Maniquins

Maniquins- I recently sent this email to LL and am awaiting a Responce however, I would also like the opinion of the populace to speak up here if you agree.

Good Morning, I am Shadow Weaver one of your older members of Sl and I have a few questions in reference to Avatars and Clothing.

#1 is there any way possible to make an interface Mannequin. IE currently we have the preview window that uses the meshes from the templates to preview clothing brought in world.

Reasons for asking for a mannequin is several to be honest.

#1 A Free Standing Mannequin in world that a player could use like a prim would help in development of clothing.

#2 A Free Standing Mannequin could be used in Stores to display clothing

#3 A Free Standing Mannequin could be used to develop new Avatar attachments.

#4 A Free Standing Mannequin could be used to Test Animations

#5 A Free Standing Mannequin could be used to Improve Skin Development for the Skins Currently being used in world created by players.

My theoretical proposal would only require a few things to implement.

Currently the Avatar Mesh we use could be the basis for the Mannequin but it would still need to have a limited set of controls to use it in the multi functions listed above


#1 An Interface that would allow the user to control the Mannequin almost as though it were an Avatar. Although when out of the Appearance module the Mannequin could not be controlled to move from place to place but would be a Grounded to the static position a User had specified.

#2 Allow for the current Clothing Layers to be utilized for testing and or display of clothing.

#3 Allow for the implementation of Animations within the control panel based on the user animation list.

#4 Allow for Attachment of Prims Identical to an avatar as its hard to adjust on an avatar but through placement on a Mannequin it would be easier.

#5 Allow for the use of current body shapes to control the look of a mannequin other than the use of the appearance mode.

#6 Allow the Mannequin to act like a Primitive and be Translucent.

#7 treat the Mannequin as a Primitive toward Prim Counts.

Doing this I believe would enhance the Clothier/Skin/Custom Avatar/Animation Community as a whole.

On a subsequent note: I have recently done a monthly study of expenditures and even with all the additions of the Texture Previewer there are still a lot of Issues with Uploads for Clothing.

#1 I have consistently been expending 46% of my income and 3X my Weekly stipend in uploads. Unfortunately those uploads due to the Preview window are not valid at times and a lot of erroneous stuff gets uploaded as you cannot see them until you put them on an avatar.

Solution: 1 of two things.

#1 Provide an Independent viewer that allows the User to develop clothing offline and upload as Clothing and not textures. This would allow the User to pay a Higher Upload cost per texture however, the quality of the content provided as such would greatly enhance SL.

#2 Provide an interface at upload that takes the user to the aforementioned Mannequin and test the clothing on a full fledged avatar Mannequin. Upon exit from that Control panel the user has the option to upload or discard.

Both these features require the use of a full avatar to implement just one is for offline and one is for online.
IM also going to post this in the Feature Suggestions Forum for input from the community.


Sincerely, Shadow Weaver

Eh. No.

I already have enough of a problem with my computer lagging and sputtering along when I enter an area with 30+ people because of the high-poly (compared to prims) models, I don't need the same thing happening when I enter any area with a clothing shop.

At least I can AVOID the people. And you just KNOW someone's going to create a bazillion of these just to make people crash, or lag so bad they can't move.

You asked for feedback, so here's my 2 cents. The mannequin is an interesting idea, but frankly I don't see how it would produce all the benefits you are saying. Let me explain point by point, as you did:

1. Development of Clothing - I don't see how putting experimental clothing on an av-like dummy is any better or worse than applying it to an actual av. I suppose if multiple dummies were set up shoulder to shoulder in a line, perhaps it might make comparing different variations of clothing a little easier, but thi just dfoesn't seem worthwhile to me somehow.

2. In-store display1 - This would be beneficial. The possibility of a mannequin as a vendor would be wonderful. No more having to drop what I'm doing and TP to my store in order to answer a request to show someone what the items look like when worn.

3. Development of Attachments Just as with clothing, I don't see the benefit. In fact, this could be harmful. Attachment size, rotation, and position have to vary with the exact size and shape of the specific avatar for whom they are designed. Unless the mannequin were an EXACT duplicate of the avatar, any attachments placed on it would be wrong. Even if they were right though, I can't see how this is any better than using your real avatar. It's easy enough to use a podium ar an animator to stop avatar movement so that attachments can be lined up.

4. Testing Animations As with points 1 and 4, I cannot see how testing an animation on an avatar-like object is any better than testing it on a real avatar. If your intention is to create a troupe of dancing marianettes, that might be interesting I suppose, but using a mannequin as a crash test dummy doesn't appear to have any advantage over using the real thing.

