plants but 17 years with no updates has taken its toll.

 

The trees are pure rubbish: class C visual quality at best yet with resource use fairly high even for class A. You can make them yourself if you like (but please don't). They're just straight output from a free tree generator program - I think it's this one -  uploaded with dodgy, bloated autogenerated LoD models and no regard for the physics. If they spent an hour "making" those trees, they wasted their time.

I haven't studied the other plants there but I seem to remember some serious alpha blunders and none of the Moles are very good mesh makers (except possible Silent Mole but she's mainly a scripter and doesn't build very much).

The only good Mole plant I've seen, is the Horizons cypress. But a tall, dense cypress happens to be one of the very few plants that are easy to make, even the second worst mesh plant maker in SL has a fairly decent one of those in his product range.

 

No. Since we lack a proper modern dedicated plant asset class, mesh is usually the best option. Prims and sculpts still have their place but only for some very special purposes.

For all the torturing options, prims are still euclidean geometric shapes and although those tend to be very suitable for human made objects, they don't usually work well for natural shapes.

A sculpt will nearly always have 2048 tris so if you make a single plant from a single sculpt, you're well and truly into class A feature plant territory in terms of resource use. Are they really worth that much? I think some are actually; Lilith Heart's lovely oaks for example and also many of Nadine Reverie's old sculpt trees. Sculpts can also be useful for big groups with lots of plants made from a single sculpt. But it really has to be a lot. The smallest sculpt group I have in my product range has 87 plants. That means 23.5 tris per plant, perfectly good for medium-sized and large class D volume plants and also appropriate for large class E background plants.

But there is mesh and then there is mesh. Most plants have far more complex shapes than anything else a 3D modeler usually is asked to produce. On top of that, they are chaotic shapes which are always harder to do well than more systematic ones. You have to be very conscious about what details to do as mesh, which to do as textures and which to leave out completely. It's a highly specialized skill and some of the best professional and semi-professional mesh makers I know flatly refuse to do plants because they don't feel they can do them well enough.

I can understand why. My plants, whether they are simple crossed sheet ones or elaborate trees, have a visual appearance vs performance way beyond what anybody else can match. People like Teresa Matfield, Alex Bader, JubJub Forder, Ozwell Wayfarer, Reid Parkin and Eldon Inshan make plants that are far more performant than the regular SL plants but even they can't match my plants in that respect. But when I think about how much time I've spent learning those specialized skills with such limited use, it easily adds up to two whole years of full time work. Has it been worth it? The only honest answer is of course no.

I don't really know where to put any of this in my brain.

Actually, it doesn't go anywhere, I flunked math in high school. Art class, too.

You're right that 17 years is a long time not to update something like a special class of objects in SL, which plants are, I mean the way they are right in the build viewer and all. I think some of them are really hopeless, but I personally still make use of the cypress trees, which are very nice, the eel grass, which if shrunk does ok, the dogwood, the plumeria, shrunk way, way down. The pine trees are pretty scrappy, although you can't go too far wrong with the winter pines in terms of view and prim.

I cannot bear the planar plants any more at all, although a few things I do still use, I put them as kind of background then arrange the plumper stuff around it. 

Sculpties are good for nature. I wish that we had a substance in SL that was like silly putty, that you could just shape at will. But what would be that shaper? You don't have a haptic hand that itself can go at all kinds of angles, so it has to be some kind of point-and-click angular thing. Sculpties are for the most part awful, but I think certain things -- plants, fantasy builds, certain historic period builds -- sculpties are really more versatile for them and less primmy.

There are a very few mesh tree/plant makers who make them well and low prim. Mr. Fundati is one. Some that have tried to make them into animesh have merely created monsters. I don't think anyone is likely to take up your classes, it's a lot of work, but maybe you can carve one thing out of it which is a Linden tree update, and try to figure out what would the top 3 things that would have to be done to make it happen, and the 10 things in between those steps, etc. etc.

I disagree with you about the Moles. Some of their earlier stuff is planar and not so hot but they actually have some nice wildflowers and sea plants they did that hold up well especially by the roadside. And in Bellissaria, the redwoods are very well done, and in general the plants and trees look pretty good. That's just it -- they are so much better than most of the early Linden plants that you wonder why they aren't in the library! They are likely too primmy, sure. One of the things that dismayed me about the stilt houses is when I pulled out the plants, which seemed really necessary on those barren sandy landscapes, I rapidly used all the land impact space up.

