Mesh upload costs on Aditi

[Boeman Fhang]

So far I've burned through 10k uploading test mesh objects since downloading the July 8th build of the Mesh Dev client.

As always, both the streaming and upload costs are inconsistent with each other for the same DAE file. It seems the cost penalty hits you the hardest for having inefficient LODs - one test calculated at over $1500 for a 52k tri object which was specified for the first three LOD slots.

Should I assume it will no longer be possible to upload mesh objects for free on the test grid?

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

We have been charged upload costs for as long as I have been using Aditi, but the L$ balance there is "fake money", and you can get more by asking a linden staff person.  And yes, the unfinished state of costs is annoying since I don't know how much I need to optimize things, or even if they are feasible to make with mesh.  Nobody will want my mesh palm tree that costs 9 prims when they can get a nice sculpted one for 1 or 2 prims.

[Tapple Gao]

according to another post, mesh palm trees are actually costing a  few hundred prims, rather than 1 or 2, due to how mesh cost goes up with size

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

It's a small palm (and now it costs 12 PE).  About 900 triangles for the high LOD.

Small Palm Tree

To show what can be done with a more relaxed triangle budget and a good graphics engine, here is a scene I set up with the CryEngine 3, with 750K triangles per frame.  There are two kinds of grass tufts, short and tall, of around 600-800 triangles each.  The ones in the upper left corner are turned into "sprites", meaning a single flat plane with a picture of the object.  A sprite faces the camera, while a billboard (as used in SL) has a fixed position.  The ones in the foreground are rendered in full.  All the plants are copies of just 3 objects, so "streaming cost" would be very low if the data was being sent online.  After sending the 3 models and their textures, the copies only have to specify position, rotation, and scaling, which amounts to about 16 bytes per copy.  The terrain texture also has two levels of detail.  At long range the snow and rock texture on the mountain is displayed.  At close range a grass and clover texture is displayed to fill in between the 3D grass tufts.

Note that this has a good frame rate with shadows turned on (35 fps in the statistics top right) on my GTX-260, and that is with post-processing (the bloom from the overexposed snow), and *animating the plants*, they all move in the wind individually.

Cryengine 3 Scene

[RaptonX Zorger]

What I find a tad odd is the cost of a mesh that has the same number of triangles as a sculpt, one being an image for sculpt, the other exported as a dae, 10L vs 159L that both look pretty much the same. I know it is not the final cost, but still, eh. Though if I were making a model, a really complex model, I would be sure to finalize it before I upload it.

[arton Rotaru]

The mesh upload fee is way down now. At least on Mesh Experimental server ( Haven't tried DRTSIM-68 yet).

A 12 triangles cube is now 11 L$. Even havier meshes are way lower  than 150 L$ now.

[Drongle McMahon]

Yes. DRTSIM-68 too. My test thing of 64 meshes is now L$81 instead of L$221, while one of them is L$11 instaed of L$151. So I guess the per-upload-event part went from L$150 to L$10. Still quite a big discount for uploading 64 at once, but L$10 does seem bearable.