5. Skin Development At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I don't see any advantage here. Making skin is just like making clothing. Testing it on a fake avatar has no apparent superiority to testing it on a real one.


As for your implimentation ideas:

1. Avatar-like Controls - This would be a nightmare. The only "control" we currently have over avatars in SL is location. How the avatar animates itself to get from one place to another is beyond our control. SInce the location of the mannequin would be fixed in place as if it were any other object, trying to move it as an avatar moves would just cause it to walk in place. Wouldn't it be more practical to control the mannequin as, well, a mannequin? In other words, be able to manipulate each part of the skeleton with the mouse.

2. Clothing Layers - As I said above, for test purposes this is irrelevant, but fior display it would be great.

3. Animations - This would probably be the easiest method of control over the mannequin that SL could currently utilize. I'm wondering about lag though. If mannequins became the new standard for store displays (as they innevitably would), no doubt many merchants would leave animations running on them all day long. Thirty or forty perpetually dancing dummies in a mall would kill a sim's processing power I'm sure.

4. Attachments - If the mannequin acts as a prim, this is easy. You can link any object to any other object anywhere you want already. I must repeat though that I see no benefit to attaching objects to a fake avatar instead of attaching them to a real one, except of course for dipsplay purposes. This would not help with development at all, and in fact could be detrimental.

5. Allow for the use of current body shapes to control the look of a mannequin other than the use of the appearance mode. - I have no idea what you man by this.

6. Translucency - Now if only they'd allow this for real avatars...

7. Prim Counts - Sure, why not?


So, in summary, I agree with you that a mannequin as a store display would be wonderful, but I can't for the life of me see how it would be of any benefit at all in the development of clothing, skins, animations, etc. These things can easily be done on a real avatar just fine.


As for your multiple upload issues, wow, 46%, really? That's insane.

Actually, if you compare it to any RL business it's not that insane I guess. If your cost to obtain each item you sell is 46% of the sale price, that means your markup is 117%, which is actually well within the range of what a typical retail store would do. The fact that you have no other expenses other than inventory leaves you with 53% profit. Most retail stores lose money for at least the first 5 years they are in business. Those that manage to make profit do so at somewhere between 5% and 20%. In those terms you are doing phenominally well.

However, I don't have to tell you that in SL terms, you are spending a fortune on uploads. I guess it's easy to spend 46% if your income is pretty low, but I'm betting it's not since you've been around for a while.

There are only two possibilities here. Either you are doing dozens of uploads for each item or you are simply making a ton of items, not all of which sell well.

If the latter is the case, all you have to do to cut your expenses is track which types of items you sell a lot of and eliminate the others. Concentrate your efforts on what works.

If the former is the case though, than I must admit I am having trouble understanding exactly why you need to do so many uploads. Just so you know, the most uploads I've ever had to do on a single item was 25, and that was pretty early on in my SL career. The learning I gained from those 24 uploads that didn't work has been invaluable. I applied that knowledge to everything I've made since, and nowadays it's pretty rare that I have to do more than 4 or 5 uploads for anything.

If you're not doing so already, I highly recommend keeping the overlay layer showing on all your developmental clothing and skins. That way it's really easy to see exactly what needs adjustment and how. Once you are certain that everything is right, then and only then turn off the overlay and upload the finished product. As I said, it really shouldn't take more than 4 or 5 adjustments to get it right.

Geez, this was a long post. I'm gonna shut up now. I hope some of this has been helpful.

I think your taking it wrong Mole, Im not suggesting making another Avatar. Once editing is over it is in essence a Prim.

no different than a building with 500 prims. Reason a 500 prim building is hard to rez is because there are 500 prims.
In all honesty a single designated prim with a "high Poly" count is easier to rez and visualise than a 500 prim object.

But I understand you concerns and on that remark about a 1000 of them have it limited to 5 or 10 to a person.

Either way it would be a benifit over all vs. what your describing.

Shadow

I was hoping my response would have been first, since it was well thought out and followed yours point by point, Shadow, not just a simple "Eh, no", but I guess I took a bit too long with it. Anyway, Im interested to hear your repsonse to my response.

To answer your reasoning of not seeing a purpose Chosen as you mentioned I have been here a while and granted your information on keeping overlays is invaluable. A lesson I learned early on it still does not account for actuall garment Line up.