The most vexing thing about the early Linden plants is that they are hard to grab hold of. One trick is to go into edit on some other nearby object, or on a prim you rez, then click on them to get them to pick up. The grasses always stray way past where they are rezzed, so grasses on Linden land can come into your land and you can't return it.

Grass is really, really, hard to do. I think Simply Shelby and anc make some of the best grasses. So often I reach for alirium dwarf trees and itchy grass because they look like a fairy tale. A lot of creators make circles that never look filled out right, like crop circles made from outer space. Grass always upsets me, because it never looks right, and to make a bare ground look normal, you need a lot of prims. Wouldn't it be great if there were a new set of Linden plants and trees, perhaps taking the Mole products of Bellissaria, adding to them, putting them in the library -- and making so they don't count on your prim count. It would be magical.

 

 

Edited February 10, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

10 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The most vexing thing about the early Linden plants is that they are hard to grab hold of. One trick is to go into edit on some other nearby object, or on a prim you rez, then click on them to get them to pick up.

The other method is to use the "select by surrounding" mode of the select tool, and draw a square around where the plant is, it's especially useful on the shrunken plants. They seem to behave a bit like upside-down flexiprims when trying to edit or move them.

I still have some 2-prim sculpty trees (pitre-green I think) that are the best I've seen yet, but I agree with you both that some of the billboard plants should be torched.

Edited February 10, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Stephanie Misfit]

On 2/9/2021 at 8:02 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

I recently bought some lovely trees and put them out and discovered to my horror that they were a whopping 265 prims together. And separately they were whopping as well. I couldn't understand how this can be. Shrinking it helped a bit but it was heavy to start with. So you've explained that although I will never be able to master any of this.

I think we bought the same trees, Prokofy. I have to say I was astonished when I rezzed them. I thought 45 LI trees were a thing of the past, the old things that were made from prims that you would buy from stores like Relic and rez just one of on your land because they were expensive and no copy. I am still using these new trees because I have the spare prims to do so, but reluctantly. I have some similar sculpty trees of the same size that are only a few prims, I may swap back to those at some point but they aren't as nice looking.

[ChinRey]

On 2/10/2021 at 10:40 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

I personally still make use of the cypress trees, which are very nice, the eel grass, which if shrunk does ok, the dogwood, the plumeria, shrunk way, way down. The pine trees are pretty scrappy, although you can't go too far wrong with the winter pines in terms of view and prim.

I like the cypress too. It doesn't look anything liek a curpress fo course but it's a very decent generic green tree. The eel grass and the ferns are also quite useful. The kelp I think are very good, if only it wasn't a whole land impact for one single little strand of it.

 

On 2/10/2021 at 10:40 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

There are a very few mesh tree/plant makers who make them well and low prim. Mr. Fundati is one.

I don't know that maker, I have to chekc him ut. Thank you for the tip!

 

On 2/10/2021 at 10:40 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

I disagree with you about the Moles.

I'm talking about the technical quality. The looks is a different matter and is a lot about taste and also how well a plant fits the context.

Look at this: https://opqmesh.blogspot.com/2020/03/whats-so-special-about-opq-meshes.html

The tree to the left in the picture is one of the Bellisseria ones. It's a whopping 31 land impact!!! It's made from 1082 triangles and uses three 1024x1024 textures which add up to about three million pixels. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Moles couldn't even get the physics right so they had to add an invisible prim arpund the trunk to keep people from walking right though it.

The tree to the left is one of mine. It's a different design of course but I think you'll agree it's about the same visual quality and complexity. It's 2 land impact, made from 245 triangles, uses only two 512x152 textures (adding up to half a million pixels) and it has proper physics. Double those numebrs and you get what the top SL plant makers can manage.

So, the Mole tree wastes 29 LI, about 50 tris and 2.5 million pixels. That's a lot of unneccessary load on the gpu, a lot of unneccessary data to download and of coure, the bloated land impact means you can't have nearly as much content on your land before you run out of prims.

Making a mesh tree of this complexity is dead easy. Anybody can do it. I mean literally anybody since there are plenty of free programs that'll do it for you - there are even online tree generators so you don't have to install any software for it. Making one that looks good at any distance, doesn't wastea ton of prims and doesn't lag down your viewer more than neccessary is harder. That's where craftsmanship comes in and the Moles show no sigificant mesh craftsmanship skills whatsoever.

[Stephanie Misfit]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Look at this: https://opqmesh.blogspot.com/2020/03/whats-so-special-about-opq-meshes.html

The tree to the left in the picture is one of the Bellisseria ones. It's a whopping 31 land impact!!! It's made from 1082 triangles and uses three 1024x1024 textures which add up to about three million pixels. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Moles couldn't even get the physics right so they had to add an invisible prim arpund the trunk to keep people from walking right though it.

