Mesh and Sculpt Comparisons

[Vivienne Daguerre]

I decided to test things out by making a sink and counter in mesh and sculpties. Both have a script in them so that when you touch the sink, dishes in water rez in the sink with soap bubbles that float up (particles).

The sculpty version on the left has 5 prims in the most recent mesh project viewer 2.7.6 (234621) Jul  1 2011. The mesh version on the right has 8 prims.

The wood frame looks nicer in mesh and with the UV map took the wood texturing much better than the sculpted wood frame (made of 3 sculpties made with Prim Oven, a simple and fast tool). The sculpted barrel and sink, made with Blender, textured well in ZBrush and look much nicer and less clunky that the low poly mesh barrel and sink. LODs seem to be good for both.

I left these rezzed for the Lindens to see. Every prim saved is a bonus to the customer. With mesh penalties as they are, the sculpt version wins.

I would encourage others to try things in mesh and sculpt, make signs for them to indicate which is which, and leave them rezzed out in the Mesh HQ area where we have our meetings so the Lindens will be sure to see them at the next one, on Monday, 11 July. It would be good for them to see hard examples and comparisons, and would also be a form of protest against the accounting as it stands right now.

It is a shame to see mesh nerfed before it even gets to the main grid.

[Jay Taggart]

If it stays as it is when it reaches the main grid, the cost formula will either stay the same forever, or the costs will be lowered. I highly doubt LL would make them MORE expensive after people have made some mesh products and put them on the market. This is the same reasoning(I assume) why they wont change the formula for prims and sculpts...they dont want to break everything. Obviously we all hope that the "prim" cost will be driven down, if it isnt, judging by your example, I think mesh will still be viable somewhat. (this, of course does not take into consideration further incentive not to use mesh which we havent had any info on, which will be L$ cost for uploads...I think we'll all be rather shocked when they reveal the pricing )

Like you say, customers only care about prim count. If it were solely a matter of looks, well, in your example, I think the wood frame looks better in the mesh version, while the sink looks better in the sculpted version. Though this is without actually logging in and seeing them in person. So if the looks of the object in this specific example was my main focus as a consumer, I would likely choose the sculpted version. If prims were my main concern, sculpted version wins again.

I already feel ill for buying 3D studio max...I hope I can get some use out of it.

[Drongle McMahon]

Well, I suppose you could have a sculpty sink on a mesh stand ...... Oh no! That will make the sink be costed like a mesh. You'll just have to buy them separately.

[Medhue Simoni]

The real question tho is, which actually cost more to render? If the sculpty version cost more than the mesh versions, then LL is not helping the lag issue at all. Which 1 is more data? If you ask me, we should have something in the object window that tells us the total amount of data for the object. Sure, I understand there are other factors, but it is hard to compare anything when we are only given some algorythm number.

[Setekh Ichtama]

Each sculpty vertex is an integer value so when it comes to precision, mesh is probably 1000x more precise and not to mention, with sculpties, you're limited to a fixed dimension with no more than 1024 vertices per map.

Sculpties had it's day; Mesh is going to take the cake. It won't radically change anything, but the quality of sculpties will improve significantly and better tools are accessible to everyone and as the person above mentioned, I'm sure there are significant rendering benefits aswell, we'll see, this is the future though (just look at the collada format and what it can do).

It really sounds like you're trying to sell us some propaganda.

Sculpties will soon be dead! 

 

[Drongle McMahon]

Yoyu can get some relevant information using Show Render Info. The mesh version is 1,364 triangles. The sculpty version is 10,240 triangles. That's 7.5 to one at high LOD (not bad, I have examples where it's 20:1).

That would be clear if all triangles were equal, but Runitai told us sharp-edged triangles cost more to render (as well as to download), and the mesh has some sharp angles while the sculpty has none*. ( Something to do with cacheing triangle data. I have no ide how big that difference may be). Also, some of  the sculpties are smaller and will therefore switch to lower LOD, and 1/4 the number of triangles, at a shorter distance than th mesh. This all makes it a bit difficult to say definitively, but I still doubt that these effects ever make the sculpty less triangles on average.

*When sculpties have sharp edges made by squeezing vertices, I think the zero-volume triangles are dropped from the rendering queue, so that is another difficulty in answering the quaestion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[Opensource Obscure]

How about Physics / Collisions? Do the two implementations behave the same way?

