Never mind me, just showing off again :-P

[ChinRey]

So many SL builds don't go far enough with optimisation. This one on the other hand goes too far.

But pushing the limits is both fun and useful so:

• 256x256 m
• 4,264 trees (although you may argue a few of them are large bushes since they have multiple trunks)
• 3 textures (including the ground), one 512x1024, one 256x1024 and one 512x512 - adding up to the same number of pixels as a single 1024x1024
• 2,688 vertices
• 1,404 triangles
• 5,335 display weight

Pictures taken with ultra graphics and a slightly tweaked windlight to get the shadows of the trees.

This is an opesim build and although it's easy enough to convert to SL (all I need to do is split the 256x256 m meshes into 64x64 m chunks) I'm not going to because I can't imagine anybody would actually want to fill up an entire sim this way. I'd estimate an SL version would end up around 2,000 tris and land impact and download weight should be somewhere between 50 and 100. The physics and servers weights would be 3.26 and 24.5 respectively.

 

(Totally irrelevant edit: Can anybody identify where I borrowed the opening line from? If you can, you are truly a learned and cultured individual who deserves respect.)

Edited April 19, 2021 by ChinRey

[Elrond Caudron]

I mean I own a sim so it's no biggie in regards to land impact lol. Also I've been a singer, pianist, musician, writer and traditional artist for 27 years. I've been a digital artist, 3D model artist and sculptor, texture artist and animator, using said skills to work with games engines (including Halo CE engine, Source, Unreal 3, Unreal 4 and Unity), for 19 years. I also do a lot of mechanical engineering. I'm the KING of showing off and optimizing mesh!

 

Anyhoo it looks good!

 

I only dropped by briefly and rarely even use this forum thing so I won't see any replies as I probably won't return for many months.

 

Keep up the good work though!

[Luna Bliss]

I textured painted a mushroom in Blender today.

[Jenna Huntsman]

If you want to be super efficient, Combine the 512x1024 and the 256x1024 into a single texture (Texture atlas).

Remember that large textures aren't always bad, and they're most efficient when used for something like this - a single 1024 texture takes up less VRAM than 4x 512 textures, as well as less CPU cycles to fetch and decode before it reaches the GPU.

[ChinRey]

11 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

If you want to be super efficient, Combine the 512x1024 and the 256x1024 into a single texture (Texture atlas).

I was actually planning to do that but it would have added 262,144 (count them if you don't believe me) superfluous pixels adding both to the VRAM and bandwidth requirements.

 

11 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

a single 1024 texture takes up less VRAM than 4x 512 textures

Maybe but unless the VRAM handling code is seriously bodged, we're talking less than a hundred bytes here. Probably only a dozen or so and certainly far less than what those extra pixels would have added.

 

11 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

as well as less CPU cycles to fetch and decode before it reaches the GPU.

That's true but one of the most important factors of optimisation is the tricky balance between the number of draw calls and the possibilities for reusing assets. The forest, not including the ground, is made from two different meshes (two copies of one of them) and two different textures and each of these four assets is supposed to be used in other contexts independently from the others. I could have merged everything into a single mesh with a single texture and a single draw call but that would have meant that even the slightest modification would have requried a brand new asset or two.

I happen to have a simple illustration of this. Here's a different forest:

Except it isn't. It's the same one with one of the meshes removed, giving a very different and more open look. This simple example doesn't save anything of course but by conistently re-using assets this way you can save a lot of bandwidth and caching capacity, more than enough up for the extra draw calls.

Content is King but without Queen Context he's nothing at all.

This is the most fundamental principle behind both good visual appearance and good performance and it's something too many SL creators seem to miss. They're so concerned about how their build looks as a stand-alone object they forget the big picture.

Edited April 20, 2021 by ChinRey

[Jenna Huntsman]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

I was actually planning to do that but it would have added 262,144 (count them if you don't believe me) superfluous pixels adding both to the VRAM and bandwidth requirements.

SL can handle a 768x1024 texture just fine without rounding up to 1024x1024, so it should be okay.

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Maybe but unless the VRAM handling code is seriously bodged, we're talking less than a hundred bytes here. Probably only a dozen or so and certainly far less than what those extra pixels would have added.

No idea, just observation. I do know though that there is definitely an impact when it comes to fetch & decode though, especially if switching between LODs as the engine can use less draw calls for a single material shared on multiple objects vs. each object having a smaller, separate texture.

My knowledge on the specifics is probably waaay out of date though, so YMMV.

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

This is the most fundamental principle behind both good visual appearance and good performance and it's something too many SL creators seem to miss. They're so concerned about how their build looks as a stand-alone object they forget the big picture.

Definitely 😟

[Candide LeMay]

3 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

SL can handle a 768x1024 texture just fine without rounding up to 1024x1024, so it should be okay.

a 768x1024px texture will upload as 512x1024px to SL

[Kyrah Abattoir]

23 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

SL can handle a 768x1024 texture just fine without rounding up to 1024x1024, so it should be okay.

768 isn't a power of 2 but a multiple of 2.

[Luna Bliss]

On 4/19/2021 at 12:07 PM, ChinRey said:

So many SL builds don't go far enough with optimisation.

Really, ChinRey, you should start some kind of optimization service for region builds...