Belleza Update

[Coffee Pancake]

14 minutes ago, KKMallory said:

More polygons = more transform & shade ops for your GPU cores to do. Granted, recent GPUs can handle a lot more geometry than they used to, but transforming, lighting, texturing, and shading two million polygons per avi isn't free.

Oh absolutely, it's not free at all. We should always strive for better and more optimal geometry and object construction.

But in the context of the SL viewer, focusing on geometry and GPU rendering costs is like emptying your cars ash tray because your car is slow ... on a 30 mph road, during rush hour, in a school zone.

The SL viewer is a garbage truck with a fueled and ready to launch escape velocity capable rocket engine.. that it's towing behind it on a trailer.

 

Sadly there isn't much we can do about this. Games don't need to do all the processing the SL viewer needs to do , so the GPU becomes the bottle neck. For SL, a single CPU core is the bottle neck, a fancy pants modern GPU barely gets out of bed.

The GPU can be a bottle neck on lower end or compromised systems (laptops).

 

On paper at least, SL presents a perfect storm for a fully threaded vulkan render pipeline, but that greatly depends on how deep into the viewer such pipelines actually go.

 

BUT (and there is always a 🍑) should we ever get a magical fully threaded vulkan render pipeline that gets all our modern CPU cores out of bed, a high FPS environment will hang a massive lantern on all the other bottlenecks inherent to SL's base architecture.

Right now for example, we don't notice moment to moment just how much round trip latency impacts avatar and vehicle motion, the moment we do ... it's gonna make our eyes bleed, perhaps to the point of nausea for some users.

[Blaise Glendevon]

. . .I've been out of Second Life for almost a year, on account of falling in to FFXIV and the first thing I do is buy a new body. Y'all are dangerous, okay. 

[Paul Hexem]

On 9/4/2021 at 1:37 AM, Pussycat Catnap said:

OMG Yes.

Especially because all of those HUDs never tell you or let you enter numbers.

I'm like... 'dragging this one so far to the left is... how much the same as clicking the dial of that one this much up?, is it even tweaking the same value... well, he goes another attempt followed by running through 50 windlight settings to see if it worked...'

Worse- I've got a Lelutka and I told 'em that it's not working. Their reply was that they'll never fix it, never provide an API, and never provide a modify copy. They've moved on to new ones and I should buy one of those.

How stupid, admitting you won't fix bugs, but suggesting "just buy the new one".

 

On 9/5/2021 at 4:21 PM, Lewis Luminos said:

Lightstar heads are mod. A couple of my alts have these.

Second Life Marketplace - *LightStar by Krystal Silverweb

 

On 9/5/2021 at 8:15 PM, Lokiande said:

Also the BJD Bento Heads James, Jessie and Lance, by Raven Bell are all modify!

There was also a Faun Gacha by Whisk [or was it Oakie?] that had a modifiable earless BOM human head included in the package

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/101160

The next hurdle of course is finding decent skins. Seems that they're all made for the same 2 or 3 of those no mod heads.

[Alwin Alcott]

7 hours ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

. . .I've been out of Second Life for almost a year,

you missed nothing, your year old things work the same as the new things.

[Karl Herber]

1 hour ago, Paul Hexem said:

The next hurdle of course is finding decent skins. Seems that they're all made for the same 2 or 3 of those no mod heads.

If the off-brand heads are built to the standard SL template (which I presume most are) then the skins to look for are those made for Genus and Catwa HDPro. Both of those heads also use the standard template (Lelutka doesn't, not even the old Lelutka, and old Catwa doesn't either).

[Blaise Glendevon]

6 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

you missed nothing, your year old things work the same as the new things.

Love to hear it. There are some situations where I'm still using appliers (because I like the thing and it hasn't been converted) and some situations where I'm fully BOMbarding myself with layers of goodies. 

OK, after about 4 hours of tweaks, I've managed to make Freya look like the thicker version of my shape I veer towards on bodies like Legacy and Regalia. I thought I didn't like the boobs - turns out I just don't like skins with heavy shading, so I am leaning heavily on Pink Fuel's skins with the cleavage dehancer. 

[MillyWH]

40 minutes ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

Love to hear it. There are some situations where I'm still using appliers (because I like the thing and it hasn't been converted) and some situations where I'm fully BOMbarding myself with layers of goodies. 

OK, after about 4 hours of tweaks, I've managed to make Freya look like the thicker version of my shape I veer towards on bodies like Legacy and Regalia. I thought I didn't like the boobs - turns out I just don't like skins with heavy shading, so I am leaning heavily on Pink Fuel's skins with the cleavage dehancer. 

If you haven't check out Izzie's she has a lot  of ways to change skins including tattoos to reduce/eliminate breast shading, as well as different cleavages etc.  She also has fixes for faces. As well as things like scars, veins, body imperfections etc. Usually all of hers comes with a tintable version.

