Second Life Creators Sell Poorly-Optimized Mesh to Satisfy Customer Demand (Comment of the Week)

Pretty amazing reader debate around my interview with professional game artist Penny Patton, who pointed out the problems with poorly optimized mesh items being sold in Second Life, and how to solve them. (That one shirt above, as I noted, has way more triangles than Kratos in God of War on the PlayStation 4.)

Reader "Seph" makes the interesting argument that creators are creating triangle-heavy products to please consumers:

Customers buy products that look great, regardless of what it does to their performance. If they preferred performance, I guarantee creators would be selling performance.

Linden Lab rolling out PBR and some better lighting features will help creators rely on more modern material maps and rendering instead of mesh density. More modernizing of Second Life's graphics engine and content creation pipeline will help more.

In the meantime, no creator is doing this to sell less but make performance floater watchers happy. Penny can keep calling them ignorant and lazy, but making customers happy is anything but.

I don't think Penny said either of those things, but I can see how customers might demand massive amounts of triangles, even though it actually does nothing for graphics quality -- similar to how in the US, there's a market for huge SUVs with impressive grilles, even though they actually do nothing for driving quality. (And in both cases, they harm the environment for the respective world they're in.)

Seph's expanded comments help explain why mesh creators are making the equivalent of  Cadillac Escalades for Second Life's fashion crowd:

Most people are wearing beautiful well made things that are very intricate but yes, very dense in mesh because that's the only way to achieve competitive detail right now without proper modern materials and lighting.

So it's not about how to make a really good black t-shirt. It's about how to be competitive with other designers and always one-upping yourself for your customers. For you its a no brainer to put shirt buttons on a normal map and hope customers have ALM on and happen to be in good directional lighting where maybe that detail will pop. For a working designer in SL though its a no brainer to mesh that button and ensure the detail pops because all their competition does that and a flat unshaded textured button would awful.

If one designer won't use increased mesh density and more material maps to make something better looking, another will, and the former will be at a disadvantage that costs money and livelihood.

The fix? Linden Lab keeps making strides like the upcoming PBR materials. Making better performance and better looking one in the same rather than things at odds is the only way this will ever improve. Accusing ignorance or lack of education is short-sighted. The most popular and most worn designers are incredibly talented and overqualified for Second Life's level of content creation and know exactly what they're doing and why.

No question that SL content creators are incredibly talented! But upgrades like PBR can only improve the performance quality of the world so much. If creators are making heavy mesh items as competitive differentiators, then that's actually a strong argument for Linden Lab to impose system limits on uploading them in the first place. That would put the onus on doing better with a limited range of triangles to work with.

Because that way, creators can tell their triangle-hungry customers, "Sorry, my hands are tied."

Comments

[Robbi]

You folks are over thinking this. Bodies aren't optimized because most makers are are too darned lazy to. They make what they make, lkook at it, nod and approve, then put it up for sale.
Optimization problem is nothing more than maker laziness.

[mad maxwell graf]

Or the lab could consider regulation: What about not permitting rigged items to be more than X dense or penalizing those that go over that limit. Similar to how you can't make a non-rigged item like, say, a decent tree of tree-like size without it being an exponentially ridiculous land impact, or a castle wall of geometrically complex stonework without it being, yet again, a land impact that makes it impractical to do anything but a normal map on a flat plane. While you are at it, put all that shit on some blocky, blurry, non-mesh, non-material covered terrain from 2004, It will look great, you just may not see it because the fashion parade showed up on your sim and performance went to shit.

But hey, upload those f*cking nano mesh earrings with 100K triangles for 1 or 2Li. No worries, the market demands it!

[mad maxwell graf]

I'm not angry! YOU'RE angry!

[Gusta]

the big problem with all this is that many of the sl shopkeepers do not create meshes and do not have the slightest notion that a heavier mesh or in triangles will affect things inside sl, and to begin with that a mesh in triangles is not a mesh for games, the right thing would be to be in squares,
and very lowpoly but the issue is that many stores buy clothes that are not made for games, they are made for rendering and put inside the sl, the main point of all is that many do not have the slightest notion of how to manipulate one and leave a fit mesh for a game be it sl or any other.
Many just want to sell and don't even know what they are doing or the vast majority asking others to do it

[Lara]

"very dense in mesh because that's the only way to achieve competitive detail right now without proper modern materials and lighting."

There are a few stores on the grid who show it absoluetly is possible and funny enough, they're some of the most creative designers on the grid. They look good with ALM off. Also haven't ever seen a flat unmeshed button on any of their outfits, yet they manage to make wondfull clothing in the low tri range and they chose texture sizes wisely, the same item would be over 100k tris by other CCs, full of 1024x1024 sized textures on the tiniest face and not look any better. No one ever said we have to reach that level of optimization described. And I highly doubt PBR will change anything, if only the texture load on dense meshes will get worse. Don't they ever feel ashamed about making those very obvious excuses?!

[Chic Aeon]

I am mostly in Lara's camp. There ARE designers who make outstanding items that are STILL triangle friendly and look just as good as the heavy mesh items.

From what I have seen the problem is two fold and hence I don't disagree with the idea is sometimes choices made are just about sales. For SOME anyway. For others? They really don't know or understand and there may be some "lazy" folks along the way because it does take more work to get "the look" and also the low triangle count.

For an instance with no names used :D. Last year on the main furniture posting spot on the SL forums many of us were complaining about the OH SO HIGH triangle count of some creators -- one very popular creator in particular. I LOOOOOOVED the items but the vertices numbers were heart stopping. We posted lots of examples and started showing examples of GOOD triangle count items that look fabulous, had good LODs (my personal pet peeve) AND creations that were low land impact AND low triangle count (one does not always guarantee the other).

EVENTUALLY (and we are talking half a year or more) one of the main brands with gorgeous but heavy mesh (and marginal LODs) started making improvements. And NOW many of us will buy their items where we we did not before. In THIS case used as an example the mesh seems to be purchased and much appears to be "render mesh". That's completely legal now as I read the TOS which was changed back in Sansar days so that both Terms of Services matched. Sansar had always had upload anything you buy rules.

Since it IS now "legal" (of course there may be a TOS EUL on the other end to contend with) I see no problem with what they (many actually) are doing. But here is the BUT ...

That RENDER MESH needs to be OPTIMIZED before uploading. It really isn't that difficult to do. It takes some time but it isn't any harder than learning how to build your own.

So, in some ways this has been an example how CUTOMER CHOICES can reverse what some creators are doing.