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Re: Meshed avatars...
14 years ago
General
Some journals are personal, and some journals are business related for Kinzart. For everything else, I don't care.
Last Updated: 12/12/11
Okay... I am getting so tired of this to the point where I keep feeling I am writing a new novel each time I have to explain it. So here I am, writing it ONCE and just using THIS as a link for my explanations.
In case the title doesn't describe the topic, this is about meshed goods on Second Life and how I don't give two flying f*ck balls about third party viewers! I just want to resolve the myths about meshes and just get it over with so people can seriously stop acting like a bunch of three year old children!
1) Meshes use more power and needs a better PC.
Answer: MYTH!
Meshes can be more efficient than sculpties by a LONG shot! All sculpties use a preset amount of polygons (if I recall, about 2048) and most avatars make use of about 50 or so, so that's over 100k polygons being processed in each frame for just ONE avatar. To give some perspective, a basic cube is composed of 12 polygons. In theory, one avatar would be equal to about 8.5k cubes being rendered at the same time, and that's before we start calculating the avatar mesh (oh, did I just say mesh?) in the first place! Meshes can vary in poly count, but in how they can control this number by still result in better detail means that meshes can have far fewer polygons than a single sculpty. This means that if more meshed goods were used, people wouldn't need such power PCs in the first place!
pointystick wrote:Nyx Linden said that in their testing, rendering mesh and traditional prims cost the same amount in terms of resources per tri. Efficient mesh can be better than traditional prims or sculpties for many things, as the creator now has control over where the detail goes.
2) Meshes cannot be modified.
Answer: MYTH!
Rigged or not, meshes respond and act the same way as any other prim or sculpty. You can still change textures (in fact, meshes can have more than one texture face, so they can be more customizable in that respect), adjust their sizes, and even link other prims to a mesh. Before people begin stating you can't edit the shape of a mesh, ask yourself if you can do the same to a sculpty and come back to me about that.
3) Meshed goods cost more to make.
Answer: MYTH (in most circumstances)!
I uploaded a new mesh body for my crux avatar to improve detail and not require avatar masking (well, now I need to make the whole body invisible, but you tomato tomato). I accidentally left the mesh duplicated in upload, so I was uploading the same thing twice. It only cost me 14L$ for a rigged, 2 texture layered mesh that had the same thing twice! A sculpt map costs 10L$, but to achieve an effect equal to what I got, it'd require several maps! For non avatars, if planned right, I can assume it could be the same, but it depends ultimately on what we are talking about.
4) Rigged meshes deform my avatar.
Answer: MYTH!
Deformation by meshes is optional, and not required to make a rigged mesh avatar.
5) Rigged meshes must be worn and can never be rezzed.
Answer: MYTH!
Rigged meshes are just meshes with more attachment data embedded into them. In heart, they are still just meshes.
6) Rigged meshes that deform my avatar need an undeformer.
Answer: (as of recent) MYTH!
Once a deforming mesh is detached, the deformation is removed. In the past, this wasn't the case, but it is a bug that has since been fixed for the most part.
I'll most likely fill out more as I hear/come to them.
-Flame
Okay... I am getting so tired of this to the point where I keep feeling I am writing a new novel each time I have to explain it. So here I am, writing it ONCE and just using THIS as a link for my explanations.
In case the title doesn't describe the topic, this is about meshed goods on Second Life and how I don't give two flying f*ck balls about third party viewers! I just want to resolve the myths about meshes and just get it over with so people can seriously stop acting like a bunch of three year old children!
1) Meshes use more power and needs a better PC.
Answer: MYTH!
Meshes can be more efficient than sculpties by a LONG shot! All sculpties use a preset amount of polygons (if I recall, about 2048) and most avatars make use of about 50 or so, so that's over 100k polygons being processed in each frame for just ONE avatar. To give some perspective, a basic cube is composed of 12 polygons. In theory, one avatar would be equal to about 8.5k cubes being rendered at the same time, and that's before we start calculating the avatar mesh (oh, did I just say mesh?) in the first place! Meshes can vary in poly count, but in how they can control this number by still result in better detail means that meshes can have far fewer polygons than a single sculpty. This means that if more meshed goods were used, people wouldn't need such power PCs in the first place!
pointystick wrote:Nyx Linden said that in their testing, rendering mesh and traditional prims cost the same amount in terms of resources per tri. Efficient mesh can be better than traditional prims or sculpties for many things, as the creator now has control over where the detail goes.
2) Meshes cannot be modified.
Answer: MYTH!
Rigged or not, meshes respond and act the same way as any other prim or sculpty. You can still change textures (in fact, meshes can have more than one texture face, so they can be more customizable in that respect), adjust their sizes, and even link other prims to a mesh. Before people begin stating you can't edit the shape of a mesh, ask yourself if you can do the same to a sculpty and come back to me about that.
3) Meshed goods cost more to make.
Answer: MYTH (in most circumstances)!
I uploaded a new mesh body for my crux avatar to improve detail and not require avatar masking (well, now I need to make the whole body invisible, but you tomato tomato). I accidentally left the mesh duplicated in upload, so I was uploading the same thing twice. It only cost me 14L$ for a rigged, 2 texture layered mesh that had the same thing twice! A sculpt map costs 10L$, but to achieve an effect equal to what I got, it'd require several maps! For non avatars, if planned right, I can assume it could be the same, but it depends ultimately on what we are talking about.
4) Rigged meshes deform my avatar.
Answer: MYTH!
Deformation by meshes is optional, and not required to make a rigged mesh avatar.
5) Rigged meshes must be worn and can never be rezzed.
Answer: MYTH!
Rigged meshes are just meshes with more attachment data embedded into them. In heart, they are still just meshes.
6) Rigged meshes that deform my avatar need an undeformer.
Answer: (as of recent) MYTH!
Once a deforming mesh is detached, the deformation is removed. In the past, this wasn't the case, but it is a bug that has since been fixed for the most part.
I'll most likely fill out more as I hear/come to them.
-Flame
Mesh scenes can be far more complex than what was previously possible. So it is likely you'll encounter places where your old graphics is going to burst in to flames trying to render.
The other render pipeline improvements made during the mesh project and the recent "shinning" OpenGL update have pretty much raised the minimum system requirements. But they're still pretty low and even a dual core Atom 330 with a decent, non-Intel graphics card would work on low settings.
I should note that I may not get 60FPS (I'm happy if I get 10-20 on average) on the laptops, even on low settings, so it's a matter of 'It runs, but not the best' debate, but I find the SSE2 instance interesting.
-Flame
I should note that "hardware skinning" might be required for rigged mesh to be visible on some PCs or viewers, which requires basic shaders support.
-Flame
1) Nyx Linden said that in their testing, rendering mesh and traditional prims cost the same amount in terms of resources per tri. Efficient mesh can be better than traditional prims or sculpties for many things, as the creator now has control over where the detail goes.
2) The only limitation that mesh has against sculpties is that UUID swapping is disabled on mesh. See also http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Why.....lipping_is_Bad While I don't necessarily agree with this decision, it's not a serious limitation at all, and the end result to "work around" this limitation results in roughly the same resource use as otherwise. also, in very early versions of mesh, glow and alpha wasn't working on rigged meshes. That has not been true for quite some time, and even rigged meshes support the whole suite of shaders that SL has to offer.
4) Should be noticed that the "deformation" done by meshes is fully supported in Second Life and doesn't require additional effects or workarounds in order to undeform.
Thanks for helping dispel myths.
-Flame
(No seriously, I do)
-Flame
Kudos.
-Flame