Texture rant

[Caliandris]

I've been away some months due to a close family bereavement, but decided to go out shopping with some of my accrued lindens. As I like to plan for Christmas well ahead, I bought a gingerbread house in a well-known shop. Got it home, unpacked it and was fairly astonished to find it had 14 x 1024x1024 textures on it. In the picture, this is house 1. I replaced the seven 1024s for the icing with blanks. This is house 2. I then went ahead and replaced the rest with concrete with a colour wash (I could do a much better biscuit texture, of course, but this was just an experiment to see if 14 1024s are justified). This is house 3, which has the normal 32x32 blank and a 256x256 concrete with colour wash.
I know creators want their products to look as good as possible, but this is just ridiculous. If you aim to keep your texture load to 1GB in an area, that only gives you 244 1024s to use - do you really want to use 14 of them on something as small as a gingerbread house? Yes, there is a lot more shading and detail in the textured version, but I don't think the object would have lost a lot if the textures were resized to 512 or even 256. And that makes a huge difference to the texture load.

Rant over.

 

[Khamon]

Welcome Back!

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I've seen trays of cupcakes almost as bad!

I like to visit destination guide places and some of them are just monsters with this kind of content.

 

[Khamon]

1024 texture is the new 300 prim bookcase

 

[Romana]

Recently I bought an outfit at the Avalon -themed shopping event. Silly me, I didn't think to check the impact piece by piece, and didn't notice, until I was going to go to a high traffic area and trying to help my complexity down, that the boots double the complexity of the outfit.
The boots use the same texture as the other pieces, so I guess it's something about mesh faces that I don't know that causes it. They're no -mod (with all the colors available via the HUD , that didn't bother me buying it) so I can't even see what's doing it or change it. Fortunately,I was able to find a pair of boots that fit over the mesh pants, but dammit, I like those boots.
I've been debating whether I should send a NC to the creator requesting a simpler version.

 

[Sean Gorham]

It feels like these days a lot of creators simply are ignorant of or don't care about optimization. Textures, meshes, you name it. Then people complain about the lag. AMATEURS!

 

[Free]

It feels like these days a lot of creators simply are ignorant of or don't care about optimization. Textures, meshes, you name it. Then people complain about the lag. AMATEURS!

I guess the question then is, would professionals who know better really be creating content for SL, rather than, I don't know, for a real world, well paying job?

 

[Chin Rey]

...
until I was going to go to a high traffic area and trying to help my complexity down, that the boots double the complexity of the outfit.

I wouldn't worry too much about that unless it was one of those places that evict avatars that display a high ARC. There are so many errors and bugs in the way Avatar Render Complexity is calculated, the number you end up with has no relation whatsoever to how heavy your avatar actually is to render.

 

[Mechanical]

Going deeper into why complexity is a garbage measurement, it does not give textures as heavy a number a it should. With LL's current OpenGL implementation texture memory has the heaviest impact on rendering and frames per second. You can figure out how much video memory a texture takes up by multiplying its pixel size by 4 to find the amount in kilobytes. Now combine this in with having only 1 gb, 2 gb, or 3 gb of texture memory depending on the viewer, and its easy to see how someone dunked in geometry optimized but no texture optimized items will have a low complexity but lag everyone out.

A gentle reminder: The Firestorm dev team was handed a fully realized texture memory inspector, but looked down their collective noses at it.

Edit: Looks like FS allows more then 2 gb now, I'll have to review.

 

[Sean Gorham]

I guess the question then is, would professionals who know better really be creating content for SL, rather than, I don't know, for a real world, well paying job?

That's a good question, one I don't have a good answer for. Given how the online content economy has changed in the past few years (and gotten a lot more crowded), I would speculate there's a lot fewer professionals bothering with SL these days. Making a living via microtransactions can be difficult even for those with talent and patience.

