General Observations On Mesh Bodys

[Coventina Dalgleish]

I own several Mesh bodys and have appliers for them the problem with one in particular is it is 1980 Ktris thats 2 million faces give or take  and while it is an impressive body with excellent weighting most users here say I can see your head but not your body I thought LL had a limit to the size allowed for upload and if they do not they are certainly missing the mark here how can a group upload something that was obviously designed on an architectual  historic redesign system that allows millions of faces and strange geometrys i.e. triangles in circles DUH  no idea why one would need to traingulate a circle hehe but it pushes the face count way up  oh wait they used an auto generator ))  no human interface they also manage to use 1400 ktris on just the hands  wow I can make a very nice hand fo 10k as many of you can the major complaint is that my system has little problem with resolving these monsters but others always say well I see you head haha I refuse to use a bot head )) but no body gee wonder why as you have anormal machine and it will only take 30 minutes for the mesh to DL. Perhaps it is time for these folks to realize that there are limits to what can be rendered in this life and to not try to over load  the system. I thought LL had limits to uploads guess I was not well infomed again ))  really getting tired of having no body as it is great but then who knows but me hehe plus their marketing  is severlely lacking in the fact that they include 8 hands and feet  on each model hmmm someone missed the concept boat there

 

Just a rant on commercial implementations by those with coins to burn buring us in Ktris lag and thats where most of the lag is created today It used to be scripts and particles but they have lost out to the mass of faces projected upon us by those who have never tried to exist in this realm

 

Humans need to control what is presented to we the users in time they will find out that while abody with 2 million poly faces is really nice people willwake uo to the fact that they are just a head and attachments  and those are not really what we are looking for ahead collar and cuffs )) woo hoo

[ChinRey]

It's not just mesh bodies, it's fitted mesh clothing in general. When it comes to rendering weight and lag it doesn't really matter if the fitted mesh covering most of your avatar's body looks like a second skin or like an evening gown.

There is actually a limit to how much "weight" an avatar can wear. It's not something LL is keen to tell us about (for obvious reasons) but wear too many or to heavy items and the computer will automatically switch over to a lower LOD model for them.

The problem is that it's all based on calculated, not actual weight, and the formula does not take into account how much heavier fitted mesh is to render than regular mesh.

I have two mesh bodies made by creators who actually are concerned about the rendering issue and try to keep their products as light as possible. One has a calculated render weight of about 4500 (which is nothing really), the other even lower - somewhere between 3000 and 3500. The problem is that the actual weight is much much higher. How much? I don't know but those bodies are clearly far heavier to render than my 40 000+ render weight flexi hair. Best guesstimate: multiply the official render weight by somewhere between 25 and 100 to see how heavy fitted mesh really is.

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Coventina Dalgleish wrote:

no idea why one would need to traingulate a circle

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Beacuse the triangle is the only geometric shape that exists in SL. Every prim, every sculpt, every mesh, the ground, the windlight - it's all triangles.

[CadenzaInVivace]

@OP, ever observed the usage of punctuation marks?

[Bobbie Faulds]

As for the importing...bodies are in 4 pieces, not one solid piece, when they are imported and then are put together inworld. So upper left/right then lower left/right.

[Coventina Dalgleish]

Nope ))

[Nalates Urriah]

There is a limit. Unfortunately, for the way bodies are built it is not hard to circumvent. See: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits

65536 vertices per LOD for each mesh. 

Well, there is the head, upper body, lower body, hands, and feet. That could be 7 items for 458,752 vertices.

But a designer could make any number of additional parts. The original SL Avatar model came in 15 peices, if I remember correctly, 15 x 65536 = 983,040 vertices. 

Still that seems like an adequite limit until you read on see that it is  21,844 triangles per material and there are 8 materials per item and that limit is being increased. 8 x 21,844 = 175,072 vertices per item. But, at 174,752 triangles, additional triangles will appear as holes.... confusing?

Consider that once you exceed 21,844 triangles per material the system starts duplicating vertices for technical reasons... the vertex count skyrockets and it gets really confusing. But, you seldom get what you expect in-world when exceeding thse limits. With some effort one can work around all the limits and problems without ever understanding what is happening, as they obviously have to get a 2 million triangle avatar. Just make more parts... lower the limit, people just make even more parts.

This is a problem that will only be solved by education not imposed limits. When the viewers publicize the render cost of items we wear, I think we will see people change their buying habits and that will push designers to change their design habits.

[ChinRey]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

Well, there is the head, upper body, lower body, hands, and feet. That could be 7 items for 458,752 vertices.

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Oh, there are more. A mesh body is a jigsaw puzzle of small faces that can be made invisible individually and you can only have eight of those on each mesh.

(Edit: Forgot to mention, a mesh body isn't actually just one body, it's three or four on top of each other, one for the skin layer and one for each clothes layer.)

 

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

When the viewers publicize the render cost of items we wear, I think we will see people change their buying habits and that will push designers to change their design habits.

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I can't see that happening to be honest. There's strong evidence suggesting that LL deliberately underestimates the render weight of fitted mesh to make it look better than it really is. And even if it turns out to be an oversight, there's hardly any chance they'll ever get around to correcting it.

As for consumer awareness about lag - well, the nice thing about lag is that you can always blame it on somebody else.

One of the saddest parts of this is that there are many fitted mesh designers who really try their best to make their products as low lag as possible but with no support or reliable info from LL they're basically working blind. And they get precious little in return for their work. Every maker can claim that their works are "low lag" and "high quality mesh" whether it's true or not and those phrases never were very good sales arguments anyway.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

 

This is a problem that will only be solved by education not imposed limits.

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I don't see why. Originated from a technical limit, LL managed to put a cap on maximum objects to be linked, they also have a triangle per object limit. Number of triangles/verts per object is available to "the system". So how hard would it be to make it impossible to limit the geometry on each LoD that can be linked? If you combine that with maximum amount of geometry to be worn in total, there is a hard limit.

Make this limit more strict for rigged items. The body I was recently talking about is the same Coventina mentions. The body is what generates the drop in framerate, not the insane 1.4 million triangle hands.

Size (and LoD switch) might still be an issue, but I'm sure that can be added to the mix.