Although I’ve had a Cloud Party account for a while, I haven’t spent much time there. I have been there a little bit over the last few days playing with the inworld building blocks tools and they are a lot of fun, although my unpublished land currently looks like a rubbish tip.
However what caught my eye this evening was the avatar development kit version 1.0. This is intended for Cloud Party content creators who want to create clothing or animations for avatars in Cloud Party. Now clothing and animations are not my fields but I found this quote from the wiki interesting:
“One problem virtual worlds struggle with is letting users fully express themselves in their avatars while not causing performance problems for other users with slower computers who are nearby. We’ve come up with a way to address that problem: Standard and High Definition modes for avatar costumes.
Each costume part will have at most one mesh/material combination that can be marked as ‘Standard Definition’ (SD). This must be under a certain triangle limit (the limits are defined per slot further down in this document). The other mesh/material combinations will automatically be marked as ‘High Definition’ (HD). HD meshes have no triangle limit.
SD mesh/material combinations will always be drawn, but HD mesh/material combinations will drop out at a distance. The distance it drops out at will vary from user to user. Some users with low-end computers or mobile devices might never see the HD version of the costume.
It’s best practice to make most, if not all, of your costume piece fit within the SD triangle limits. If you don’t, that costume piece will disappear or maybe even never be drawn on certain lower-end machines, even if it’s a shirt or pants. We’ll be providing tools on the marketplace for users to easily see what they look like in SD vs HD. Also, certain costume slots REQUIRE a SD mesh.
An example of a good use of the SD/HD system is a coat with brass buttons. The coat itself should fit within the SD triangle limits and use just one material. The coat can have a separate material with shiny, reflective brass buttons and buckles that will not be drawn in SD.”
Now the first thing I’m thinking here is that surely it’s dangerous, to say the least, to allow people to create a mesh with no triangle limit, however on closer inspection it looks as if those around you won’t suffer if you do go buck mad in the triangle department.
The idea here, it seems to me, is that if your computer can handle it you can outfit yourself in some pretty damn funky HD mesh but you’re not going to drag your friends down if they come over to visit you.
This isn’t the easiest concept to grasp, but Chic Aeon makes a good fist of it in a blog post on the subject. Chic talks of one of the pitfalls of this approach, the need to create two meshes, which can be mandatory when it comes to clothing. Chic explains more about the SD/HD concept in her blog post:
“When you make your costume items (clothing and wearable attachments) it is best to include an SD version in the slot provided. Otherwise you or your customers go around naked or invisible. Indeed, that IS a mandatory part of the costume scenario in the clothing area — it is not for attachments as of this writing.
You will need to make TWO meshes (more are possible in the full outfit slot). One will be your high quality, detailed mesh (no triangle limit but let’s not go down the subsurf finger tapping mode – shall we). One will be for the simple (very simple) version of your object.
How you make those versions will depend on your work method. Some folks make the complex mesh first and then simplify. I find that in CP I am making the SD versions first, trying them on for fit and then enhancing them for looks and detail. SD items can only have ONE material (texture call from the server). HD items can have as many as needed but unless you are making color change items or something that needs shine etc. it is more efficient to use one material. You could also use masks to define areas.”
I can’t honestly say how well this works, but it does sound, in theory at least, as if it could work very well. I’ll have to try and find out more about how Cloud Party determines when to replace HD with SD because that is certainly an important factor in providing the end user with a satisfactory experience.
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