Techniques for improving rendering speed of avatar costumes in online virtual environments

One or more non-transitory computer-readable media storing instructions which, when executed by one or more computing devices, cause:

• providing, by a cloud-based platform:
• a virtual environment that includes avatars whose appearance is based on customized costumes;
• and
• user interface controls that enable users to create customized costumes for avatars for the virtual environment by selecting combinations of costume components;
• creating a combined mesh for each costume in a set of high-likelihood costumes;
• wherein the set of high-likelihood costumes is a subset of all customized costumes that can be created using the user interface controls;
• wherein the combined mesh for each costume in the set of high-likelihood costumes is created by combining meshes of all costume components that were selected by a user for the costume;
• storing, in a cloud-based costume cache of the cloud-based platform, the combined mesh for each costume in the set of high-likelihood costumes;
• and
• in response to a costume-download-triggering event, causing the combined mesh for a particular high-likelihood costume to be sent from the cloud-based costume cache to a particular client device, of a particular user, that is connected to the cloud-based platform, without performing any on-the-fly combination of meshes of the costume components of the particular high-likelihood costume.