Decorating SOS...how do I?

[Abnor Mole]

9 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Items with many vertices aren't great. Avoid sculpts if you can. Flat prims and low-land impact mesh are best. There are so many factors that can create lag that it's hard to say what is the worst cause. Maybe if you go to a furniture store where everything rezzes easily and you don't get lagged out, their furniture would be better? If you make or retexture items with textures from your Linden Home Houseboat pack that will help too, because those textures have already been loaded in your region.

It's not just land impact. View objects in wireframe. The mesh should not be any more complex than it really needs to be. If an otherwise simple object still looks practically solid that means it has a very high triangle count. Your graphics card has to work that much harder the more triangles it has to render. Some creators use tricks to make overly complex mesh still have a low land impact value. That doesn't mean it is any kinder to your GPU. 

[Marianne Little]

For me, it is textures that is the problem. There are grey surfaces and grey items when I get too many textures. It is good that the same textures is in the content pack. I use them much, so there is not a lot of new textures to handle.

I am really glad that the fence and wall system in the content pack is so light in Li. I do not need to use other lightweight options to save Li. (Edit to add: Land impact goes down for these parts when they are linked. Well made.)

I do not know if scripts matter much. I have read different opinions. But I do not need light scripts, because I do not turn lights on and off. I turn on the lamps, and go to contents and delete the script. Same if it is color/texture change items, as already mentioned.

Complex mesh is difficult to avoid, because I love a lot of decorative stuff, and should I not use complex mesh, the house would feel "bare". Complex mesh can also have several textures, and too big textures.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Marianne Little

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, Marianne Little said:

For me, it is textures that is the problem. There are grey surfaces and grey items when I get too many textures.

If you're using the Stock Linden viewer, shout at them to increase the texture vram cap from 512 mb. All the TPV's allow this now, but there are lots of places in SL where the stock viewer just can't render everything. They have been sitting on their hands for years with this because there is no "perfect solution" that works under all circumstances.

Till then, lowering draw distance and detaching huds is all you can do.

9 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

I do not know if scripts matter much.

They really don't.

9 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

Complex mesh is difficult to avoid, because I love a lot of decorative stuff, and should I not use complex mesh, the house would feel "bare". Complex mesh can also have several textures, and too big textures.

Li is more about scale than complexity, almost everything can be 1 Li when it's sized to fit on a desk.

Tiny things are the cheapest to rez but are the most expensive to render in terms of geometry and texture density vs on screen rendered size, they also tend to be created to look good full screen.

That all said .. none of this should really cause a problem for a modern GPU, the world in SL has far less impact on overall frame rate than a couple of avatars festooned with rigged mesh objects.

[Abnor Mole]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

That all said .. none of this should really cause a problem for a modern GPU, the world in SL has far less impact on overall frame rate than a couple of avatars festooned with rigged mesh objects.

It shouldn't, but it all adds up. I've been to places where that happens. If we use an unoccupied Linden Homes region at 256 draw distance as a benchmark, I'm rendering 3.5 million tris. I've seen very beautiful (but quite laggy) venues where that number is 40 million when empty at 32m draw distance. Add on top of that a few high ARC avatars, 1024 textures on tiny things, high LOD settings so things don't break into their lower LODs, 256 or 512 draw distance... Even the best cards will start to feel that burn and not everyone has a top end gaming machine. 🙁

I've mentioned to a few people before, if you plan on having a venue with a lot of traffic in close proximity, keep your build well balanced between detail and efficiency. If you go overboard, once you get more than 5 people everyone will start to complain about the lag and no amount of telling people to take off their scripts is going to do much to change that. 

Edit: Object complexity isn't the only factor, but it is one most people tend to forget when they talk about contributing factors.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Abnor Mole

[Persephone Emerald]

4 hours ago, Abnor Mole said:

It's not just land impact. View objects in wireframe. The mesh should not be any more complex than it really needs to be. If an otherwise simple object still looks practically solid that means it has a very high triangle count. Your graphics card has to work that much harder the more triangles it has to render. Some creators use tricks to make overly complex mesh still have a low land impact value. That doesn't mean it is any kinder to your GPU. 

Thank you, for chiming in on this concern that many users have.  I forgot about checking how things look in Wireframe. A person could go to a furniture store and look at it in Wireframe to get an idea of how complex their stuff is. A friend of mine on a low-end computer wanted to see Blade Runner type sims, so I scouted out a few for him, but forgot to check how they look in Wireframe too. Sadly, while I loved the new Blade Runner sim, he could had trouble even typing and crashed.

[EnchantrixLisa]

 

@Persephone Emerald

Thank you for responding! I had no idea you could remove scripts or that they caused lag issues. I am not sure how to do that the proper way so I will look for a video on YT on how to remove scripts. I just assumed they are needed in order for things to work properly. 🤷🏽

I did find a video about lag issues, what sometimes causes them and how to fix some of them.  Textures!  I had wrapped  my entire Houseboat in a texture and had done so with a couple pieces of furniture. Smh I had no idea using textures could create such an issue. The person in the video also suggested tweaking the graphics, etc in Preferences and also how to deal with being on other Sims that may cause lag issues.  I will work on the issues when I log back onto SL. I also found a creator on the MP who creates 1 prim furniture and other decor and lets you demo before buying, so I will check that out as well when I log back on to SL. 

As you can see I am still learning a lot of things when it co we to SL.

 

 

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14 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

There are different kinds of lag and different things that can add to it. Too many textures or high rez textures can cause textures to load slowly, which makes things look gray. Too many scripts can cause freezing and slow responses. Having light or glow added to prims can be a factor. Breedable pets are especially bad for causing script lag.

