LOD / LI balance within a homestead sim with open views

[BartPitcher]

Good day!

I'm trying to landscape an entire homestead sim with an alpine nature theme. The aim is to create a mountain landscape with open views. I have a very cool sim surround and would like the sim to blend in with that.

Most nature sims I looked at are split-up into smaller area's so that you never have a view across the entire sim. Which is a fall-back scenario, but first want to try the open view.
My current challenge is to find trees that do not disappear if you move away half a sim distance. With the client LOD setting maxed out, I found some that still have reasonable LI, like 4 to 5 for the bigger trees, 1 for the small. However, at a certain distance the LOD reduces in such a way that the shadows disappear, which is almost as ugly as disappearing objects.

My wish is to not use too many different vendors, the one I use now has a nice seasonal HUD that I would like to use on as many objects as possible.
As the sim fills up, long views will be reduced regardless of my aim, decreasing the problem intrinsically I guess.

Anyway, I could use some advice ...

Cheers, Bart.

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, BartPitcher said:

My current challenge is to find trees that do not disappear if you move away half a sim distance. With the client LOD setting maxed out, I found some that still have reasonable LI, like 4 to 5 for the bigger trees, 1 for the small. However, at a certain distance the LOD reduces in such a way that the shadows disappear, which is almost as ugly as disappearing objects.

Off the top of my head I can only think of four mesh tree creators who fit that bill: Reid Parkin (Mesh Plants), Alex Bader (Skye), Teresa Matfield (T-Spot) and one I'm not allowed to mention here.

I'm sure there are a few others too so let's see what others recommend.

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Edit: No, make it four. I completely forgot Eldowyn Inshan (United InshCon) since I never got around to use any of her works on my own sim. I've also seen low LI/lag trees with good LOD by others but I don't know of any who does it consistently.

I was in a similar situation as you about ten years ago, building a two sim landscape with low lag and long distance visibility. In the end I had to learn how to make trees myself but even after that I was still happy to keep the Teresa Matfield and Alex Bader ones I already had. (Reid Parkin's trees weren't on the market yet at that time as far as I know.) They weren't quite up to the standard I wanted but close enough not to cause any serious issues and far better than most mesh trees on the market.

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Edit 2: If you want low lag, low LI and good LOD lush vegetation, it's important to think in layers: Very simple (even down to old style crossed panel) meshes for smaller plants and plants that are well away from where people are likely to go, well optimized medium detail plants (like the ones from the makers I mentioned) for the bulk of trees and then a few highly detailed mesh or sculpt(!) ones in strategic spots. The two Grand Old Ladies of SL trees, Lilith Heart and Nadine Reverie are worth checking out for the latter.

I already posted a message about this long ago so I won't go into details here. Take a look at https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/465598-plants-lag-and-a-new-classification-system-for-vegetation/

 

Edited January 23 by ChinRey

[BartPitcher]

31 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Off the top of my head ...

Thank you! Some of your recommendations I haven't seen yet. Will check them out. I now use Kriss Lehmann's Botanical trees. Looking for fir / cone shaped trees ...
But I also assume the disappearing of the shadows is the general consequence of LOD reduction or fallback to 2D forms.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, BartPitcher said:

I now use Kriss Lehmann's Botanical trees.

Ok. His cedars aren't too bad actually. At least not from what I've seen. I never needed cedars myself so I never looked too closely at the options for that particular tree.

Edited January 23 by ChinRey

[BartPitcher]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Edit 2: If you want low lag, low LI and good LOD lush vegetation, it's important to think in layers: Very simple (even down to old style crossed panel) meshes for smaller plants and plants that are well away from where people are likely to go, well optimized medium detail plants (like the ones from the makers I mentioned) for the bulk of trees and then a few highly detailed mesh or sculpt(!) ones in strategic spots. The two Grand Old Ladies of SL trees, Lilith Heart and Nadine Reverie are worth checking out for the latter.