I'd expect the sculpty one to behave weirdly, when you walk over it. or let a physical object fall over it (unless you made it phantom, which again would be unrealistic - while adding a transparent, primmed structure to allow realistic collisions would raise the prims number); meshes have the potential for more realistic collisions.

Guarantee, for some kinds of objects this aspect is not a concern, but when buying furnitures I would take it into consideration.

[Nacy Nightfire]

That was fun!  Nice job and thanks for setting out the comparison, Vivenne. Very helpful.

I don't see enough advantage to buying the mesh version over the sculpted.  The barrel is an "eye" catcher so it really matters, and the sculpted barrel holds its texture considerably better then the low poly mesh version.  I agree the mesh sink is slightly better then the sculpted, and I'm not convinced there's much difference in the wood texture to matter.  Over all I'd buy the sculpted set.

[ChuckBaggett1488303079]

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Setekh Ichtama wrote:the quality of sculpties will improve significantly

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Did you mean "mesh objects" there instead of "sculpties"?

[Vivienne Daguerre]

the barrel is so low poly that it looks very clunky and chunky. I took the low poly barrel out and linked in the better looking sculpted barrel. The total linkset count was still 8 prims, unchanged. It looks like there is no advantage at all in using very low poly meshes over sculpties.

If the Lindens want us to use sculpties over mesh, then this accounting system is the way to go. I would suggest it is not a good idea, for more sculpties over mesh means a more intensive drain on resources.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

I think they behave the same when it comes to physics. One nice thing about the prim oven tool is that its bounding box hugs the sculpty pretty tight. I can stand on each of them just the same. I can't tell about sitting, because there is an animation that makes your avatar wash dishes that rez in the sink (it even gives you a sculpted wash cloth to "wear"). Please have a look and see what you think.

They can be found on Mesh HQ1 a nd also on Mesh Sandbox 29.

[Medhue Simoni]

It seems to me that, if all this stuff that only applies to mesh is all about lag, is not LL going about this in the wrong kind of way? To me, the genius of SL is the caching. In a world like blue mars, you have to download  everything at once, just so everything can work, much like a game you play off a disk. SL has a cache that renders things as you need them, but why does it ever delete anything? I have a Terabyte of hard drive space and I'm sure I can fit a good percentage of everything I've ever seen in SL. This would mean that I would almost never have to download anything to view it, much like any game you play on a disc. Why is our cache so dang small despite all computers having way more space than we will ever need?

Please, some1 explain to me why I'm totally wrong here, cause this is something that I've had in my brain for awhile now.

[arton Rotaru]

In the Mesh Viewer we can set almost 10GB for cache. That's not a TB, but better than before. 

[Marcthur Goosson]

After reading all the words I decided to build the sink myself.

To see what happens.

I have same results.

I modelled it with hard and soft edges: that gave 10 prims (without script)

And the model with only soft edges: 7 prims (without script)

I did not care about UV mapping for this test.

(I also found a bug: texture faces switching when changing LOD)

So for primcount the sculptie wins but in my opinion mesh has far more options in texturing and building accurate models. If that is a plus in a prim based economy ? Sculpties might get a PE value to in future, HELP !!

I rezzed my testmodels next to Vivienne's models in sandbox 29.

 

[Setekh Ichtama]

Barrels and a bunch of prim rectangles and a sink are not complicated mesh objects.
Make something complex like a statue (if you can) and show us what happens.

Sculpties are Meshes like everything else, just extremely limited meshes so to argue that Sculpties are better than Mesh is pretty silly in my opinion.

[Gaia Clary]

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Marcthur Goosson wrote:

(I also found a bug: texture faces switching when changing LOD)

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I am not sure about that, but i always had the impression that you have to take care about the order in which the vertex groups for the different texture faces are exported. So you might have mangled something in your model ?

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So for primcount the sculptie wins but in my opinion mesh has far more options in texturing and building accurate models. If that is a plus in a prim based economy ? Sculpties might get a PE value to in future, HELP !!

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If Sculpties would get a PE in the future, wouldn't that be a content breaker ? Also i am afraid that many people would not care about "is it mesh or sculpty", but they would care about how many prims they have to spend to rezz an object. And i think this behaviour is very very legitimate.

However i still think, that if done correctly, then a multi part mesh should become better compared to an equivalent sculpties-only creation regarding vertex-count, look&feel  AND primcount. And the final numbers should make it possible to do that. Anything else would not make too much sense to me.