 

[Blaise Glendevon]

56 minutes ago, MillyWH said:

If you haven't check out Izzie's she has a lot  of ways to change skins including tattoos to reduce/eliminate breast shading, as well as different cleavages etc.  She also has fixes for faces. As well as things like scars, veins, body imperfections etc. Usually all of hers comes with a tintable version.

 

I live by the Izzie's concealers, for sure. But I love a good skin out of the box.

[juma Capalini]

On 9/2/2021 at 8:33 PM, Jenna Huntsman said:

I've now completed the work to automate the simplification process.

My script will now automatically reduce your body's complexity by shedding the traditional onion layers, and optimize the body towards BoM - it also cleans up after itself!

Bonus: The body HUD works! You can use your alpha HUD, or system alphas, change your breast shape, foot shape, etc. all as if nothing had ever happened.

Marketplace link (Free!): https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Belleza-Auto-Optimizer/22630871

Thank you very much for this.

I just optimised my body a few hours ago.🥰

[KKMallory]

On 9/8/2021 at 10:07 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

Oh absolutely, it's not free at all. We should always strive for better and more optimal geometry and object construction.

But in the context of the SL viewer, focusing on geometry and GPU rendering costs is like emptying your cars ash tray because your car is slow ... on a 30 mph road, during rush hour, in a school zone.

The SL viewer is a garbage truck with a fueled and ready to launch escape velocity capable rocket engine.. that it's towing behind it on a trailer.

 

Sadly there isn't much we can do about this. Games don't need to do all the processing the SL viewer needs to do , so the GPU becomes the bottle neck. For SL, a single CPU core is the bottle neck, a fancy pants modern GPU barely gets out of bed.

The GPU can be a bottle neck on lower end or compromised systems (laptops).

 

On paper at least, SL presents a perfect storm for a fully threaded vulkan render pipeline, but that greatly depends on how deep into the viewer such pipelines actually go.

 

BUT (and there is always a 🍑) should we ever get a magical fully threaded vulkan render pipeline that gets all our modern CPU cores out of bed, a high FPS environment will hang a massive lantern on all the other bottlenecks inherent to SL's base architecture.

Right now for example, we don't notice moment to moment just how much round trip latency impacts avatar and vehicle motion, the moment we do ... it's gonna make our eyes bleed, perhaps to the point of nausea for some users.

If the poor framerate were driven almost entirely by network latency, then turning off advanced lighting wouldn't cause a massive jump in FPS depending on where I am.  Disabling advanced lighting doesn't change what's happening server side; it's *entirely* a client-side phenomenon, and those effects are all being done on the GPU. If they were being done in software, they wouldn't work in real-time, not even on a 5 GHz Xeon. A lot of that stuff is done purely in screen space, but plenty of it needs set up calculations done in vertex space first.

I mean, yes, the renderer is obviously hot garbage, but LL is doing themselves no favors. They neither want to write a better renderer (I'm using this term loosely to refer to the entire pipeline that starts from primitive data and gets you to pixels) nor take any measures to control asset complexity.

 

[Ember Shuffle]

I just thought i'd zoom in here and mention, I still use the Freya every day. Not that the Legacy, Kupra, etc aren't amazing, but Freya looks just right for me for the time being. I even managed to get it to work just fine with BOM. Glad to hear the Belleza-bods are back in development though, I really look forward to what comes next! Hopefully we'll get less tris and resizable feets. 😛

[Cinos Field]

This is totally awesome. If you strip the body down to just what a furry might use as a base (i.e. no hands or feet) it's only 42k polygons.

Even for humans, stripping the onion layers and the boob options nobody uses should do wonders.

Now if only TMP and Maitreya would do the same... then again, if they don't, Belleza should rapidly recover a lot of market share.

[Nalates Urriah]

20 hours ago, KKMallory said:

I mean, yes, the renderer is obviously hot garbage, but LL is doing themselves no favors. They neither want to write a better renderer (I'm using this term loosely to refer to the entire pipeline that starts from primitive data and gets you to pixels) nor take any measures to control asset complexity.

 

The Lab will eventually have to replace the render engine. We have no way to know where they are on the road to a new engine. Over the years the Lab has been consistent when talking about what they will and won't tell us. ONLY when they are sure they can complete a project and do so in a reasonable time frame will they say anything.

As to measures to control asset complexity... why do you think they built the BOM update?

[steeljane42]

1 hour ago, Cinos Field said:

then again, if they don't, Belleza should rapidly recover a lot of market share.

Most people only care about how it looks like, if it works properly without too obvious issues, and most importantly - clothing support. Unless there will be a major comeback in new clothes from good creators (not terrible retextured fp templates that have all sizes up to original TMP bodies, and sometimes even ancient "standard sizes"), then they won't recover a thing. Kupra is a good example, it's way too heavy especially considering it has no onion layers, but look how popular it is now.

