Strawberry Singh has a meme called What’s Your Digits? It is about shape and mesh bodies. So, what can I add to that?

My Digits 4/2015

If your new to Second Life™ you may not know the viewer’s appearance editor reports the wrong height for avatars. You can check this yourself by rezzing a cube and stretching it to whatever height you think you are. Make it phantom and walk into it.

You’ll see it is smaller than your avatar, while they should be the same size. Some third party viewers may have fixed the problem. But, the SL Viewer has had this problem ever since I came into SL in 2008. The JIRA on this issue is VWR-19767.

The 5″ Appearance Error

The error is 14cm or 5-½ inches to the higher than stated side.

Those that are trying to fit their avatars to a specific height use something other than the Appearance Editor read out. I made my own tool to help with height and other body proportions: Model Shape Tool Version 1.2. You see it in the background of the image with my digits.

Also, there is the matter of render cost… or ARC – Avatar Render Cost. You can enable a read out of ARC in the top menu: Advanced (Ctrl-Alt-D = reveal/hide Advanced)->Performance Tools->Show Draw Weight for Avatars.

Mesh Body Comparison – 2015

Do all these mesh bodies rate the same on ARC? No. I did a comparison. The image shows the results, but those are not the outfits I used to get the numbers. I used the classic avatar with classic hands and feet. I used the demo Slink body with my Slink hands and feet. I also used the Maitreya body, hands, and feet. I used the same hair and earrings on all three, not the hair or rings shown. The results:

• Classic: 44,571
• Slink: 59,251
• Maitreya: 94,381

If you look at the polygon density of the avatars, you can see why they differ in render cost. The key question is how important is a difference of 15,000 or 50,000 ARC units? Well, not much. But, the idea is to get your ARC down into the <50k range. My hair and earrings were killing may chances of doing that.

To get a personal sense of how much this matters, enable Avatar Render Muting. This will give you high ARC avatars that look a bit like gummies, jelly babies. See: Second Life Performance: Render Muting.

By enabling show avatar’s ARC, you’ll get a since of what other avatars cost to render. With this information you can decide if 15k or 50k of ARC makes a difference to you. There is no doubt it takes more CPU cycles to render 50k of polys, but is the look worth the cost to you? And can you actually see a difference? I think you can’t.

My Outfit:

Dress:     LARRY – Vine Dress NUDE
Panties:  ! [SINTIMACY] In Love (Brave) Underpants
Hands & Feet: Slink FEMALE (AvEnhance) Hands and Feet
Earrings: *Ticky Tacky* My Girl Likes to Grapple Earrings – Silver
Hair:  ::Exile:: Hair fair gift:Red
Shoes:  Eudora 3D Kiania Heels
Fixes:    StrawberrySingh.com Broken Ankle Fix
Shape:  My custom Body Adj 140331 5-10
Skin:      *YS&YS* Ashanti 01 Nude