Ie Shading from front to back shading on the arms ect. Yeah we can line up so much with the "Templates" and even with score marks ensure that our straps and tops and such all line up according to the template overlay but what cannot be compensated for is shading line up 1-4 pixels can totaly eraticate a good blending line up.

So why? Well what I am proposing is the ability to edit a complete outfit without having to upload until all is fixed. Clothing is easy. One thing you cannot do effectively is edit from top to bottom the bottom template is actually a different pixel size than the top...and the top to the head and so on.

Animations I just threw in to apease animators. However, a Avatar Vendor so to speak would be highly effective like a mirror of sorts.

But then again I presume you have noticed you can make an outfit ..FIT one avatar yet another the images are stretched way out of porportion.

Imagine a customer being able to go to a vendor and drop in their shape and it put on the clothes for them. What would this do this would revolutionize the clothing industry in SL because then they could SEE what the customer wants.

Now on your retort about uploads ...lets look at the conventional method that it takes to "Box" an outfit.

Depending on development of a clothing article lets even use your 1-5 upload scheme for me most of the time its 3 but thats neither here nor there.

So 3 uploads thats $30 for say a top just on uploads for the top texture.

Now we have to put it on and take a picture. Well this is a new line so you want new back grounds so you upload 10-15 just to get the one that looks appropriate with this outfit.

lets use 10 as a minmum thats L$100

So just to get to the point of taking a picture you have uploaded L$130 (am I going to recoup that the first sale?NO!)

Now the picture has been taken and saved to hard drive. Now you have 10-15 pics to go through on your hard drive. You edit and make your new box covers and presume its ok and upload. Well a few "judges" say ok you need to adjust this mod this and tweak that....well thats 1 upload gone so thats L$10 more for a total of L$140

in the end once you get the box cover done you have uploaded a minimum of 3 thus bringing the total up to L$170

But I only do this for the initail product so now I have 10 other garments along the same style but each is slightly different. So almost back to square 1 cept each upload only take 2 now thus L$200 Lindens for those clothes. and each Picture I take I use the existing back ground so no cost incurrred there but i do incur 100 more upload for the box covers...thus all in all for a 11 garment line I have spent 370 to upload. now I set them for sale for L$35 each as I want Newer players to be able to afford them. So that is the low end of the development spectrum. 48% upload costs means of just those 11 Items alone I have sold 2 of each and maybe 3 of one or the other.

However that is not the case. My upload costs for actuall clothing is about 50% of that but taking pictures is another 50%. Thus my net profit as you presumed to be 52% is still not as I have to pay group fees, Location Fees for placing vendors, Scriting Fees as I dont script, in the end I net 10% of my income vs expenditures.

So an Offline editor for an avatar...definately a Plus
An Online Avatar Mannequin definately a plus for visual sales better than a picture and definately reduces that cost.

I dont know how you sell your clothes as far as packaging.
but in some cases packaging is what makes the sale.

Anyway I digress, sorry to hear the negative commentary thus far.

Sincerely, Shadow

forgive they typos as I had to send because the boss walked in.

Shadow, I'm sorry that you are taking this as negative commentary. I thought it was a healthy discussion of an interesting idea.

Anyway, I love the idea of a customer being able to drop their shape into a vendor manequin. That is awesome. There are some obvious problems, such as no-transfer and potential piracy issues which would have to be worked out, but on the whole it's a great idea.

Now as far as your uploads go, okay we've established that you are not doing dozens of uploads for each piece of clothing. That is good. I said 4 or 5 should be max and you are around 3 so you're in much better shape than you previously implied.

It now seems that you are spending most of your upload money on "backgrounds" and snapshots, not on the actual clothing. This is largely irrelevent to the discussion as far as I can tell, as having a manequin to play with would not solve this problem. But, if you want to go there anyway, let's explore.

First you mentioned backgrounds. I always make my backdrops in Photoshop, which obviously costs nothing. Even if you want to use in-world backgrounds, taking snapshots of the landscape shouldn't cost you anything either, nor should taking pictures of an avatar wearing the clothing you want to sell. Save it all to disk, not as textures.

Now simply do a little compositing in Photoshop (or whatever your raster editor of choice happens to be) and you're done. If you want to get opinions on a few variations, as you indicated, fine. Upload a few of them.

By my math, 3 uploads to get a an item made plus another 3 or 4 for variations in packaging is a maximum of about L$70-80 spent for each item. If you are selling them for L$35 each, 2-3 sales pays for every creation and then everything after that is pure profit.

