For those who maybe haven't followed along with the broadcasts, what is zone culling?
TL;DRZone culling removes the hidden parts of underlying clothing when a layer is worn over it, avoiding overlapping geometry, poke-through and puffy jackets.
It's basically, so I'm wearing this shirt and I'm wearing this jacket. Without the jacket on, you see all of the shirt. When you put the jacket on, everything that's not visually seen will actually be zone culled out. So it doesn't exist anymore. That way, when you're doing animations and stuff, you don't have the shirt poking through. It allows us to not have jackets be incredibly puffy to allow for that shirt geo to stick around.
Really, it's avoiding layers. Because you don't want layers of geo over each other. It just never works. Imagine the body, the shirt, the jacket, and all those plates of geo on top of each other. So with Corey's zones, we split it up, and then you can just start ripping them out based on markup.
Yeah, without zone culling, you'd have to line up the edges so perfectly that when it is deforming, everything is deforming exactly the same, and even then there's not really a guarantee.
Which we tried. Back in 2.6, we did do that.