Last week, Pastrami Linden posted a blog about a tool that calculates Avatar Rendering. I will let you read the article on the Second Life® blog to see how it is done, so please forgive me for not giving more detail but basically an avatar with no attachments will equal 1. See picture below. The avatar rendering calculation is a combination of prims, textures and other assorted items (*see note at bottom of posting).
Not bad – your basic avatar counts as 1. You look like a noob, but it makes sense.
So I decided to look at my score in my usual avatar setup and was shocked to see that I scored a 1339!. Holy cow! I hardly wear anything. Just hair, shoes, SL Stat Watch and a multi-gadget. Since I pride myself on being prim savy in all of my builds, to see this high score unsettled me. I was expecting a score around 500. So where did the cost come from?
My Hair
- My current hair which I call “Banana Messy” is from Panache and is the Asher Night style. It scores out at a whopping 1015. Wow. Since it has 211 prims, I expected its score to be around 400.
- So I checked a couple of other hair pieces I had. My “original” Banana pony tail which was designed by sachi Vixen came in at 20 for the non-flex style and at 61 for the flex style. Later I modified it to have more bounce and that hair comes in at 103.
- I tried on a couple of other styles and found most of them ran around 300-500.
- So I need some new hair.
Shoes
- I usually wear a boot from Quixotic Trance called CyberTrip Lowz Shooz. I love these!. I was happy to see one shoe scored 15 and both together accounted for a score of 25.
- I checked on some promotional Addidas shoes, the a3 microride astronaut and got a combined score 211. I expected a high score here due to the number of prims.
- I was surprised to see my SnUggs scored a combined number of 55.
- So I will be keeping my boots!
Mutli-Gadget
- I have used a multi for over two years – It gives me lots of cool things including avatar radar, flight assists, chair and a robot. But is scores 153 points.
- I think I will make a single prim flight assist and avatar radar detector.
Miscellaneous Items
- Gritty Kitty: Studio Headphones – cost = 158
- Necklace Shamrock – cost = 3,047
- Platinum Cross – cost = 36
- Cyberpunk Goggles – cost = 45
- Gritty Kitty: Neko Cuff Watch – cost = 35
- RicX mens watch A03g – cost = 1,110
- RicX mens watch A12 – cost = 1,054
- Sunglasses – cost = 44
- SL Stat Watch – cost = 20
So I changed my hair to Panache-ZF Drew – Red Black Twotone (scored of 287), removed the Multi and kept the boots and the SL Stat Watch. I was aiming for a cost around 400 to 500 and came in at 338.
So what will be the community standard?
Here I am with my new hair and no multi coming in at 338 points. Dot score is 984 which is considered in the yellow by Linden Labs. The cost is all in the hair. Dot is not wearing any jewelry.
I checked three locations to look at avatar averages. Over at the Open Mic I saw most avatars were well into the 1800 range. A couple avatars were over 2000 and one came in at over 4000. I did see one avatar under 150! He was dressed as a skeleton.
The same type of scores were seen at two more locations on Monday night.
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From Second Life Blog – Avatar Rendering Cost
- A base avatar begins with a score of 1
- 5 points added for each unique texture on the avatar (not counting the base skin). Rationale: Unique textures break batches, create CPU overhead for decoding, and consume GPU memory bandwidth. However, note that this is across the avatar- so two unique textures across 10 prims only count as two unique textures!
- All attachments are then looked at on a per-prim level. The prims are weighted as follows:
- 10 base points for having the prim.
- 1 point added if prim is invisible, shiny, or glowing (each counts). Rationale: Invisiprims/shiny/glow create a small amount of overhead by breaking batches or requiring an extra render pass.
- 1 point added for each planar-mapped face of the prim. Rationale: Planar mapping creates a small amount of CPU overhead that gets worse with flexible objects.
- 1 point added per meter, per axis, of the prim’s size. Rationale: Bigger prims are higher LOD and create more fill.
- 4 points added if prim has bump applied. Rationale: Bump mapping breaks batches and requires a register combiner, and creates a lot of CPU overhead when coupled with a flexible object.
- 4 points added for each transparent face of the prim. Rationale: Alpha creates a lot of overhead by needing to be sorted every frame AND by breaking batches.
- 4 points added for each animated textured face of the prim. Rationale: Animated textures break batches and require the use of a texture matrix.
- 8 points added if prim is flexi. Rationale: Flexible objects create a lot of CPU overhead and consume graphics bus bandwidth.
- 16 points added if prim is a particle emitter. Rationale: Particles create even MORE CPU overhead and consume graphics bus bandwidth.
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