My line is significantly more expensive than yours, all items ranging from L$300-1500 and I have a limited clientele, as all my products are sci fi related. Needless to say though, I've sold way more than two to three of every item. If your stuff is so low priced and it's designed for a general audience, you should have no trouble selling 10 or 20 units for every one of mine. Even if you only sold 10 total of everything, that's L$350 income. Subtract the 80 spent for a PROPER AND REASONABLE amount of uploads and you're making L$270 for each item you make, or around 770% profit. That's huge.

I believe you should explore the possibility that you are spending so much in uploads not out of necessity, but out of habit. A little re-management of your online and offline resources would save you about 75% of your expenses.

I think it would be wonderful, its been suggested several times so far and yes it would be beneficial in all the areas listed.

Chosen: I would have agree with shadow on the skin, clothing attachments etc, assuming the Maniquin doesnt move. It would be simpler to look around it, add a script to make it auto turn, now it seems any movement on our part will effect our camera, however any movement on an MQ will not, that is a major bene imho.

I agree with the reservations expressed about multiples of these MQ's in public areas, I think that can be alieviated by a linden set limit on a per parcel basis. I.e. you can have only 5 MQ's per 8192sqm plot or something similar.

Personally I would like to see them be able to be fully scripted, MQs in this would could have great potential for making attractions more enjoyable and more involved.

All in all, it certainly has a host of issues associated with it but I think once a good set of guides are setup and a few things decided it would be a great addition.

I do not mean to sound rude, but I can't think of any other way of putting this: Am I missing something here or am I the only person on this forum who knows how to get an avatar to stop moving and how to control the camera?

It takes about 60 seoconds to create an object that will fix your avatar in any position you want when you "sit" on it. All movement stops. Camera control at that point is the same as it always was. Hold down ctrl, ctrl+alt, or ctrl+alt+shift, click on whatever you want as your pivot point, and move the mouse.

Every single 3D modeling program in existence allows for this same type of camera control (different key strokes, but same concept). Why on earth would the model need to turn when the camera can move to any angle?

I agree that the manequin has a few potential benfits, as I have stated. However there is absolutely NOTHING as fer as I can tell concerning the making of avatars, skins, clothing, etc. that cannot be just as easily or more easily done on the avatar itself.

No one has yet explained how the mannequin would improve these things, simply that it magically would. Please enlighten me.

Basic lack of understanding of how graphics cards work, which is understandable. Read more below.



Well, I'm so glad to hear my reply is not 'well thought out'. It's only probably the exact reason the Lindens haven't implimented it in the first place. What could I possibly know?

---

Everything in a 3D environment is made up of two dimensional surfaces. It's partly why looking at something from the inside of a non-hollow prim doesn't show the prim itself. The best way to illustrate this is by pretending everything in every 3D environment is made up of triangles.

A cube would be made of twelve triangles, two for each side.

With a sufficient number of triangles, you can create a reasonable approximation of any shape in existence. With enough triangles, you can make something that the human eye can't distinguish between, and the real thing.

If you take those triangles, and start connecting them at their points at different angles, keeping the triangle itself flat, but curving multiple triangles over an imagined surface, you can create the illusion of a three dimensional surface. Much like creating the side of a cube with just two triangles. The more complex the surface, the more triangles are required.

Now, modern day graphics cards have evolved beyond that. They have more than just mere triangles that they can render. They can cheat, and do outright squares, making a cube only six polygons instead of twelve. That's half (or close to it) the number or required operations to draw that polygon on your screen. More code includes things such as vertices and such.

But the plain and simple fact is, the more 'detail' in a 3d object, the more time it takes for your card to render it. This is represented as a number known as FPS, or frames per second.

The absolute best way to give you a concrete example of how this works is for you to go to a sim at the edge of the grid, or better yet an island sim, fly to the extreme edge, so you're staring out into the simless ocean, and then log out.

Then log back in and keep staring. Logging out and back in guarantees me that SL will stop rendering everything you just flew through that's now behind you. So keep staring out into the ocean. No prims in front of you. No avatars. Just some ocean, and maybe some clouds.

Make sure your debug menu is on. If it isn't, hit Ctrl+Alt+D.

Turn off your minimap if it isn't. It's something like Ctrl+Shift+M.

Then hit Alt+1. This will bring up a bit of data on the right side of your screen. The three main categories should be something like Basic, Advanced, and Simulator. If Basic isn't open, click the word Basic (the bar won't do, the word is the only thing that will open it). I'd also recommend you close the Advanced and Simulator readouts, just to make sure you don't read the wrong value.

