Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Black Dragon 64x - Update 2.9.3 "Bit Dragon"

This is really just a quick update to get some of the stockpiled changes out and to clean up some things as well as add a big change i want to get feedback on.


Avatar Render Complexity (ARC) also known as Avatar Render Cost.

I changed it. Punish me Oz senpai, i broke your toy.

No seriously, the final nail in the coffin and the sole reason i finally did it was seeing an avatar with 3.5 million polygons and 2 million vertices having almost half as much ARC as my avatar which i spend a shitton optimizing all over the place, it's safe to say that i know better than this mess of ARC whats better for my framerate (well okay i literally deattached my stuff and measured too.... but... you know...) and i'm pretty certain that this 3.5 million polygon avatar is much worse than me. So how do i go about changing it? The simplest solution available. Punish high polycounts. Punish sculpt usage. Punish all the bad things.

I can write the details if anyone's interested but the gist of it is: More stuff = more ARC. Having a higher base polygon count in most cases means you'll have a higher ARC unless you do some other nasty stuff.

Needless to say i'll be tweaking these values and possibly add an option to switch between these two calculations but for now you'll get my new one, just be warned, numbers will be MUCH higher.


Look at these numbers. LOOK AT THEM. You are bad and you are bad and you too. All of you! Except those green and yellow numbers. I suppose you already knew that most avatars totally ignore ARC hence why they have such huge numbers, both polycounts and ARC... but hey, it actually helps, i'm getting 30 FPS there, which i have never ever before.

9 comments:

  1. A wonderful update!
    I am pleased that Brack Dragon gets even better XD

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  2. I can not find version 2.9.3 on the download page. Actually there is no 64 bit viewer at all. What happened?

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    1. Not sure. It's not the first time that it didn't accept my upload. Reuploading. Will see if it happens again.

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  3. I'm wearing a Maitreya body, hands and feet, Lelutka head. nothing else. I took my mesh eyes off (kinda scary, but in the name of science!) and my render count is 700K. I've spent some time looking for a hair that isnt cost crazy and my count is 779K. Ok, I'm bad, everyone is bad for wearing a mesh body but the max value of the slider is 800K and I go anywhere and the only people who are not jellied are using a system body with no mesh and that isn't many people. If I want to be able to see any one I have to put the slider to 0 so I've lost any benefit there was in having these counts. :( Good news, the eyes are only 2K!

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    1. I'm not surprised.

      The picture gives you already an idea in how bad of an state optimization of avatars are and i was fully expecting to have much more people (and different people) get derendered, especially Maitreya and Belleza bodies. This change is targeted mostly at these bodies since these sport the most polygons out of all popular mesh bodies i know. Prims, especially scrulpts however do hit pretty hard too as again seen on the picture. People simply wear a massive amount of stuff which each comes with a massive amount of polygons and thus ARC. I was kinda shocked when i saw my own new ARC and thought hell thats probably not good and then i saw everyone else and was like wow...

      Well... i'll be tuning the ARC calculation and crunching a bit on numbers, making them primarily smaller by a fraction of 10 so we get back down to normal 20000-500000 values, should make looking at them much easier too while keeping the overall aggressiveness of the new ARC intact.

      It will also feature a way of seeing the composition of your own ARC (and possibly other people's ARC later down the line)

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  4. i'll just leave this here
    http://polycount.com/discussion/141061/polycounts-in-next-gen-games-thread

    Beev

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  5. Niran, does your mesh body utilize onion skin layers (tattoo, underwear, clothing) like the popular mesh bodies do? Just wondering because I imagine the layers are a factor in this high poly count. Which mesh body are you using by the way?

    Also, I am curious what the poly count is for the base mesh body (highest LOD) is excluding the layers. And then how much do the layers add onto that count? Let's take Maitreya for example since it has a high market saturation.

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    1. Here's a quick rundown.
      - The Orange Nova Kobold doesn't use onion layers.
      - The base body (unmodded) has around 47k triangles.
      - My modified version has 23k triangles. (extra boob sizes and hand poses replaced with bento hands)
      - Kobold has around 6-8k base ARC (with the old ARC calculation)
      - Kobold is a extremely popular body as of late due to its high modability and huge amounts of mods.
      - Kobold comes with full modability, full mesh rig + UV map + textures and mod/copy perms.

      I use only 3 mesh bodies. Solarian Feline, Snaggletooth Kobold and Skadi Sergal. 2 of which are by the same creator.

      In direct comparison to the Maitreya Mesh Body - Lara V4 which has 108k polygons just the base body, no hands, no feet, no head included. All of them except the head (couldnt get it selected) was around 200+k. Not including hair, eyes, teeth and clothing as well as accessorizes based on the body which in turn have a much higher polygon density as well. Just the base body is like having me 10 times. This essentially means each layer is 40-50k polygons depending on if it has 4 or 5 layers.

      My high ARC comes from my overall high polycount which stems from the fact that i'm using Magika sculpt hair, sculpts have a huge amount of polygons, having many of them around quickly inflates your polycount, hence why i quickly end up with 200k polygons. My hair has 120k polygons, my base body with eyes, crystals and ears included has roughly 32k polygons, the rest are invisible spheres i use to have lights on my crystals. I'm planning to reduce my polycount by reducing the spheres to cubes.

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