MEsh clothes spam

[Naiman Broome]

Since I have read that meshes can impact so bad on perfrmances of a sim then how will be handled the supersmap of mesh clothes we will soon seen in SL ? Hpw will be possible to protect regions from overcoming of people with lot ofmesh clothes?

[Marielle Caerndow]

As how I see it, it won't be much different as it's now.

Even now, someone can wear a pair of 300-, 400- or 500-prim boots andcause performance issues.

Same will applyfor mesh. Some creators will build with insane high poly-count (instead using textures for details). 

On the other hand, mesh will allow much more performance-friendly builds.

Just a test: I made a pair of boots, built with 8 sculpties. For the viewer's render engine it counts with 15.000 triangles (!). (One sculpty already counts nearly 2.000 triangles).

Now I built the same  boots as mesh: counts only 1.700 triangles. This means, the mesh version is nearly 90% more efficient.

[Poenald Palen]

Um, bots programmed to look for high arc counts and then boot those people with a notecard sent to them in multiple languages expressing your sorrow BUT they need to detach some items. Informing them of where and what ARC is might help. The problem is...ARC is disputed frequently and may be unfair to some borderline cases because they can end up on either side of the cut off value you set and both be just as laggy as the other!

Sad, but I am not sure you can do anything BUT try to educate your visitors. A host might make announcemtns, send IM's and then you can also make announcements to partons they need to drop thier 'object slider to the left" after enabling advanced mode in the graphics tab or the preferences window /me catches breath.

But, those are two ways. People can help themelves BUT reduce the quality of view OR you can request people remove stuff or simply boot them until they comply.

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

The guideline for the map region is 250,000 visible triangles/frame.  If we assume avatars get a similar guideline for performance, and about 15 avatars per map region before *other* factors besides mesh objects start to lag the region, then we get a guideline of 16,000 mesh triangles per avatar.  That is actually a fairly generous allowance if the items are well designed.

As guidance for designers and buyers, consider the SL camera has a near clip by default of 0.5 meters. In other words, anything closer is not rendered.  Therefore, any geometry or texture detail smaller than about 0.5 mm is less than one screen pixel in size when zoomed in as close as possible, and *will not be seen*.  So it is pointless to make or buy items with details smaller than that.  I expect it will happen anyway due to lack of knowledge, hubris, or vanity.

[Gearsawe Stonecutter]

Actually mesh will be better since the restrictions for triangle per prim will be greater than that of the sculpt or normal twisted/hollowed prims. The Sim performance does not suffer but the client side rendering is what degrades. As designers learn to make efficient meshes, things will improve. As it stand with normal prims and sculpts there is a lot of wasted tringle.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

Quote: "Since I have read that meshes can impact so bad on perfrmances of a sim then how will be handled the supersmap of mesh clothes we will soon seen in SL ? Hpw will be possible to protect regions from overcoming of people with lot ofmesh clothes?"

Where did you read that? From my understanding the opposite will be true. Mesh will be less demanding on resources than a lot of normal prims, flex prims, and sculpts used currently to make clothing. I think your source is mistaken.

[Poenald Palen]

It is mentioned that mesh will be a bad thing for perfromance, and I guess this is related to the prim counts and so on. But, I am thinking mesh will get the short end of the stick on vert count and will be less than sculpts. But, streaming and the tendency to use large textures might effect some people pipeline in thier PC...just a guess. But in some games, they have an option to use smaller textures to stop the larger ones to increase GPU performance. So, I assume the tendency to use larger images to handle the multple surfaces all combined in one form might cause some issues.. I think mesh has a potential to be better though, due to the non wasting of verts AND it forces people to combine on a texture, which saves overall performance sometimes because before some builders where making 1024's on each prim, or even on some sides of prims! This should make this a little bit better.

The funny thing is all the time spent (or not) on detailing what your build is composed of! If this slows me down from building...it is sort of lag lol. I have to explain it because some people want to photo an item, but up close. If they want up close and the texture is a bit blurry because I am using mesh and it has restrictions....well, they might be upset. So I need to make extra photo's, so they can see it upclose! On top of that, some will hate mesh and not want it OR they will seek it out! So, now I will have to indicate the composition. Lucky for me, I type lots anyway due to my mental situation lol. I type enough to write a novel each month, if I dont' watch out and stop typing. Shame I have bad grammar! Which reminds me, I need to stop typing now and go read up on that and do chores around the house.

