Quick: Before pressing Play on the video above, which set of SL mesh shoes and shirts are more detailed, and which have more triangles? The answer, as they say, May Just Surprise You.
This video demo via reader Nadeja, who posted them as a response to last week's post, "Does The SL Community Care Enough To Clamor For Well-Optimized Mesh?" It's a perfect way of refuting the commonly held assumption that with mesh, more triangles means more detail. Not at all, not at all.
"Adding triangles helps only to some extent, but then it becomes wasted resources," as Nadeja writes in Comments. "Optimization means to find the right trade between visual and resources, to get the best look at the smallest cost."
Look closer at this comparison of tops:
The top on the left, she notes, has "[l]ess than half of the triangles and it even has wrinkles. You optimize for the platform you have. You did that in the 90s and early '00s as well. Better shaders would allow more for sure, but that doesn't mean that you can't do a better job… The evidence with similar models shows otherwise."
But surely this doesn't apply to full mesh avatars, some skeptics may say. Nadeja has you covered there too – watch below:
"Here we go: full dressed human avatar with less than 80K triangles and not bald at all. The head is modifiable, so I was able strip it down to reduce the triangle count. And I'm pretty sure it's possible to do even better."
By contrast, recall that many top SL mesh avatar bodies have triangles in the mid six figures. The recent Belleza 5.2 Bento mesh body has over 1.5 MILLION triangles. Which translates to horrendous lag and poor performance in the virtual world. It's why, in recent years, that Second Life has largely become a single player experience, since it's nigh impossible for more than one avatar to display in the same space without tremendous craptastic-ness obtaining.
All of which demonstrates that achieving technical efficiency does not require sacrificing visual quality. And that the real question is whether the community knows enough — and cares enough — to want both.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
Leave a comment