Using fewer textures and simple textures (lower than 1024 x 1024) would help. If you can take out retexturing scripts, that might help. Furniture with lower land impact might help. Items with many vertices aren't great. Avoid sculpts if you can. Flat prims and low-land impact mesh are best. There are so many factors that can create lag that it's hard to say what is the worst cause. Maybe if you go to a furniture store where everything rezzes easily and you don't get lagged out, their furniture would be better? If you make or retexture items with textures from your Linden Home Houseboat pack that will help too, because those textures have already been loaded in your region.

 

 

 

 

 

[EnchantrixLisa]

4 hours ago, Abnor Mole said:

It's not just land impact. View objects in wireframe. The mesh should not be any more complex than it really needs to be. If an otherwise simple object still looks practically solid that means it has a very high triangle count. Your graphics card has to work that much harder the more triangles it has to render. Some creators use tricks to make overly complex mesh still have a low land impact value. That doesn't mean it is any kinder to your GPU. 

Why is Wireframe and how do I view something in it?  

[Coffee Pancake]

14 minutes ago, EnchantrixLisa said:

Why is Wireframe and how do I view something in it?  

CTRL + SHIFT + R

(note - It will not work if you have ANY hud attachment locked on with RLV, so check relays, the wardrobe, etc etc if it doesn't work!)

It shows the underlying mesh. Here's me in my skybox changing room.

Objects that look solid .. like this 1Li  pot plant .. are WAY too detailed, this could be far fewer triangle and look identical.

However .. because we like to zoom in on everything, it's really not uncommon to find items like this.

 

Performance wise .. this doesn't matter as much as it used to especially If you have a modern GPU from the last 5 years. Obviously this is terrible if you're on a laptop with an integrated intel something or other.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Abnor Mole said:

It shouldn't, but it all adds up. I've been to places where that happens. If we use an unoccupied Linden Homes region at 256 draw distance as a benchmark, I'm rendering 3.5 million tris. I've seen very beautiful (but quite laggy) venues where that number is 40 million when empty at 32m draw distance. Add on top of that a few high ARC avatars, 1024 textures on tiny things, high LOD settings so things don't break into their lower LODs, 256 or 512 draw distance... Even the best cards will start to feel that burn and not everyone has a top end gaming machine. 🙁

It does indeed all add up, although I'm surprised the Linden viewer is even viable at 256m (presumably you're testing regions prior to occupation) with a texture cap of 512mb, that is going to be constantly swapping and redecoding the same data over and over again. (next time you are, pop open the texture console and see what the bias is & if it ever stops thrashing .. we've been trying to get LL devs to up that in the stock for years now, had Linden's out to Kitty's house to do benchmarking and testing .. and nothing ever comes of it apart from a recognition that it is indeed a big problem).

Every bit of CPU time that isn't spent rendering is super expensive and has a far larger impact on frame rate (and perceived lag) than anything in the scene. Texture decoding is expensive, shadows are expensive.

Get a crowd going and ARC becomes immaterial as we're way past actual render costs being the time sink, what counts is the number of rigged objects in total as it scales linearly, mesh bodies with sectional alpha are 40 - 80 (or more) meshes per avatar plus everything else they have on.  20 - 40 fully meshed avatars in a scene and it's game over, it doesn't matter what GPU you have anymore .. animating hundreds, sometimes thousands of meshes each and every frame and the viewer isn't doing much of anything else.

(The most popular brand also has a tricksy bounding box, so the viewer always treats those bodies as super important compared to others, and is why when jellys are enabled it seems the viewer is making poor choices about who to jelly and who to keep fully rendered.)

 

[Rowan Amore]

Just saw this on my Flickr...made specifically with the new homes in mind...

 

[Cali Souther]

I think this fits here ...  and I searched,  but did not find anything on this specific issue...

How do you place your furniture so that it looks good from all sides?

Yes,  11 years later, I still have to tweak my furniture again and again until it looks like it's in the right place regardless of the viewing angle.

Yesterday,  I tried to put a potted plant on top of a short pillar --  and no matter how I moved it --  it was never in the center if I moved my camera angle....   

Also pictures ---    What is the easiest way to put it flat against the wall?    I think I need to take some building classes or something.

As always,  any advice is appreciated.

[Persephone Emerald]

1 hour ago, Cali Souther said:

I think this fits here ...  and I searched,  but did not find anything on this specific issue...

How do you place your furniture so that it looks good from all sides?

Yes,  11 years later, I still have to tweak my furniture again and again until it looks like it's in the right place regardless of the viewing angle.

Yesterday,  I tried to put a potted plant on top of a short pillar --  and no matter how I moved it --  it was never in the center if I moved my camera angle....   

Also pictures ---    What is the easiest way to put it flat against the wall?    I think I need to take some building classes or something.

As always,  any advice is appreciated.

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but I always use the numbers in my Edit window to make sure objects are as close to walls and floors as is practical. I also use the numbers in Edit to line up objects with each other. It usually looks best to me when a bed or picture is in the middle of the wall, so I put that object in a central position, then line up the rug or the lamp on the table with that. Keeping items flat usually means setting them to  0.0, 90.0, 180.0. or 270.0 degrees in the z rotation field, though sometimes I use 10, 30, 45, 60 or other degrees of z rotation.

Using the colored lines when moving objects can help you line them up with other objects such as the center of windows.

I also only recently learned how to use repeats per meter properly when lining up textures on multiple prims, such as when making a carpet for an irregularly shaped room. ( A prim floor covering on a mesh floor helps your objects to rez where you want them to rez.)

[Cali Souther]

Thank you!!!   I have tried using the numbers - wasn't sure what the magic numbers were,  but I will use yours and see if it helps  (no doubt, it will).

Really nice tip about the prim floor covering ...    it seems,  I have to rez everything on the floor and then move it where it belongs...  so,  that will be VERY helpful!