My experiments so far show that this can be done wherever you use many sculpties (like 40 prim shoes, 200 prim hair, etc..) In such cases a mesh could reduce the PE weight dramatically. But wherever we talk about only a few complex objects, mesh fails and Sculpty will win. Some (one prim) objects even seem to be much easier to build with Sculpties.

And i am pretty sure that some objects can be made with Mesh, where you have a lot of trouble if you wanted to do the same obejct with Sculpties. So at the end we will have good examples for every method (regular prim,sculpty,mesh). And i do NOT at all believe that Sculpties are "out of the game". They HAVE some nice features, if you like it or not ;-)

[Marcthur Goosson]

Yes please show us your statue.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

My point is not to argue that sculpties are better than mesh. Indeed, I prefer mesh. It is easier to work with, texture, and less draining on resources.

My argument here is that the accounting system which determines prim equivalency is out of whack.

Some of those on the mesh team believe that prims, scripts, and sculpties were not made to count for prims based on the demands they place on resources. They are trying to balance things out by increasing the prim equivalency cost of mesh.

Our argument is that they have gone too far, making mesh less attractive to use than regular prims and sculpties. If the hope of Linden Lab was that mesh would reduce lag and demands on resources, they will fail with the accounting system as is, because people will continue to use sculpties over mesh for most things. As the accounting system stands at this moment, mesh will likely be used mostly for rigged clothing and attachments, since prims worn by an avatar do not count against sim prim limits.

My very low poly mesh barrel is so low poly that it is ugly, yet it counts alone as 2 prims, while the resource greedy sculpty barrel looks much better and counts as only one prim. There is no incentive to use low poly mesh over sculpties. Even linked into the sink and frame, the sculpty barrel does not make the sink cost more than it did with the mesh barrel.

Mesh is nerfed.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

Here is the render information from the two linksets so you can more accurately compare them to see that the accounting makes no sense.

Sculpted Linkset
7.168 Ktris, 5 objects, 0.0/0.0 kb, streaming cost 13.1
counts as 5 prims

Mesh Linkset
1.364 Ktris, 15.1/36.7 kb, streaming cost 10.2
counts as 8 prims

Sculpt Barrel
.512 Ktris, 0.0/0.0 kb, streaming cost 1.6
counts as 1 prim

Mesh Barrel
.256 Ktris, 3.2/9.3 kb, streaming cost 2.0
counts as 2 prims

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Vivienne Daguerre wrote:Our argument is that they have gone too far, making mesh less attractive to use than regular prims and sculpties. If the hope of Linden Lab was that mesh would reduce lag and demands on resources, they will fail with the accounting system as is, because people will continue to use sculpties over mesh for most things. As the accounting system stands at this moment, mesh will likely be used mostly for rigged clothing and attachments, since prims worn by an avatar do not count against sim prim limits.

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Indeed. At our business we saw a great future with mesh, until the prim count was announced. We have discussed it and as it stands now we are going to skip our mesh plans for the biggest part. When it comes to rezzable objects we will mainly stick to sculpties. The mesh line we are going to develop will only be for attachables.

The point is that rezzable mesh will be too expensive for our customers. Expensive in the sense of tier expensive. Maybe LL thinks that they are going to gain more tier income when meshes have a higher prim count than comparable prims and sculpts. But customers will choose for the most profitable deal. The lower the prim count the better. With sculpts we can create one prims objects with a comparable quality as it's two prims mesh equivalent.

The whole point is: who is going to pay?

Objectively the render costs are higher for sculpties. So for LL it is cheaper to rezz mesh then to rezz sculpts. Though the customer will be charged more for this less recourse demanding variation. But for the general customer it does not matter if an object is economical in use of recourses. It matter that he has so and so much prims available on his land. And the lower prim variant of an object (with comparable quality) will always be the favorite.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

Not only is the sculpty barrel lower prim than my low poly mesh one, it is much better quality in terms of resolution. My poor low poly mesh barrel looks terrible beside the sculpted one, and costs double the prims of the sculpted one. To make a mesh barrel of equivalent quality, it would cost even more in prim count. If you add a script, the count goes up again.

Here is the advice I would give to others asking me about mesh if it hits the main grid as is:

• If what you want to make can be done in sculpty or mesh, do it in sculpty. The prim count will be lower and the quality will be higher than what you can do in the same number of prims with mesh.
• If you need to make a one prim object, do it with a sculpty. Meshes can never be lower than 2 prims.
• If you plan to script the object, make it with sculpties.
• If it is to be worn as rigged mesh or as a non-rigged attachment, go with mesh because prim count does not matter.
• If it is all square with no rounded parts, and you can make it very low poly, then it might have a reasonable prim count in mesh, depending on size.

