Qestion about Alpha prims and alpha layers.

[linkin Slate]

I been playing around with shoe makeing,seems like a good place  in mesh creation since its a worn item, less worries about land impact.and somehtign one can make a few sales to farther pay for furture,mesh projects.

Anyways my Qestion isAlpha layers  seem like the cats meow, they dont seem to be 100 % reliable, those times when your av texture go bonkers, feet will show but when walkingn over another alpha you dont seem to get that halo effect as prim alpha's,.

But prim alpha's for feet  in shadow mode doesnt seem to work, is this a bug ? or is prim alpha's on there way out ?

 

Then one other qestion, since im here,i didnt kow this , till just a bit ago (blushes), but is it true, alot of people set there render volume lods in debug to 2 or 4 forceing just the render of top lods dismissing lower lods from ever being seen?

If this is a common practice, i dont see  why one should work so  hard to provide those lower lods.

And or is this the vary reason why we get so many  complainning about lag ?

I know the correct way is to make and design all the lods as layed out, this will provide best results for every one.

But as a cheat one could focus more on top lod have the 3 lower at lowest counts set render volume to 4 and have cheeper imports. your killed price wise on the lower lods.

I dont  say this is  a way of doing thing im just saying i see some might and is tempting.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

The only reason why people (including me until recently) set their RenderVolume LODFactor so high is because sculpties have such poor LOD behaviour. If you build meshes, you have full control over them and you will find out, especially with small worn items, the lower LODs really don't need a lot of geometry. How many pixels is a shoe from 50 meters away? That's the question you need to ask yourself when building, well or a similiar question anyway.

I'm not quite sure what you are asking about the alpha... if you use the alpha layer (Yes Chosen, a clothing layer for alpha ) for the avatar, you shouldn't have any glitches. If you need an alpha channel on the shoe, make a seperate material (SL face) for it, so you can keep its surface area to a minimum. I would avoid the invisiprims, they really look crappy on a lot of floors.

[Drongle McMahon]

Whatever settings people use does not change the effect of LOD meshes on the land impact calculation. That calculation is much more affected by the lowest LOD for smaller (<4m) objects. So if you want low download weight, you still need to focus on the lowest LOD. Increasing the renderVolumeLODFactor to 2 or 4 does not stop you seeing the low and lowest LOD of small objects.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

No, but the point was:

If people have their rendervolume dialed up, you can make the lower lods extra simple, because they will show from a greater distance....

I wouldn't go along this line of thinking. Use 1 or 2 when building, that's what most people's systems will have at default. And now that mesh is slowly creeping into SL, the need for the sculpts with bad behaviour will become less and less. My guess is people won't be tempted to set the RVLODF so high....

[Jenni Darkwatch]

For smaller items like shoes and such I'd think it's a matter of math... how many pixels wide/high will the shoe be at different LODs? It's about the same logic as choosing the right texture resolution I'd think. If it's not gonna show, why bother with unneeded detail at lower LODs.

[Drongle McMahon]

Indeed. Unfortunately, there is no penalty for attachments, like shoes. with excessive polygons. So the same disasters that already abound, with 20-sculpties per shoe etc., will likely continue with meshes.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Yes you are very right and we already did the math on that...over a billion attached triangles is now possible with mesh, in theory anyway. I really think there should be a cap on rendercost for attachments. The standard SL avatar is 4000 faces I think (highest LOD), so something in the region of 10-20k attached should be more than plenty for dressing up nicely. I also fear mesh boots with every lace and little metal ring and every leather wrinkle modelled. As a couple of creators have shown on these forums (sorry I forgot who), a couple of 1000 is plenty for very nice shoes.