Anatomy Of A Beautiful Second Life Avatar

What does it take to become a gorgeous avatar?  Quite a lot, really.  I challenged New World Notes style correspondent Iris Ophelia to demonstrate the engineering of Second Life beauty with this self-portrait; she's posing here in a typical, everyday outfit, but behind the scenes, numerous attachments comprised of many building block primitives make it possible, transforming the rather bland default avatar, into the distinctly Audrey Hepburn-esque beauty that Iris is.

How many attachments is Iris wearing here, and how many prims are they made of?  Take a look, make a guess-- then click below, for Ms. Ophelia's detailed tally from head-to-toe.

Counting Iris Ophelia's customized skin, shape, and other modifications to her basic avatar frame, there are, she tells me, "Eighteen things that make that avatar what it is."  That includes thirteen attachments, adding up to almost 400 prims.  (To be sure, more recent fashion items take advantage of sculpted prim technology, and require less prims.)

The Avatar Rendering Cost is an experimental feature recently introduced by the Lindens to track the system resources required to display an avatar, and by implication, encourage users to lower their ARC number.  (ARC increases in proportion to the number of prims an avatar wears; 1141 is decidedly on the high side, while 200-400 is on the low end).  But what Iris is wearing is pretty much what any respectable fashionista wears on a casual day out in the metaverse.  Which suggests we're unlikely to see ARC levels decrease anytime soon; when bandwidth is at war with beauty, the latter is likely to win.

Comments

[Truthseeker]

Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet! Not you, too???

"Yeah! Lag is down to all those GIRLS (that we're always ogling on our blogs) With all that damn PURTY HAIR & SPARKLY JEWELS!"

*facepalms*

...and, um, pay no mind to Zeus, over there, or that, um, post-Singularity shaman with teh feathers & all those shiny, flexi AND bump-mapped tentacles

>.<;;

—Truthseeker Young
ARC: 3374
come get me, bitches

[Cinomed]

Yeah....uhm and ARC of 1100ish is not on the high side in my SL.
I guess if you tend to hang out with 20+ people at a time it might be a bit much, but anything under 3k is find with me.

Heck a few of my friends have boots that add some 2k!

I stay under 1500 and I am happy.

Though, lets all be honest, 52 prims per earring and 174 prims for a necklace are a tad excessive, though 170 prims a boot can be too :P

[Bela Lubezki]

one thing everyone could add easily is asymmetry. no, not the quasimodo style. but my nose, my eyes and my mouth are not exactly 50, not in the middle of the sliders. it adds nearly unnoticeable some naturalness.

[Ann Otoole]

Oh all you have to do to make your prim attachments low ARC is put in a sculpty and make it the root prim. Then it counts as 1 for ARC.
(Yes I was surprised to make this discovery)

Is it cheating? No. I asked and was harshly informed that sculpties do not cause any additional rendering cost at all (regardless of the rather obvious additional polygons) and therefore count only as one for the attachment.

OK. So be it.

[Hamlet Au]

I kept it gender-neutral for a reason, Truthseeker, I'd call that Zeus avatar fricking beautiful too.

[Sophrosyne Stenvaag]

Wooo, Truthy!

This is an interesting article, but Truthseeker raises an important cultural point. I've definitely seen ARC used to harass women at events.

I recall one event where a greeter harangued the event organizer for her jewelry and wings (it wasn't me) while standing next to a 2,000+ ARC male robot. But anybody in big bright wings must be hogging an unfair share of bandwidth!

And, really, while ARC *might* be a useful tool in older mainland sims, if Extropia Core can accommodate 85 *Extropians* without significant lag, "bandwidth versus beauty" is just a false dichotomy.

[Truthseeker]

That's just it, Hamlet. you most certainly DIDN'T
"keep it gender-neutral"...

You put Iris' (totally fabulous, btw) picture up there, and not, say, a split-screen of Iris & some equally-fab (or just crazy-primmy) male av, and you end the post with:

"...pretty much what any respectable fashionista wears on a casual day out in the metaverse. Which suggests we're unlikely to see ARC levels decrease anytime soon; when bandwidth is at war with beauty, the latter is likely to win."

...as tho everyone doesn't know that 'fashionista' = 'woman' (in pretty much the same way that 'welfare mom' is code for 'black & lazy'), or that 'beauty' is generally a more 'frivolous,' 'female' concern, whereas 'bandwidth,' being a more serious, technical issue, is really, you know, the proper domain of men...

Look, I'm not trying to bang on you personally, Hamlet, or single you out, and I truly & sincerely doubt you've got any special malice towards women.

But engaging in that kind of subtle coding both muddies & poisons the discourse, which ends up supporting the passive-aggressive bullshit witch-huntery that the Lindens (willfully, I believe) introduced when they unleashed this totally half-baked & inconsistent ARC scheme upon the drama-hungry masses. "Lulz, this'll teach 'em to cry & carry on about lag!"

