Ophelia's Gaze: The Bug in Second Life's Mesh Viewer That Keeps Me From Blogging About Second Life Mesh

 

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion

This darling dress, Persephone from Violent Seduction, is easily my favorite mesh item in SL to date. It's not perfect, but the delicious little details made it love at first sight. Normally I'd look for any excuse to blog this sweet creation, but unfortunately for me, the new mesh-enabled SL viewer makes blogging a bit of a chore. Though you (hopefully) can't tell, I had to take every picture for my first review of mesh items twice-- once with shadows and once without.

Why? Just take a closer look at the screenshot above:

The mesh viewer, like all viewers going back to 2.8, has a habit of hiding all prims with alpha textures when shadows are enabled... at least for me. The list of bugs seems to vary widely from person to person, and more importantly from computer to computer. To take what I would consider a proper picture I have to shoot first without shadows, shoot again with shadows (and consequently without alphas), then with Photoshop carefully blend the two images together until I get what should have been a shot right from SL. Using an older (pre-2.8) viewer, alphas and shadows don't conflict at all–– which is peachy for shooting everything except mesh.

If you don't see the big deal with my unretouched before and after pictures above, I've made some helpful notes on the version at right to explain why this is such a crippling problem for me. Alpha textures are what make SL hair look hairy. Back before alpha textures were popular in hair design, there was a definite problem with hair looking too ropey, almost like play-dough. Alpha textures are also used heavily in landscaping, meaning that pictures in lovely grassy fields to show off some handsome mesh fawn legs are out of the question unless I'm willing to practically dedicate the evening to post-processing. The most perplexing thing about his bug is that the alpha textures still cast shadows, which means that that are being rendered at some point but hidden.

Fashion bloggers are expected to take the best shots they can. Your graphics settings are expected to be maxed, and forgetting to turn on anti-aliasing is just as bad as wearing socks with sandals. Shadows raised the bar even higher, and these days I can't bring myself to shoot without them. Maybe it's my computer, maybe it's my operating system, maybe it's my own ignorance. If you've managed to fix this bug yourself I'd be eternally grateful to hear your secret (and before you say it, smartypantses, deferred rendering settings seem to have nothing to do with it.)

What has your experience trying to blog SL mesh fashion been? Has it gone smoothly, or have you had some problems of your own to deal with?

Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Rowan Derryth]

Thanks Iris, I thought it was just me! I don't fuss too much with shadows, but I noticed that when I turned mine on, my windows in my loft disappeared! Definitely a problem for photographers.

As SL has become a fantastic place for creative production, especially for photography and film, I would love to see someone - particularly Linden Labs - work on a viewer that is specifically geared for artistic production.

[Zauber Paracelsus]

I've seen this bug occuring as far back as Viewer 1.23. I have yet to try the mesh viewer, but at least in Singularity, this alpha-hiding bug doesn't occur. Cool VL Viewer might have it fixed as well, as it includes a lot of the backported code from Singularity.

[Ana Lutetia]

I haven't tried (or even about) the Second Life Mesh but I don't remember having that the alpha bug.

[Softpawthefairycat.blogspot.com]

I have an issue similar to this with phoenix. I blogged about it here http://softpawthefairycat.blogspot.com/2011/08/tails-and-shadows.html

Basically, turning on shadows took away some alphas, and messed up inworld photos even worse.

I had just figured it was my system.

[Pamela Galli]

And I can guarantee that the builders of homes from which the flowers or windows disappear will get IMs asking why their builds are defective. :-)

[Hitomi Tiponi]

LL believe this issue was fixed in Beta Viewer 3.0.2 and later - see https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2181 which covers that and a range of related problems. If it hasn't been it needs re-opening.

[Storm Thunders]

I have the shadows / alpha hiding problem on the current release viewer too. And anti-aliasing stops working if I turn shadows on. It's depressing.

[Tatum Lisle]

Still, the dress is a delight and the skin just lovely (what skin is that btw?). I haven't yet managed to get shadows happening for me, so can't comment on these specific glitches, but I totally understand your frustration!

[Nalates Urriah]

@Rowan Derryth, the someone is KirstenLee, the viewer the S21. All viewers have their problems. But, Kirsten's is targeted at the best possible renders. It even has a top menu item that exposes the settings one needs for photography and Machinima.

It is undecided if Lee can continue it. NiranV Dean,Renekton, Jus and Vector want to continue the viewer. A new version of S21 with more bug fixes is released on NiranV's site. http://niranv-sl.blogspot.com/

One of the nice things about S21 is it will let you take an image that is a black and white image no grays. You can use it has a mask to perfectly clip the avatar from an image. It saves a load of time in PS/Gimp.

[Henri Beauchamp]

I want to stress out that the backport of Mesh that I made for the Cool VL Viewer is totally unrelated to Singularity's. While both viewers share the same kind of backports (and some of the backports I made were reused in Singularity and vice-versa), this is not the case of the rendering pipeline and mesh specific code.

I worked from the mesh beta viewers v2.4 and v2.6 code, and then updated it to v3 code for the few parts that required it (mesh data transmission protocol changed between v2.6-2.8 and v3). It makes the Cool VL Viewer a v1 UI viewer with a v2.6ish renderer. v2.6 got the advantage over 2.7 and latter viewers to be faster and more compatible with older OpenGL versions.

This said, I do not know Ophelia's scene here would render in the Cool VL Viewer (would have to see by myself to tell...).

[Aliasi Stonebender]

Well, you could carefully photoshop, sure.

Or.... you could just hide as much of the UI as possible and take a conventional screencapture!

Still requires a hair of post-processing in your favored graphical manipulation tool, but unless you're specifically going for very-high-resolution screenshots it should do you fine.

[Cajsa Lilliehook]

I have the same problem - and in the newest Beta viewer as well. I can live without the shadows though - depending on the picture.

[Iris Ophelia]

@Tatum- the skin is Suzanne from Mynerva! :)

@Aliasi- Unfortunately it's not a snapshot-only problem. Those pictures are exactly as it appears in world, so screenshotting instead of snapshotting would make no difference. Independent of that, though, I do definitely need high resolution pics anyway. D:

[Storm Thunders]

I was having the same problem, but the current release viewer seems to have fixed most of it for me. I still have to choose between antialiasing and shadows. It did have an odd new glitch, but there's a workaround. http://slstorm.blogspot.com/2011/09/viewer-hair-shadows-glitch.html