 

[Val]

That's a good question, one I don't have a good answer for. Given how the online content economy has changed in the past few years (and gotten a lot more crowded), I would speculate there's a lot fewer professionals bothering with SL these days. Making a living via microtransactions can be difficult even for those with talent and patience.

You made me realise an odd thing as I know few professionals selling stuff in SL and few of them I followed from other digital design places where they sold exactly the same things but properly optimised while in SL they barely load. It is not the engine as they clearly use different model versions and for the life of me, I do not know why as if they are the same thing - surely you would upload the better version unless it is restricted to whatever provider you use but it is not the case of people I mean. Otherwise - SL is fine if you do not need to rely on it for income and have free time but I also doubt many modellers treat is same as full time, well paid and holidayed job ... as it is so not that.

 

[Chin Rey]

Going deeper into why complexity is a garbage measurement, it does not give textures as heavy a number a it should.

Yes, probably (I haven't seen any conclusive proof about yet) but as bad as it is, this isn't actually the worst problem here.

I'm sure most of us know that the LoD swap distances have a huge impact on the actual render cost of an object and they are determined by the size of the object's bonding box. There is a suite of three bugs in the way SL handles fitted mesh. And of course, we all know that a fitted is stretched or shrunk to fit the size of the avatar wearing it no matter how big or small it actually - that's exactly what fitted mesh means after all. Without going too much into details, the actual bonding box for a fitted mesh when worn may well be 50x50x50 m or more but it's not at all uncommon for fitted meshes to be uploaded at the minimum 0.01x0.01x0.01 m. The LoD swap distances and thus the actual render cost are determined by this huge bounding box when worn but the ARC calculation is based on the size the mesh had when it was uploaded. I think it's safe to assume that a 1,250,000,000,000% difference between actual and calculated values does affect the precision and reliability of the end result a little bit.

 

[Sid]

The average designer for SL is IMHO an amateur, banging on things in their spare time or because of lack of possibilities in RL for whatever reason.
The real professional artists don't do SL or at least not many of them.
Many of these amateurs make stuff that looks fantastic at times, but don't expect it to be greatly optimized at all times, these designers are not necessarily up to par with all theories about optimization behind it.

Even the Moles throw around with 1024x1024 textures in their Bellisserian decoration like plants and trees and houses, where it IMHO is not needed.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I can explain why they would not optimize... because in SL, making optimized content often gets you ignored because 'Its not as pretty'.

 

[Noodles]

I can explain why they would not optimize... because in SL, making optimized content often gets you ignored because 'Its not as pretty'.

The real irony is, I am pretty sure a lot more users use pretty low end hardware than you would expect. So they need see it

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

The other problem is that in most games, you can only zoom in so much, while in SL, you can zoom in so close that people forget that under normal circumstances, people are not going to see it that close.

 

[Romana]

I went to have a look around the SciFi Expo yesterday. I had put together an all -pink outfit to go with the RFL cause. I got hit with a complexity warning. It didn't say, but I guessed the limit was 50,000 so I changed it enough to get under that. So not sure what was putting me over.
I've seen avatars (or rather, jellydolls) walking around with complexity over 350k. I wonder how whether they really are. But I can see now why it's not as hard to get up there as I'd have thought.

 

[Free]

I went to have a look around the SciFi Expo yesterday....I got hit with a complexity warning.

I guess that means no demo wear allowed from any of the vendors at the Expo, then.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I can explain why they would not optimize... because in SL, making optimized content often gets you ignored because 'Its not as pretty'.

Which does nothing to explain why designers don't optimize textures that look "pretty" at far smaller sizes than 1024x1024.

A very popular shoe designer -- whose shoes, unfortunately, I love -- uses about 10-12 of the 1024x1024 textures, and this includes an entire 1024 for the stitching and another for the soles, and yet another for the edging along the soles. There's next to no detail that needs to be rendered, and with use of repeats the stitching probably could have handily rendered with a 64x64 texture.

I gave up buying those shoes.

 

[Clara D.]

With materials, each face can have three 1024 textures!