The tree to the left is one of mine. It's a different design of course but I think you'll agree it's about the same visual quality and complexity. It's 2 land impact, made from 245 triangles, uses only two 512x152 textures (adding up to half a million pixels) and it has proper physics. Double those numebrs and you get what the top SL plant makers can manage.

 

Just need some nice swamp trees of that quality (hint hint).

[Prokofy Neva]

20 hours ago, Stephanie Misfit said:

I think we bought the same trees, Prokofy. I have to say I was astonished when I rezzed them. I thought 45 LI trees were a thing of the past, the old things that were made from prims that you would buy from stores like Relic and rez just one of on your land because they were expensive and no copy. I am still using these new trees because I have the spare prims to do so, but reluctantly. I have some similar sculpty trees of the same size that are only a few prims, I may swap back to those at some point but they aren't as nice looking.

Yes, we did. I bought them happily thinking I'd put them out all over another sim. They are really well done and unique. I discovered their actual land impact amount looking at YOUR copy of them put on a sim where we are neighbours. I had wanted to put them out to match yours. I then had to reduce them in size and just put out one, to keep it even at 45. 

Reducing in size does help somewhat but the whole point of them was to keep them at their majestic original size. 

[Prokofy Neva]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

I like the cypress too. It doesn't look anything liek a curpress fo course but it's a very decent generic green tree. The eel grass and the ferns are also quite useful. The kelp I think are very good, if only it wasn't a whole land impact for one single little strand of it.

 

I don't know that maker, I have to chekc him ut. Thank you for the tip!

 

I'm talking about the technical quality. The looks is a different matter and is a lot about taste and also how well a plant fits the context.

Look at this: https://opqmesh.blogspot.com/2020/03/whats-so-special-about-opq-meshes.html

The tree to the left in the picture is one of the Bellisseria ones. It's a whopping 31 land impact!!! It's made from 1082 triangles and uses three 1024x1024 textures which add up to about three million pixels. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Moles couldn't even get the physics right so they had to add an invisible prim arpund the trunk to keep people from walking right though it.

The tree to the left is one of mine. It's a different design of course but I think you'll agree it's about the same visual quality and complexity. It's 2 land impact, made from 245 triangles, uses only two 512x152 textures (adding up to half a million pixels) and it has proper physics. Double those numebrs and you get what the top SL plant makers can manage.

So, the Mole tree wastes 29 LI, about 50 tris and 2.5 million pixels. That's a lot of unneccessary load on the gpu, a lot of unneccessary data to download and of coure, the bloated land impact means you can't have nearly as much content on your land before you run out of prims.

Making a mesh tree of this complexity is dead easy. Anybody can do it. I mean literally anybody since there are plenty of free programs that'll do it for you - there are even online tree generators so you don't have to install any software for it. Making one that looks good at any distance, doesn't wastea ton of prims and doesn't lag down your viewer more than neccessary is harder. That's where craftsmanship comes in and the Moles show no sigificant mesh craftsmanship skills whatsoever.

OK, I see your point. I have complained about the Shop 'n Hop builds using unnecessary script loads and I suspect 1024 textures (not sure how you tell by looking at them). The Linden event rules tell you to use 512 textures, and island sims won't let you upload 1024 terrain textures (you have to log on to Firestorm to even upload them, it's madness). I don't see that on a homestead, 1024 terrain versus 512 terrain lags the sim, but it's hard to tell as it is a fairly quiet sim with only 2 or 3 people on it, only some of them time. But if they can put in hard stops like that on the viewer, you wonder why in building Bellissaria they didn't follow that rule.

[ChinRey]

18 hours ago, Stephanie Misfit said:

Just need some nice swamp trees of that quality (hint hint).

You mean like these?

These were made for the Torque game engine, not SL, by a very skilled mesh maker who calls himself Duion. They do have two rather serious design problems.  I wouldn't call them flaws since they are deliberate choices but they probably wouldn't be very popular in SL today. They'd also end up at about 20 LI with decent SL style LOD and that's at about 20 m height, not really enough for really statuesque swamp cedars or swamp tupelos.

I think I could make something similar with those two design issues corrected at about 5 LI if I only had time. But just out of curiosity, how much of the trunk would be under water?

