Mesh tricks for low LI?

[Pamela Galli]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Pamela Galli wrote:

 It will never happen but it would be great if mesh could be instanced like textures can – like a given mesh would only need to be  rendered once, no matter how many copies were rezzed.

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As far as I know, even with full instancing every single instance of an asset will have to be rendered separately. But reused assets mean there is less data to transfer and process through every link in the chain and that helps a lot.

 

Btw, since it seems nobody is going to do their homework

Here are the answers:

The LI saving trick Drongle unknowingly taught me was to export without triangulating. The SL uploader is more efficient than Blender's exporter when it comes to splitting bigger polys into tris. It's a good feeling actually: if the uploader can do something right, there's hope for everybody.

As for Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, there are two features that trick the eye there. One is the fruitbowl. It seems to be on the table but it isn't, it's hanging off the edge towards the viewer, only held up by the suspension of disbelief. The trick has a purpose btw, along with St. Peter's outstretched hand it expands the picture outside the canvas, inviting the viewer to join the meal. (As Caravaggio did himself, that fourth person standing in the background is him.)

Interesting but I was using the picture to show how the brain fills in details and that' the second trick. Take a close look at the table, examine the table legs...

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Oh, I did not know that there was in fact an advantage to repurposed mesh, yay. Yes, Drongle also taught me not to triangulate in Blender :-) Along with a lot of other things.

I wondered why the basket was half off the table, I don't remember anything in the story about that. Peter was not present, btw. The painting portrays the moment the fellow travelers realize who their companion is.

[ChinRey]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

Oh, I did not know that there was in fact an advantage to repurposed mesh, yay.

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Well, a reused mesh is cached locally at least and that alone will often give a significant improvement in speed. It should also reduce the load all the way to the graphics processor but to be honest, I'm not at all convinced it does.

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Pamela Galli wrote:

Yes, Drongle also taught me not to triangulate in Blender :-) Along with a lot of other things.

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Aww, and I thought I had made a brand new discovery! Oh well, es gibt nichts neues unter die Sonne.

 

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Pamela Galli wrote:

Peter was not present, btw. The painting portrays the moment the fellow travelers realize who their companion is.

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Oh sorry, I got the theory that the second disciple present was Peter from a web site about the painting and I thought everything you read on the internet was true!

 

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Pamela Galli wrote:

I wondered why the basket was half off the table, I don't remember anything in the story about that.

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I know this is getting really esoteric but for those who are interested, I think there are a few things to learn about Second Life in this. Here's a better representation of the story made only a few years later than Caravaggio's:



I doubt Jesus wore a visible halo all the time but apart from that, this is a realistic image of the scene, as realistic as Rembrandt could make it 16 centuries after it took place.

Caravaggios painting isn't actually realistic at all. I've heard people call it the first impressionistic picture and there's something to that but what it mainly is, is a collection of symbols. Just about every item in that picture has a specific meaning, anything that didn't, he left out if he possibly could. These symbols were all part of fairly well formalised visual "language" that most learned ladies and gentlemen at Caravaggio's time would be quite familiar with, their meanings may be a bit more obscure today.

Caravaggio's picture is not nearly as realistic as Rembrandt's but it still feels more real, doesn't it? This is not because he was a better painter than Rembrandt but because the two paintings have different purposes. Rembrandt's picture is a scene to watch and probably contemplate, Caravaggio's is an experience to join.

Which of these is Second Life?

How we build for SL depends on the answer to that question and the answer to that question depends on how we build.

If we want SL to be a picture to look at, we probably want as many details as can possibly be rendered on a computer screen.

If we want SL to be an experience to join, we need to do as Caravaggio and get rid of the distractions, partly to increase the pace but mostly to focus better on the essentials.

I don't think I surprise anybody when I say I would have preferred option no. 2 here but that's my personal opinion, I'm certainly not going to claim it's more "right" than the other alternative. By now it's probably too late to change course anyway.

(I've been writing at length about art picturing a scene from the bible here so in case somebody wonder what my own religious beliefs are: don't ask and I promise not to tell.)

[ChinRey]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

"You can reuse baked textures too"

Yes indeed. In my experience, that is very good for high resolution detail with minimum texture area, but, the way I have ever used it, you have to be extremely accurate in the geometry to get the ao to match perfectly.

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It can.

I use a lot of "realistic natural"¹⁾ textures and with them it's often possible to redefine the purpose of various details, what is a shade along the top on one surface may be a smudge in the middle of another and so on. Maybe not a method recommended to people who don't love solving puzzles.

 

¹⁾ In SL "realistic natural" means "with all imperfections rather heavily exaggerated" as opposed to the more common "with all imperfections extremely heavily exaggerated"

[Pamela Galli]

It comes down to what kind of "game" or "platform" one uses SL as.  If you are using it like a video game, then you are not going to be paying that much attention to the details of your environment, but navigating the whole. If. however,  you are using content to create decor and landscaping, then the smallest details are what make the environment an expression of your personality and creativity -- the blogs and Flickr are full of these tableaux. Your friend Hattie creates for this contingent. 

[ChinRey]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

If. however,  you are using content to create decor and landscaping, then the smallest details are what make the environment an expression of your personality and creativity -- the blogs and Flickr are full of these tableaux. Your friend Hattie creates for this contingent. 

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And there's nothing wrong with that. Second Life can easily be Daz 3D online, it's already far better at being DAZ than DAZ is itself, it's the way SL's been heading for a while and it may well be the only possible future for this old place.

But you can't ride two horses at the same time. There are still lots of machinima, role playing (in the widest possible definition of the term) and games going on and there will be for quite a while. When you start filling up places intended for those purposes with photo session style props, that's when you run into problems.