Same goes for all those popular hair makers with their styles of over 350-500k triangles at times. Look at how crowded their stores are every time they release a new style and how many people use those compared to a few niche brands that actually make a somewhat optimized hair (raven bell for example). And, well, very much everything in SL.

Forum crowd is a very small minority "that cares about such stuff".

[Cinos Field]

6 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

Most people only care about how it looks like, if it works properly without too obvious issues, and most importantly - clothing support. Unless there will be a major comeback in new clothes from good creators (not terrible retextured fp templates that have all sizes up to original TMP bodies, and sometimes even ancient "standard sizes"), then they won't recover a thing. Kupra is a good example, it's way too heavy especially considering it has no onion layers, but look how popular it is now.

Same goes for all those popular hair makers with their styles of over 350-500k triangles at times. Look at how crowded their stores are every time they release a new style and how many people use those compared to a few niche brands that actually make a somewhat optimized hair (raven bell for example). And, well, very much everything in SL.

Forum crowd is a very small minority "that cares about such stuff".

Average Jane might not care about optimization, but the fact that it has mod permissions alone is definitely going to be enough to at least keep Belleza well in the black. It's the only moddable mainstream body!

[steeljane42]

2 hours ago, Cinos Field said:

Average Jane might not care about optimization, but the fact that it has mod permissions alone is definitely going to be enough to at least keep Belleza well in the black. It's the only moddable mainstream body!

It will have its niche if it will remain the only moddable mainstream body, however it already had its niche anyway. When clothing support became less and less and there were no updates on sight for BoM (without 3rd party hud), or for pretty much every new mainstream mesh head released after early 2020 (because all of them use new universal neck seam, which belleza didn't had until this update), some people kept using it.

I would guess most of them will use it now, too, and might get a bit more vocal about asking for having freya sizes (again) for some clothing. However with majority of mainstream clothing being no-mod by itself I doubt the vocal minority will make a large impact on that or would even be interested too much given the no-mod nature of said clothing.

[Rowan Amore]

Can anyone confirm or deny that the hand issue on the male body has been fixed?  I've seen quite a few men who say they've updated that still show the splayed hands.

[Janet Voxel]

Are they wearing a bento AO?

[Rowan Amore]

Beats me.  I wear a bento AO with both bodies I've used and never had an issue with hands.   If it's still doing it one Belleza, regardless of what type of AO, than it's not fixed IMO

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Why am I thinking that they might have updated, but are still wearing their old bodies?

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

Why am I thinking that they might have updated, but are still wearing their old bodies?

I'll be scanning the next time I see it before I even ask.  I saw 3 men at one place and asked them all.  They all said they had updated which led me to think the hand issue hasn't been fixed or you're right, they haven't actually updated.

[Janet Voxel]

4 minutes ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

Why am I thinking that they might have updated, but are still wearing their old bodies?

....because we're talking about guys here.

In my experience, people that have this issue are either not wearing the right body or they have an old non bento AO.

Sometimes...they don't even know what bento is.

Edited September 17, 2021 by Janet Voxel

[Blush Bravin]

15 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Beats me.  I wear a bento AO with both bodies I've used and never had an issue with hands.   If it's still doing it one Belleza, regardless of what type of AO, than it's not fixed IMO

The bento bones for the hands are splayed when relaxed (not animated). So any bento hands, if not animated by a Bento AO, will be splayed. As far as I know, the Jake hands would splay even with a Bento AO previously. I believe that has been fixed by the comments I've seen. I don't own a Jake body though so don't have personal experience.

Edited September 18, 2021 by Blush Bravin

[Lewis Luminos]

15 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Can anyone confirm or deny that the hand issue on the male body has been fixed?  I've seen quite a few men who say they've updated that still show the splayed hands.

I can 100% confirm that this bug has NOT been fixed. I don't see it myself, but when I am logged in with an alt, my alt sees it ALL THE TIME. Whish means that everyone else does too. The bug still exists for all three female bodies.

I don't have a bento hand AO so I have been forced to return to Signature body. I am not a happy bunny about this.

What actually happens is that when you teleport into a new place, everyone (except you) sees your hands as splayed. You can select nee pose from the hud, and everyone will see it change, so fine. You need to do this every time you teleport. Whats worse however, is that it also affects anyone else who teleports in after you. So you need to change your hand position again for them to see you properly too.

I tried to set up an AO to change hand positions every few seconds, but that stopped my main AO from working.

Edited September 18, 2021 by Lewis Luminos

[s2Pandora]

Can't confirm, but i've not seen it happen on any Jake users since the update. Granted I didn't see it too often even before.