Cassie Demos a Dozen Top SL Mesh Bodies & Documents Their Performance

In case you missed it, here's the massive review of top mesh bodies from master YouTuber Cassie Middle -- which is how she created this super valuable spreadsheet listing them all by avatar complexity, triangle count, and so on.

Some of the bodies she demos here are Bakes on Mesh, but Cassie tells me she saw no difference in performance for BoM bodies, as compared to traditional mesh. (Probably because creators are still figuring out how to use and optimize BoM.) However, she adds, "It's very fun to use; I can use a ton of older tattoos and skins, I can stack them on top of each other, and it still looks amazing on the bodies."

The video itself is a labor of love and an insane amount of time: 

"I bought the Legacy body for a photo at Fameshed, and mentioned offhand comparing the bodies. People wanted it so I went and grabbed extra bodies."

Many, many, many hours later, here's her video -- and here's the spreadsheet to compare and contrast.

Comments

[Pulsar]

When "she saw no difference in performance for BoM bodies, as compared to traditional mesh", what did she actually compare? I don't know about male bodies, but there is no BoM female body yet, except SLink ones. You can see that from the spreadsheet too (e.g. "Legacy" vs "Legacy BoM"): they are exactly the same body, with just a different texture on.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

BoM's true value contribution will only surface once onion-skin geometry is stripped away from BoM-optimized versions of the same body and people stop wearing more than one copy of the body geometry because of the removal of said onion-skins. The other optimiztion that will need to happen - and this is trickier because of limitations on how BoM works currently as well as so many legacy mesh clothing items being reliant on them - is the removal of legacy alpha cutting in favor of a BoM model that can handle 'cuts' made by using system layer alphas - this would reduce the amount of duplicated geometry required to fake smooth transitions between disparate pieces of geometry as well.

Only when these two changes are pushed through in full will the full value of BoM in cutting the impact of mesh bodies on the SL grid be fully realised. Then there's the issue of trying to port this work over to cope with normal and specular/env channels baking, which is an entirely new kettle of fish since the way normals are blended is a little different compared to diffuse and specular texture layering.

In short, it's going to take a while, and you need to support your body maker of choice in the transition by encouraging them and providing the feedfack they need as they release beta tests of your current body, because if they see it as a thankless task, they may just give up and let go. And that's no good for any one of us.

[Ai Austin]

I was looking at Ruth 2.0 RC#3 and Roth 2.0 RC#1 stats to compare them. If someone knows if we should include fingernails in the hands and toenails in the feet or keep those separate I can give the figures for Vertices, Triangles and Complexity for those.

As far as VRAM is concerned it simply seems to be a multiple of the umber of (baked) textures used. If the bodies, hands and feet use BoM I assume they will just (re-)use the baked textures?

[Ai Austin]

Raw stats at http://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2018/01/21/ruth-2-0/#stats

[Pulsar]

Thank you for reminding Ruth, Ai! As a BoM body, that one is pretty good now. It has a couple of rough edges, but overall it can look pretty good. Here it is the RC#3 with a good skin:
https://imgur.com/WVYvbQT
Apart that, it only misses a shirt / panties smooth mode as SLink has (the Redux one, without onion layers and ready usable without BoM huds relays needed. On SLink you can also add shiny and droplet effects). On the other hand, it's mod and free, feet are resizable too. The weaker part is the head, but you can replace it.

I think finger/toe nais are better separated as they are: that's good for gloves, for example. So the stats in that webpage are ok. At most, for a fair comparison with other bodies, I'd put a note that other bodies include the nails too (that you have to keep even when not needed).
The user can merge them to a single item, if they wish, as the body is mod (but you have to adjust the nails script).
Talking about comparisons, female bodies can have combo feet (multiple pairs merged together, for flat, high heel etc positions), so that's should be considered too and mentioned in comparisons.

[Ai Austin]

Thanks Pulsar, I will add the notes on comparisons as you suggested.