I already posted a message about this long ago so I won't go into details here. Take a look at https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/465598-plants-lag-and-a-new-classification-system-for-vegetation/

 

Thanks again. Was trying this with low LI mesh trees I had, but they did completely disappear at longer view distances. But they are not the cross panel type, will try these.

And yes, I already use very big sculpt Heart oak trees. Mesh can't do that  Edit: oops the tris of this are beyond the scale of class A ... 😳

Edited January 23 by BartPitcher

[ChinRey]

51 minutes ago, BartPitcher said:

Thanks again. Was trying this with low LI mesh trees I had, but they did completely disappear at longer view distances. But they are not the cross panel type, will try these.

Oh, I hope you don't misunderstand me. It's perfectly possible to make good looking low LI high LOD trees without going all the way down to crossed panels.

Take these two trees for example. The one to the left is 21 m tall and 4 LI, the one to the right 10 m and only 1 LI yet (you have to take my word for it here) they never disappear or even distort noticeably until you go beyond your veiwer's draw distance.

The trees from the creators I mentioned in my first post are not quite at that level but they are close enough I'm sure you'll be happy with them.

 

1 hour ago, BartPitcher said:

And yes, I already use very big sculpt Heart oak trees. Mesh can't do that

Ummm, I think my picture prooves you wrong there. Mesh can do that but there are only a handful of mesh makers skilled enough and very few of them make trees.

But sculpts do make a lot of sense for very big feature trees as long as you don't have too many of them and Lilith Heart's old oaks are still among the best there are in SL in that category.

[BartPitcher]

Yes, I already had several 'aha erlebnis' and 'oops erlebnis' moments today thanks to your reply! 

Edited January 23 by BartPitcher

[BartPitcher]

13 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Take these two trees for example ...

3D modelling n00b warning

Maybe, repetitiveness versus variance is also a factor of quality. Is it possible to re-use model 'snip-its' that have high level of detail? I'm not sure if you re-use a branch with leaves a couple of times in a tree model would reduce the amount of poly's. To define the tree in the model app I assume re-use the same sub structure could be efficient, but at the end all these re-used parts need to be rendered individually because each re-used part has different positions, angles, etc.?

[ChinRey]

20 minutes ago, BartPitcher said:

Maybe, repetitiveness versus variance is also a factor of quality. Is it possible to re-use model 'snip-its' that have high level of detail? I'm not sure if you re-use a branch with leaves a couple of times in a tree model would reduce the amount of poly's. To define the tree in the model app I assume re-use the same sub structure could be efficient, but at the end all these re-used parts need to be rendered individually because each re-used part has different positions, angles, etc.?

That's an advanced question, certainly not a noob one.

Second Life does not have object instancing (yet) but there can still be a lot to save by assembling objects from a few standardised modules rather than making them from big single meshes since it can drastically reduce the amount of data the client has to download (or retrieve from cache) and process. The most render efficient way to make a tree would be to use a few such modules for the trunk and branches and make the foliage entirely from prim sheets. That would mean a huge icnrease in the land impact though. Land impact has nothing to do with render efficiency, it's all about server load and as far as the server is concerned, an object is an object. It doesn't matter if it's a high poly mesh or a simple prim and it doesn't matter if it's part of a linkset or not. (The latter is a fundamental flaw in SL's software btw but it's one that would be horrendously difficult to fix now.)

One of the biggest secrets of efficient building is to find the right balance between render load and land impact. This is a bit of an art really since there are no absolute rules and every case is unique. For trees, splitting the canopy is definitely a part of this balancing act.

If you look at the two trees in picture above, the small one has a canopy made from a single mesh. That's the only way to get the LI down to 1 and the foliage only has 24 tris anyway so it's hardly going to affect the load. The big tree, however have a canopy made from three different meshes, some of them copied so adding up to seven parts.

With that being said, textures are still far more important for render load than geometry and there's a lot more to save by re-using textures than meshes.