Kyrah Abattoir

If you're not gonna simplify or LOD it you gain nothing from doing this.

Thing is zeroing isn't truly "zero" it is 1 triangle per unique material. You are declaring a mesh per material no matter the triangle count, and as far as your GPU is concerned, opening that context has an incompressible time cost where 1-50 triangles is virtually going to take the same time to render. If you're gonna pay for that context switch no matter what, you might aswel put something in it.

You're also gonna have to paint those holes black to avoid getting a white "halo" where the holes become transparent.

Lil bit of story, objexts from a neighboring sim don't exist, and likewise, a neighbor sim doesn't exist until you cross into it. If you look at linden roads, they use the same approach @animatssuggested, they essentially have two invisible "bridges" that overlap on each region border to "hold" you until you finished crossing into the next region.

Wait, are you telling us that your problem was the bone representation mode?

And you'll never see them because they don't want a solution, they just don't want anything to change.

The grid is specifically engineered to avoid dealing with the content itself as much as possible if you haven't noticed. It has been Linden Lab's policy to make sure that, when possible, new features would have little to no performance hit on the region server. Just because regions floats at a happy 45FPS doesn't mean the user experience hasn't been getting progressively worse. Thankfully, the current team seem to understand now that what users experience is just as important as the health of the region simulator.

You do them in edit mode.

Also it is textured for PBR rendering.

@NaomiLocketOne might wonder why you so vehemently defend garbage content...

There is no game out there where the kind of mesh creators in SL output is "normal". And yes, without pressure, bad creators who make a killing on sales aren't going to listen, because sales are the only metric of whether they are doing well or not.

And to be clear this isn't just a problem isolated to SecondLife, this is a problem on the unity asset store, on turbosquid, on every single marketplace where creators are effectively shielded from peer review or supervision (like when working under an artistic director) and are only beholden to the person purchasing their work.

At the end of the day, you work within the constraints of the engine, you don't ignore those constraints assuming that it will just "get better" in the future. You don't just get to reverse the balance because you're a petulant Second Life creator. Every game artist understands this very well: you work with the tools you are given.

I know people don't like me to bring this as an example, but look at Utilizator's Avatar 2.0. It clocks at 34K head included, and has what i'd consider an excellent topology.

There is always Avastar /me ducks behind cover.

As low as you can get away with.

Manual topology is always required for game art ^^

In a way VR is much less forgiving than SL and so they have to be much more strict about resource consumption, since you will render the scene twice (once for each eye) every frame, and that low framerate in VR means instant nausea.

@PharaonisMind sharing the explanation with the class? :3

Yup it is so CPU/throughput bound that the GPU is basically doing nothing most of the time. I get no framerate difference even if i limit my GPU's TDP to 50% (much cooler card tho). As a point of reference, these are the VRChat content creation recommendations (keep inb mind vrchat treats avatars as whole objects (i only took what was relevant to our tools): Reduce the amount of meshes on your avatar: VRChat recommends that you have one Skinned Mesh Renderer at maximum, and 3 static mesh renderers at maximum. Ensure that you're not using an excessive amount of triangles: The SDK will warn you if you're trying to upload a model that exceeds 70,000 triangles for PC or 20,000 on Quest. The most effective optimization tends to occur during initial design and avatar creation. In other words, you're going to have problems if you try to take a 120,000 made-for-rendering model and squeeze it into 20,000 polygons. Don't make things harder than they have to be-- find a model that starts low! 20k is quite a large amount of leeway. Reduce the amount of material slots you use: Each additional material slot is also a draw call, which eats more processor time! If you have a lot of materials (more than 10), look into Texture Atlasing. Alpha Transparency: Alpha transparency is also another expensive part of shaders-- typically you want to be using Cutout or Opaque modes on shaders. Transparency can be quite expensive, so only use it if you know what you're doing! Reduce the amount of bones: Even if you have a bunch of bones sitting in a scarf, skirt, or your hair that you're not using for anything, they can incur additional costs during skinning calls that your GPU has to worry about.

Which is infortunate really. Call me an envious jerk but I sincerely believe that at least a couple high profile SL creators do not deserve most of the 5/5 stars they receive given the awful support they provide and their shoddy craftmanship (and that's even assuming they aren't just contracting it out), I would even go as far as saying they don't even deserve the profits they make. "But it's pretty and I don't want to get banned from the store so... I guess I'll either 5 star, or not review at all?" That's not entirely accurate, they are perfectly happy breaking content when they deem that content unimportant. I really wish they would fix rigged mesh lodding. despite the huge content breakage, it is one of the big reasons why our avatars are so heavy.

It is still an aspect that is considered as "I'll do it sure, but you have to pay for it" by mesh contractors (who are responsible for a lot of the content brands pump out on a weekly basis). Education of end users is also an issue as they rarely turn against bad creators when confronted with bad LODs, it is usually not considered by the end user until it stares at them in the face. And then it will usually be rationalized as "LL's fault/my computer is *****". Pretty hard to get people to write honest reviews too given how some creators react to criticism.

@MollymewsYou raise a good point here and I think it is worth repeating one of the issues that the current "model" has that, in my opinion, is causing the most problems: Avatars are not metered in any meaningful way: This is a difficult problem to solve because pretty much everything you can buy today, and have been able to buy for the past decade for your avatar has been built with the baked assumption that "it is a wearable, therefore its complexity doesn't matter". It is also not a "new" problem either, back in 2004, being able to wear half a region worth of prims was already a concern. But back then Linden Lab didn't have much concern for aspects of Second Life that did not affect their servers. Complexity is unenforceable, by design: It is as far as Linden Lab has gone to address the issue of the load of avatars on the client, and it essentially boils down to "we aren't taking any real decision here because we don't want to be the bad guys." What little good it did to empower resident to be the arbiters here falls because it was intentionally designed to prevent landowners to use it in any capacity (don't unionize plz). There is no support for it baked into the parcel/region tools, and the scripting support is entirely based on trusting that clients will report it in good faith. Land impact calculation promote bad behaviors: This is at least aknowledges, there is no incentive in place to produce reasonable LOD models (whether they are generated or user supplied) as the lowest setting will produce the most "marketable" value for the seller while being "mostly" hidden from the customer at the moment of sale (you won't notice bad LODs immediately, and that is assuming that you know this is intentional and not "SL bad". Metering is not consistent: Regardless of the usage all metrics should matter, LODs should matter for rigged wearables as well as unrigged wearables, texture count should matter for wearables and for rezzed objects, script count should matter for wearables and for rezzed objects. From a rendering standpoint, it doesn't matter whether you are making a chair or a jacket. You can make a case that avatars should be more detailed than the environment, and you would absolutely be right, but at the end of the day, it all has to go through the same clogged rendering pipeline.

You are completely missing my point, the reason why it's not all in 4K has more to do with engine stability and the target computer the game was made for. I keep saying that LL need to step in an decide "this is the performances target for this year and deviating from that target will have you penalized." but they never will judging from the way they bend over backward when high profile creators break the platform.

It doesn't work. Even skyrim modders (who should know what they are doing given how much of a pain it is) are usually completely clueless as to why all the textures aren't in 4K and why details aren't fully modeled all the time.