Slink, a popular virtual world brand for avatar enhancements, produces what's basically the Tesla for mesh bodies in Second Life — not just sleek and stylish, but energy efficient and good for the environment. This is because their creator, Siddean Munro, painstakingly optimizes them to have the least number of triangles without hurting visual quality.
This is an important update to a much-discussed New World Notes post from 2018, where I included Slink among the list of mesh bodies found to be poorly optimized, a key source to virtual world pollution — i.e., lag and non-displaying avatars. Ms. Munro disputes Slink's inclusion in that post, so I will update it accordingly. And since then, in any case, she has updated her mesh bodies to be more efficient.
"I do work hard to make sure all my meshes are as optimal as they can be, use as few textures and scripts. as possible and that they are also laid out and written efficiently," she tells me.
As evidence, she offers this image below:
"78k triangles on the full Redux (Bakes on Mesh) body bundle including 5 sets of feet, hands and toenails. The body alone (no hands and feet) is 15234."
Which is quite decent for SL! This despite the fact that she's working on top Linden Lab's default avatar, which is a hurdle to begin with:
"The classic avatar must by design multiply the body count by four because of the required applier layers," as she puts it, "but I am trying to get as many of my customers into Bakes on Mesh as I can, since that body is much more optimized.
"Even the most complex of my applier bodies, with all the layers, and wearing hands and all five (deluxe) feet come nowhere near this number! It skirts under 20k complexity. But as I said I am trying to get people out of the old applier bodies and into the new BOM bodies to try and reduce my impact."
I did say "decent for SL", because relative to avatars in AAA games, her full mesh body is still a touch on the high side, triangle-wise. However, Siddean says she is focused on optimizing them even further.
She's even taken to advising other SL creators on optimization:
"Because I've been providing a content creators kit for the last few years, I have asked people to send me examples of their work… And I have a lot of creators in my Discord channel who I try to guide into making better meshes as well building from as low poly as they are able and only adding where necessary so it's something I think about a lot."
Read more about it on Siddean's blog. And on a personal note, my profuse apologies to her for mentioning in social media that Slink is among the list of notoriously non-optimized mesh bodies. She deserves credit for creating content that aims to keep the virtual world a community that can come together — and not so poorly optimized, it's only usable as a solo activity.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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