See the large graph with a green line moving inside a red area? That's your graphics card's FPS. Be SURE you're not reading the SimFPS, which is the speed your simulator is running at. If you are, you need to close the Simulator heading and open the Basic one.

Look at the number next to the word FPS. See it? It should be something higher than 10. Probably something more like 20 or 30ish. That's how many frames of graphics per second your graphics card is rendering. The only polygons it's really having to render is your one avatar, and maybe some water, and maybe a bit of the land and prims around you. Nothing much else.

Now, play an animation. See how smoothly the animation runs? I can almost guarantee you will be shocked at how smooth it runs if you've never stared into the ocean before. Especially right after logging in.

Now find a party. The bigger, the better. I'd recommend Club Elite, but since that place closed down (yay!), just any old party with a large number of avatars will do.

Go to it. Be sure to fly around the area a bit. Then land, and look and make sure you can see -everyone- who's at the party. Be SURE you can see them! Now look at what your FPS is. Low, isn't it? Probably something like 10, or 5, or maybe even lower. And how many people are there? How choppy their animations are? Log out. Log back in. Look again. It's still low, isn't it?

If all those avatars were PERFECTLY STILL, your FPS would still be as low as it is now. Even if they were... say... mannequins (check your spelling, Shadow), your FPS would STILL be just as low. Because your graphics card is having to render dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of polygons for each individual avatar. And if 30 or so avatars manage to slow down your graphics -this- much, just think how much 200 in a large mall would. Hell, it might even bring people's systems to a screeching halt. Might overheat their graphics cards and burn them to a crisp if they aren't cooling them properly.

Please don't dismiss someone out of hand because they disagree with you, or have a short reason that you don't understand. It's a very valid problem, and LL would have to completely rework the graphics engine AS WELL as increasing the listed system requirements high enough to quite possibly turn away a large portion of their user base just to make it possible for a mall owner to put out two hundred dolls to show off the latest clothing. And even then, a thousand avatar-like mannequins would hurt the person with better equipment just like 200 would the person with worse. Unless they've got some magic secret technology I don't know about.

Mole, you gotta stop taking things so personally. All I was saying was that I wanted to hear Shadow's response to my specific feedback. You didn't like his/her idea, fine, you said so. That's all you had to do.

Saying that my response was well thought out was one point. Saying it was not a simple "Eh, no", was a completely seperate point, put there to emphasize that there was some substance to the writing other than just a disagreeing opinion. One had nothing to do with the other, and neither was an attack on you.

So relax, take a pill or two, and understand that not everything is about you. Mmmkay?





...and by the way, if the UV maps are at all acurate, it looks like avatars are only about 10,000 polygons at the most, so it's entirely possible that Shadow's inference that an av model may be roughly equivilent to about 500 prims might not be that far off. Thanks for the lecture though.

Which means that 30 would be equivilent the number of polygons in the number of prims a simulator can carry. I dunno 'bout you, but generally I don't render entire sims at once, and when I do, my framerate is single-digit. And people don't even tend to use the entire allotment of prims given to them. It'd probably be worse if they did.

200 different outfits would equal out to well over six simulators completely filled prims we would be rendering. I dunno 'bout you, but my card probably couldn't handle me setting my draw distance to 1000 or so. (Which would be, in fact, the distance of a little over four sims, but I'm figuring a couple on the edges of your vision too.) And remember, that's a conservative estimate, considering people don't use the entire 15,000 prims available in a sim.

Good point. Very good point.

Thank you Neil, thats an honor comming from someone who does this for a living making graphics for systems such as xbox and playstation.

Shadow

Mole, mannequins would be nonphysical, carry no attachments or scripts, and wouldnt constantly be exchanging data with the servers so they would impact the sim a lot less.
Also, in order to make a mannequin, you dont need to use the full-LOD mesh. You could simply use the low-LOD one. A mannequin doesnt even have to be a full avatar with arms and legs. Lots of RL mannequins are only a torso, or half of a torso with a flat back.
You are overreacting: I endorse the mannequin feature with gleeful abandon

I endorse this; i would like to see NPC's too. (i think to keep the NPC level reasonable they should be taxed weekly)

This isn't about server strain. Didn't you read a word of my post? This is about framerate. NONE of that stuff about physicality, attachments, or whatever affects rendering in -any way- (other than the few polygons on any prims, but that's like saying removing a grain of sand will make a beach much less sandy).

As far as low LOD models, don't you think that people are generally low LOD until you get close to them? Again, I say go find a party and see how far your framerate drops. Even from a distance! Then multiply that slowdown by ten, and you'll have an idea of how fast your framerate will be with this idea. Your card will fry.

