If you have the Preferences > Graphics > Advanced Settings>Avatar Maximum complexity maxed out, you will still see some medium and low ARCI avatars rendered as Jelly Babies. 145k is a yellow orange rating and I see that avatar as a JB even with a setting of 200k. I’ve seen some with ARC’s as low as 115k render as Jelly B’s. So, they are definitely exceeding settings other than the Complexity setting.

No Anti-Aliasing in Jelly Babies

I think the coloring of the 4 numbers shown above the avatar when the Show ARCI setting is enabled indicate the limiting setting. The values are; Complexity, Rank, m², and kb.

The wiki explains, sort of, that Complexity is the overall rendering complexity. The value is a measure based on a mathematical combination of the things the Lindens know slow rendering. This is the number used with the Complexity setting you control in Preferences as described above.

I’m not sure why we have Rank. The wiki tells us rank is an indication of how close the avatar is to the camera. I know that Avatar Impostors kick-in or not based on distance from our camera. I find it is factored into when to render as a Jelly Baby too and you will see some Jelly Babies change to a fully rendered avatars as you zoom in.

M² is the square meters of attachment surface. Mesh bodies, feet, hands, and other attachments add to this value. Creating attachments with huge surface areas is a griefer’s thing. The default setting is designed to stop the griefing. You can lower the limit to improve performance. But, I suggest you use the ARCI setting.

KB is the number of kilobytes of data needed to transfer for the viewer to render all the attachments. I am finding this is often the limiting factor for who gets rendered and who doesn’t. For mesh designers this translates into polygon count. Fewer polygons means less data has to transfer.

An interesting bit about this value is it decreases as the camera distance increases… moving the camera away from the avatar. I suspect building LoD levels into clothes is a factor. But, I have yet to test the idea.

I’ve seen some avatars that have a KB value in the megabyte range, 30+mb. Wearing quite a bit of mesh I have a KB of 560kb; hands, feet, shoes, hair, jewelry, and a dress. Adding Slink and Maitreya bodies changed the KB value very little, about 20kb.

You will likely see the beginner avatars with a KB of 0. I’m not sure why that is so. I know I can strip off all my attachments and get to 0.0kb. System clothes don’t contribute to this value. But, everyone has to download those textures, so why don’t they add to the number? Does this mean I have them cached so there is no download? May be…

While my Slink feet don’t seem to add to the value, my Slink hands most certainly do. Puzzling. I’ll have to play with this a bit to figure out how it works. I think feet and hands should both add to the KB value.

I find it odd that HUD’s do add to this number. After all the only person that renders the HUD is the person wearing it.

If you want to play with the Project Quick Graphics Viewer, restart your computer after installing it. When I ran it after having run the previous version I had a horrible time, until I restarted my computer. Things improved considerably after that.

I still get logged off after 15 or 20 minutes… I’m trying to decide if it is me or the viewer. I am left with the message I’ve been disconnected and can read messages or close the viewer. Sure…

Also, texture loading and rendering seem WAY slow.