I cannot give advice regaring large buildings or vehicles because I have not played with them much.

I brought in a townhouse I made with regular prims and sculpties and was able to reduce it from 149 prims down to about 90 prims replacing the walls with mesh. However, with the new accounting, it is now 133 prims, so it was not really worth the effort to replace parts of it with mesh.

[Dain Shan]

Exactly my thoughts.

But as we already know from the last Meeting, it will not change.

From the Meeting

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Archive/2011-06-27

Point 7

[12:34]

Charlar Linden

7. Is it too late to propose an alternative to the prim equivilance system being implemented? Two people did so:



[12:34]

Nyx Linden

yes, its too late



Seems we go life with this ... :matte-motes-frown:

I have 2 view angles onto this.

1.) Market.

There will be only a very small Market, as it is at the moment, Mesh will not become a major selling point.

It may be, that there are a few selected things that do better with mesh then with sculpts. But this has yet to be shown. I found that small Building pieces might have a chance, because they are more detailed and also easy to handle if you can stack them like Legos ( as normal prims ), if the customer understands the proper handling that is. And as long as you keep a very close eye on the resource cost and try, try, try ...

2.) Resource View

Here im still boggled. I understand that they want to take streaming costs into account. But hey, as we see from the Barrel above, Meshes are NOT the download killer here. A 256 by 256 Sculpt map on 16Bit color depth will have a data volume of about 1 Megabyte ( rounded .. Its 1024 KByte ) compared to that Mesh file above .. Its like a Goliath while the cute little mesh file comes along with under 100Kbyte. Closest will be a 64x64 sculptmap with 64Kbyte.

Don't get me started with the even larger ones. And yes, i have seen 512x512 ones .. :matte-motes-sick:

 

We also see here

Sculpted Linkset
7.168 Ktris, 5 objects, 0.0/0.0 kb, streaming cost 13.1
counts as 5 prims

Mesh Linkset
1.364 Ktris, 15.1/36.7 kb, streaming cost 10.2
counts as 8 prims

The sculpted set needs 5 of this maps ( i don't know the size, maybe Vivienne can comment on this ) so 5 calls and downloads from the asset server, while with mesh its only 1 call and 1 download.

 

I really don't understand it .. I read the explanations serval times and tried to wrap my brain around it. It still somehow makes absolutely no sense.

 

[Vivienne Daguerre]

On the positive side, those who feared mesh may put them out of business can rest easy. We are seeing that there is no advantage in terms of prim count in building with mesh as compared to building with sculpties and regular prims. With increased prim size, I think most builders will be able to reduce the prim count of their buildings to a point where mesh cannot hope to compete.

Mesh will be of limited value in terms of rigged mesh. Rigged mesh will adjust with the skeleton, but not with morphs. You can compensate for that by using alpha layers to make parts that may stick out disappear if the clothing covers most of the body. If the clothing bares a lot of skin, then the morphs (muscularity, breast size, butt size, etc.) are going to be a problem and rigged mesh would not be the best choice for that kind of clothing. People may continue to prefer the movement of flex prim skirts as compared to rigged mesh skirts. Rigged mesh will not be good for everything. Non-rigged mesh attachments will work very well, such as shoes, boots, and belts.

Mesh will not work well for small objects such as jewelry. Sculpties and nano prims will continue to be the tools of choice for jewelers.

I think mesh may enable vehicle makers to make higher prim and more detailed vehicles with the physic hull options. However, the vehicles will be higher prim and that may be a serious drawback in some cases.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

The sculpted barrel and sculpted sink sculpt maps are 128 x 128 each. The 3 parts of the sculpted wooden frame are 16 x 256 each. I realize I could take that down and should, and I will before taking it to the main grid. However, there is no penalty for not doing so and not all sculpty makers are even aware that they should. You will see sculpt maps of this size, and larger, commonly on the main grid.

[Dain Shan]

Makes a memory usage of 1,2 Mbyte alltogether for the sculpts.

The mesh dosent even touch the 100Kbyte border.

 

 

AND i made a BIG mistake in my last Post ... Please note that i meant the Memory usage !!! Not the download size. The Numbers of calls on the Assetserver are still higher, thought ... 5 for sculpts 1 for mesh.