How To Get Second Life Shadows in Viewer 2

Ms. Banana Vella has a helpful, illustrated step-by-step guide for enabling dynamic shadows in Viewer 2, so you can go from a Second Life that looks like the pic at left to the one at right.

Comments

[Iris Ophelia]

Unless you have certain graphics cards, like older ATIs or Integrated cards. Then you're still out of luck because deferred Rendering and Global Illumination will be entirely greyed out for you.

[Adeon Writer]

From the picture, I was surprised to see she actually had eyes! The only reason I haven't been using shadows is due to an odd bug that makes your eyes vanish when enabled. But after reading, it looks like she just solved the problem with prim-eyes. Cleaver, but I hope LL actually fixes this bug so we can use shadows without such a bizarre sideeffect.

[Katharine Berry]

These are the same steps that you had to perform in the very first shadow-draft viewer – they're just no longer hidden in the debug settings (they're hidden in the debug menu).

Alternatively, in panel_preferences_graphics1.xml, there's a tickbox and dropdown for it commented out with "DISABLED UNTIL WE REALLY WANT TO SUPPORT THIS" (see this commit to my viewer for instance)

[Little Lost Linden]

"Unless you have certain graphics cards, like older ATIs or Integrated cards. Then you're still out of luck because deferred Rendering and Global Illumination will be entirely greyed out for you."

Yeah, dynamic shadows are still just a hack attempt in the standard SL viewer. I'm hoping they get fixed sometime this millenium. I've used the Kirsten viewer but had catch 22 items with that one. oh well. I can still dream.

[Banana Vella]

Deferred Rendering and Global Illumination are entirely greyed out as a default... thats why you have to check the three in the order. (ie, tick Framebuffer Objects first, then Deferred Rendering, then Global Illumination.)

Hope that works for you :)
If not, then I guess it cant be done.

[Aloah Oh]

So does anyone know where there is a list of graphics cards which will support shadows??
I am at the point of buying a new laptop - but it appears that even a top notch dell with a nvidia FX3800 will not manage shadows???

[Ferd Frederix]

Many cards, such as the 6600GT, can't do multiple render targets which is a requirement for Lighting and Shadows. The non-GT versions of the GeForce 6 family do, so check that any card you have or get supports Multiple Rendering Targets, and you can have lights and shadows.

Source: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MAINT-808