Yesterday's post about mesh bodies causing major performance problems in Second Life has unsurprisingly provoked a pretty heated debate in the comments. One question that frequently comes up in this conservation is, "How are average SL consumers supposed to tell a mesh body is well-made?"
One possible answer: Learn from the furries of Second Life. Graphics expert NiranV, who pointed out how resource heavy the top human mesh bodies of Second Life are, has a post on his own blog looking at a humanoid snake avatar that's extremely detailed, somewhat NSFW in that adorably bizarre way only furries can capture, and incredibly well-optimized:
Its full triangle count is mere 27676 triangles. Next-gen games use 20.000 - 40.000 average, this avatar is on the bottom line of the next gen default which speaks for its well thought out mesh and quality as well as its small performance impact compared to other avatars. As comparison, the Maitreya body without hands, feet and head has 125,000 triangles. Belleza has even more.
"I don't understand why so many furry content creators had this figured out immediately when meshes came around," Niran tells me. "[F]urry avatars turned into much more optimized avatars while humans turned from simple avatars into super massive clusterfucks of polygons." One reason:
Because furries are highly customized, they need to be extremely well optimized so they can interact with each other. "I can go to furry clubs filled with 20-30 people and still have 20 FPS."
Maybe we need some tutorials from furry mesh makers, teaching the humans how to optimize.
I suspect the reason is it's quite easy to grab something from a public 3D asset store for a baseline human, but most of the furry avatars have to be made wholly from scratch. That doesn't explain all of it, but I suspect it contributes.
Posted by: Aliasi Stonebender | Saturday, December 08, 2018 at 05:29 AM
Not as far away from the truth probably. As far as i know most human mesh creators don't directly make their own stuff but rather "commission" their models by third party modelers, these modelers obviously not knowing much about Second Life and it's needs. They are then shoehorned into SL. Furry creators as you said need to create their own stuff from scratch for what they are doing, they need to have some knowledge and skill. It does not explain why they are doing it in the first place, they could just ignore optimizing and not give a fuck. They could just do it like any greedy money maker...sadly... luckily they don't.
Posted by: NiranV | Saturday, December 08, 2018 at 12:49 PM
LL: *allows people to make mesh bodies but doesn't put a limit on the poly upload for them that keeps the game running at a reasonable state*
CREATORS: *makes mesh bodies with any poly count*
LL DEV ON NWN: "Y'all won"
Posted by: Cake | Saturday, December 08, 2018 at 10:45 PM
27676 triangles.
So if it would have an additional tattoo layer and a clothing layer and a mask layer, like every mesh body has, it would have 110.000 triangles.
Posted by: uriesk | Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 01:03 AM