Oh, and Anne: THANK YOU for that tip! My ARC's about to drop so low that just by lookin my way, Y'ALL will be laggin ME!!

Hooo!!

[Hamlet Au]

Well that's a valid point, TS, especially coupled to Sophrosyne's observation, something I want to explore further-- is there a gender bias over Avatar Rendering Costs? Still, there definitely seems to be numerically more fashionistas (and fashion-minded social gamers) in SL who lean toward prim-heavy human avatars, than prim-heavy robot/vampire/dragon/etc. avatars. Also, not all fashionistas are women (in SL or RL or both); Iris has written about them as well. (Fashionistos?)

[Miriel Enfield]

I think it's unfortunate the way ARC is treated in this article and elsewhere.

ARC is very, very crude. It's a little better than nothing, but only a little. It's not anywhere near a reliable way of telling how laggy an avatar is. It ignores texture size (bigger textures are slower), polygon count (certain prims are much laggier than others, due to their geometry), and prim size (tiny prims are culled at a distance, and so are less laggy). An attachment with 10 tiny boxes and a single 32 x 32 texture will generate the same ARC as one with ten big sculpts and ten 1024 x 1024 textures, despite the fact that the actual lag caused by these is much, much different.

[Nexii Malthus]

ARC is as Miriel posted, incredibly crude completely, ignoring textures entirely which are massive hogs compared to the lag basic primitives.

ARC isn't about bandwidth either, it is rather the rendering costs. So the definitions that people throw here about bandwidth are false.

Lag is also divided into three clear sections; Client, Server, Network. This is what most people just don't seem to get when they talk about lag it might be their very own computer at fault being unable to draw the million or so polygons.

[Two Worlds]

YOU, Ophelia.

YOU are the person who is crashing my viewer. In the rendering world of Second Life, you are the soccer mom with a Big Mac in one hand, a cellphone in the other, and a Starbucks coffee in the cupholder, in a Hummer H2, using the carpool lane.

[Two Worlds]

Also, in this hypothetical analogy the H2 has truck nuts on the back and the soccer mom has Mexican immigrants cutting her lawn (in her gated community)

[Two Worlds]

Also I notice that your skin model has photorealistic feet, we should talk ;)

[Valentina Kendal]

First I think it's funny that wearing pretty much what all my female friends and I wear everyday, suddenly makes us 'fashionistas'. I think it just makes us non-newbs.

Second, Ann thank you for that tip! I make jewelry - it is hard to make any reasonable necklace with fewer than 100 prims. They are simple prims, and contain no scripts, but still many necklaces end up being 100 -200 prims. If people want nice jewery in SL, this is the price.

Finally, just say NO to ARC. We all paid our money, why isn't it LL's fault if they can't support the world they have allowed us to create? Are we going to let them succeed at turning us all into ARC-police, annoying each other? I think people who host large public events are often very polite about asking for bling, scripts and HUDs to be turned off, and this is how the issue should be dealt with. And if the problem is that *your* computer can't render my attachments without hiccuping, well, such is life at the bleeding edge of inhabiting a virtual world. I have at least two friends who's computer upgrades were driven by their SL needs!

[Gahum Riptide]

Valentina: SL is pushing me towards upgrading my computer (especially when attending big events!).

Anyhoo, I find ARC funny, but what use is it really? I didn't find it until I switch the advanced menu on, and I'm sure MOST SLers aren't aware how to do that anyway.

By the way Ham, the ending -ista is neutral in Spanish , and applies to both men and women (like, "Sandinista").

[Iris Ophelia]

Here's my question to you guys-- Why is ARC bad?
I don't see it as a way to police each other, I see it as more information, and I am completely in favour of getting as much information about how SL works for me as I can.
ARC is a bad thing because we've made it a bad thing. If we get a bit more realistic about what it means technically and what it should mean to us, it should be no different than looking at our FPS reading.

[Valentina Kendal]

Hello Iris - well I agree with both of your points. First that ARC can be a very useful tool to acquire information about the variables that affect the quality of our SL experience (in a purely technical way) and we can modify our behavior if we choose to based on that information. But I also agree that ARC is becoming a bad thing because we are letting it become a bad thing. There will always be a segment of people who will feel it acceptable to criticize you based on your ARC number, and I find such self-appointed fashion/bandwidth police tiresome. It reminds me of RL: I don't smoke and I wear a seat-belt, but I don't feel obligated or entitled to tell you to behave the way I do even if your behavior might drive up health insurance costs for all of us. I would rather admire your fabulous sense of fashion than worry about the effect it might be having on my lag, but maybe that's just me.

[Cajsa Lilliehook]

I think it might have been fair to include a guy - one wearing boots, please. One pair of men's boots can out ARC three women in a heartbeat. And let's not forget all the paraphenalia if he's a RPG avatar.

The few times I have turned on ARC, the men have had higher counts than the women. I am certain that it's the boots.