If you impliment it missing limbs or whatnot, you'll end up with people complaining about not having arms, or legs, or whatever to show off their wares on. Or if you modify the model (with your 'flat back' example) you'll end up people complaining that they have to create a completely different texture for the mannequin. Which they will.

Unless LL manages to -seriously- improve the graphics engine in SL by an enormous amount, this will not work. (Not without severe limitations, at least, such as perhaps counting each mannequin against the server's population.)

A twist on the idea: a local outfit preview window?

Only the dumbest of 3D graphics engines reprocesses every vertex of the entire scenegraph from scratch on every single frame. While I don't know anything at all about Havok, it's got to be better than that.

Typically you build up displaylists of segments that don't change on the initial pass, and only invalidate and regenerate them as needed. And texture caching is old hat. Furthermore, the CLOD code should keep your framerate up at the expense of fine detail when there's a lot changing around you.

If those mannequins are going to be catwalked with a continual change of clothing (and that was probably the idea, otherwise the request would not have included animation), then lag could indeed be a big problem because movement undermines the optimizations that even a modern 3D engine can make. If mannequins are just detailed static prims though, I really don't anticipate a problem if Havok is anywhere near as capable as I think.

Well, first, Havok has nothing to do with rendering. It's a physics engine. Why it came up in the conversation here is beyond me.

Second, from what I've been told, SL pretty much CAN'T do any 3D graphics optimizations beyond the basic LOD stuff, because everything is mutable.

I want NPC models, you could then plop down an NPC object, edit it however you want, and choose to script or not script it.

An unscripted NPC model would basicly be a maniquin.

Also add a Debug option to turn off rendering of NPC models (seperate from avatars). That way if someone does put out 20 models, you can just turn off the rendering and save some FPS.

A tax on NPC's would suck, very much, and would just limit creativity. If any limitation would have to be put on NPC's I'd make them count as 10 prims or something, so 1 NPC = 10 of your prim allotment. Since not all NPC models would be scripted anyway in cases like for maniquins.

For this feature it should be possible to specify which limbs and body parts you want to be visible. Also on the note of the physics engine. Have you ever ran a timer script to checkup on your av's bounding box? It's quite jerky. So I'd venture the guess that it's not the physics engine that has the problem with so many av's; it's the part of the engine that tells a single av what the other av's are up to.

Thanks for the correction about Havok, Moleculor. It came up in the conversation here only because I thought Havok included SL's client-side graphics engine. It doesn't, so cheers for the headsup.

Everything else I wrote though applies to the graphics engine that LL does use, regardless of its name.

That was probably a simplified quote made for the benefit of a non-technical audience. All 3D engines optimize rather than rendering everything --- even the most noddy student engines clip and cull to avoid rendering every polygon on every frame, and many go way beyond that. 3D engine design is all about removing items from the per-frame draw list.

If SL's 3D engine is LL's own internal product then they have total control over it, which is very good if their world is more mutable than usual (and that seems to be true). The fact that a lot is mutable doesn't prevent optimizations though, and in fact it makes optimizations even more necessary than normal otherwise the product will scale extremely badly with rising and mutating object numbers.

The mannequin idea doesn't have to create high lag if the mannequins are stationary, even with high polygon counts, because only those things which vary at frame rate or faster cannot be optimized out of per-frame processing unless they are obscured. Even switching their clothes every few seconds (which deserves to be treated as an insane idea on perception grounds) doesn't have to create rendering lag except at the very first instant that a particular item is loaded for the first time.

If the SL engine is not taking every opportunity to reduce per-frame processing then one can only blame LL. It has no excuse in the fact that almost everything can mutate, slowly.

I was searching for something else and found this old thread.

I see Moleculor's point about the expense of prim rendering, but it would still be darn handy to be able to have non-player avs in some situations (including shop modeling and some kinds of games people are trying to build in-world). I like Oz's suggestion about counting the mannequin as multiple prims, but 10 probably won't be enough. I'd like a discount from the true prim cost if possible, but it might be necessary to charge more like 100 prims for such an object, to be fair to all players. The rendering is going to be expensive. The way we currently limit this resource drain per sim is with prim counts.

That being said, you should get a lot for your 100 prims, including the ability to preview clothes on the customer's av, execute animations, etc.

I also support any offline building tools, including clothing modeling tools, but I think we're going to be a long while waiting for that one, because of the way the client-server model for SL is put together.

neko