[Scope]

The first(?) thread about degrading performance due to a new assett format.

I believe we had rather a lot when sculpts appeared too. Somebody should quickly knock up a standard answer in the wiki so it can be referred to when this question returns several times a day soon.

[Medhue Simoni]

Will some creators try to push the limit, sure, but this is a matter of the customer being informed and given the correct information to make an educated decision. Currently, this is not possible, and most items on the marketplace don't even tell the prims count.

Few people seem to understand that their shoes and hair are probably creating the most amount of lag. These 2 items are perfect for a mesh overall, which will turn those laggy shoes into beautifully efficient works of art that actually flex and bend. Mesh based hair with some flexiprims will also bring the rendering cost of hair way down. As far as clothing, we already have sculpty clothing. What could cause more lag than that? Just go look at the scupty clothing in wireframe mode.

[arton Rotaru]

Since I saw the 18.9K Triangles twistet torus (still 900 Tris in lowest LOD), sculpts are not that bad at all. :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: And they have fixed lower LODs. With mesh attachments, a builder could do only HI LOD in all LOD slots. That's not good and the OPs concernes about Avatars is valid. Though, it will be hard to make mesh hair with the amount of triangles that 256 twisted tori have already. lol

Then there will be the new ARC. So lets wait and see how this will turn out.

 

[Medhue Simoni]

This is why I advocate for more specs on the marketplace, and more information to consumers.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

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Poenald Palen wrote:

"...AND it forces people to combine on a texture"

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I'm afraid that's incorrect.  A mesh object can be assigned 8 seperate materials, which means you can potentially display 8 different 1024 x 1024 textures on a single mesh. :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

Uploading a multi-face mesh

 

Also, if you want to cover a large area of a mesh object without the texture blurring or having to resort to high resolution textures, it's possible to use smaller seamless textures and overlap parts of the UV map (or simply apply the texture to seperate "faces" of the uploaded mesh and change the repeats as you would with regular prims).

[arton Rotaru]

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Fluffy Sharkfin wrote:

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Poenald Palen wrote:

"...AND it forces people to combine on a texture"

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I'm afraid that's incorrect.  A mesh object can be assigned 8 seperate materials, which means you can potentially display 8 different 1024 x 1024 textures on a single mesh. :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

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Yeah, and I can apply 9 1024x1024 on a pathcut, hollow prim cube already.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

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arton Rotaru wrote:

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Fluffy Sharkfin wrote:

I'm afraid that's incorrect.  A mesh object can be assigned 8 seperate materials, which means you can potentially display 8 different 1024 x 1024 textures on a single mesh. :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

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Yeah, and I can apply 9 1024x1024 on a pathcut, hollow prim cube already.

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Well yes, you can.  I certainly hope you don't make a habit of it though! :matte-motes-tongue:

[Gamthalion Raymaker]

Hey all

All fun and games discussing resource cost on mesh object compare to sculpts but it all comes down to the same as it always have bin.
How smart is the creator in terms of understanding what is going on and how does it work.
Already experiences 3D designers who have a little experience in game modeling wont have a lot of problems keeping the cost low but a beginner will make a lot of mistakes at first. nothing that cant be overcome but it takes time.
Until the mesh goes life and people start using it we cant really say what will happen but only speculate on it.

1 very important option i still see un explored. BUMP MAPPING, conventional 3D modeling that has the need to keep a very low poly count use bump maps to create additional details "displacement maps are out of the question" now we know SL can handle bump maps but... well we dont have custom bump maps but the few crappy ones from sl that are pretty useless.
Non the less this would be a great solution for hi detailed meshes dont you think ?

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

The Linden staff have stated several times that normal maps are on the desired feature list after mesh goes to the main grid. 

Normal maps give the direction of the normal vector for lighting calculations.  Bump maps need to be converted to calculated normals for shading purposes, so modern graphics engines use the normal map directly.  That is more efficient since it does not have to be computed.  A more advanced feature is "displacement mapping", where the actual geometry is modified by a map, rather than just the shading.  For that purpose a greyscale bump map would serve, but it also requires a faster graphics card to handle the added calculations.