---

Edit: Yep, 5 LI seems about right, I did a quick test build:

The challenge is the trunk base. You really need to invest some tris in those lovely bends there. Duion choose to leave them out and that's one of the two "flaws" i mentioned. This one is 30 m tall though, I could get a smaller one down to 4 or even 3.

Edited February 12, 2021 by ChinRey

[Prokofy Neva]

12 hours ago, ChinRey said:

You mean like these?

These were made for the Torque game engine, not SL, by a very skilled mesh maker who calls himself Duion. They do have two rather serious design problems.  I wouldn't call them flaws since they are deliberate choices but they probably wouldn't be very popular in SL today. They'd also end up at about 20 LI with decent SL style LOD and that's at about 20 m height, not really enough for really statuesque swamp cedars or swamp tupelos.

I think I could make something similar with those two design issues corrected at about 5 LI if I only had time. But just out of curiosity, how much of the trunk would be under water?

---

Edit: Yep, 5 LI seems about right, I did a quick test build:

The challenge is the trunk base. You really need to invest some tris in those lovely bends there. Duion choose to leave them out and that's one of the two "flaws" i mentioned. This one is 30 m tall though, I could get a smaller one down to 4 or even 3.

That's a nice tree, but not exactly swampy. BTW, on a related (I think topic), where is the link to your discussion about why mesh bounces on mesh floors in mesh houses? I can't seem to find it. You had explained it as something related to how it was uploaded...

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

That's a nice tree, but not exactly swampy.

Assuming you mean the one in the second picture (the onee in the first aren't mine), thank you! It's only a proof of concept but looking at it now, I may eventually change it into a "normal" tree with a more regular base and upload it.

I may have misunderstood what you meant with swamp trees or maybe it's the textures. Since it's not something I'm actually ever going to use or list for sale, I wasn't going to waste time making textures for it of course, so I used an oak bark and a birch foliage one I happened to have in my inventory. The shape is based on a swamp cedar like these:

(Source: Tennessee State Government)

Maybe that wasn't what you had in mind?

Speaking of swamp trees in general, I came across this beautiful mesh model when searching for pictures of them:

(Source: Speedtree.com)

It's 2.8 milllion triangles. One such mesh can lag down a moderately powerful computer to a standstill all on its own and it would take several minutes to load. Meshes like this are intended for movie sets where the rendering is done frame by frame overnight by a whole rack of heavy duty servers. Yet too many people don't understand the difference and think mesh is mesh. The art of making mesh for a virtual reality is always and will always be to make as much as possible out of as little as possible.

 

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

BTW, on a related (I think topic), where is the link to your discussion about why mesh bounces on mesh floors in mesh houses? I can't seem to find it. You had explained it as something related to how it was uploaded...

I can't find it at the moment but the rules for making good floor physics are quite simple:

1. Do not use analyzed physics for surfaces people are supposed to walk or rez on if it can possibly be avoided. The rezzing issue is not the only problem it can cause.
2. If you have to use analyzed physics, make the physics model from complete cubes - that is with all six sides included - and only complete cubes. Use as few cubes as possible and make sure none of them touch each other.

Edited February 13, 2021 by ChinRey
Forgot to include one of the credit links

[Stephanie Misfit]

18 hours ago, ChinRey said:

You mean like these?

More swampy, with a flared base and very tall. These are the trees that Prokofy and I bought that were so high in LI.

 

 

[ChinRey]

16 hours ago, Stephanie Misfit said:

More swampy, with a flared base and very tall. These are the trees that Prokofy and I bought that were so high in LI.

Oh, I can see why you and Prokofy love those trees. With better textures they could well fit the Class A - Feature plants category in my classification system. If I was to make something as detailed as these meshes, complete with the air roots sticking up around the tree, I'd probably aim for 10-15 LI and wouldn't be too unhappy if they ended up close to 20.

I'm not going to though, at least not anytime soon. Making a single test mesh isn't much work but I'd need a range of different ones for it to make sense. Then there's the textures - a good foliage texture for a low lag tree can easily require fifty or more layers. And worst of all, to sell I'd have to tackle the MP merchants' UI Dopehead Linden dreamed up once on a particularly bad trip. I have no need for such trees for any of my own build and I would have to sell at least a hundred of them to make it commercially viable. That's not going to happen. Besides, I get a feeling you and Prokofy is looking for not swamp trees in general but ones that look more or less exactly like these and I'm not into plagiarism. Nobody owns the copyright for an RL tree species but a distinct fantasy tree design like these belong to the original creator morally and possibly legally too.

Edited February 13, 2021 by ChinRey