This blog post from Nalates Urriah gives some instructions on various settings you can tweak/change to try and improve your viewer’s performance, especially at events where are there are lots of avatars present.
I used to use the Ctrl+Alt+Shift+4 to derender avatars at busy events. However, I found it that sometimes derendered other things that weren’t avatars (like certain machines at The Arcade). I’m not sure why it does that, but I have since just derendered avatars using the radar tool in Firestorm.
Some interesting information, but tweak/change with care. 😀
Ok, people – somebody knows, and I’m not giving up til I find the answer.
*crosses arms and glares*
What is up with my shadows in SL?
Since a few recent upgrades to my computer, I’ve been running at Ultra with all the fancy shadows and lighting on and loving it.
It’s part of the reason I started taking photos in SL – because they no longer looked like the pixellated junk I’d been taking before.
However, I’ve noticed an issue, and I can’t seem to find an answer to the problem anywhere.
I’ve found a few places that mention the same issue I’m having, but I can’t seem to find where a solution is mentioned.
Up til now, I’ve just dealt with the problem by fixing it in Photoshop.
But I’m left with the feeling that there must be an answer *somewhere*.
Here’s the issue:
When I take photos, I generally wear my mesh body.
If I don’t wear my mesh body, I generally at least wear my mesh hands and feet.
Avatar feet are hideous, and although I resisted mesh hands initially, after wearing them for so long, I can’t stand the avatar hands anymore either.
I’ve had the issue in a few photos, but as I said, I just cleaned up the photo in Photoshop, or the photo was taken at an angle where the issue wasn’t really noticeable.
The other day I started to play around with using a projector to take some photos, trying to achieve some really dramatic lighting effects.
Here’s one of the shots I ended up not using:
I was really happy with the dramatic lighting and shadows I got using the projector.
Sometimes, however, I don’t notice problems.
Like the hand shadow.
Again, I usually end up either cropping out the problem area or fixing it in Photoshop.
Fixing it in Photoshop can be very time-consuming, so I’ve been trying to find a way to fix the issue when I take the photo.
Here’s a close-up of the problem area:
It may be a bit hard to see, because the photo is dark.
If you look closely, you can see the shadows of two hands – my mesh hand AND my avatar hand.
Now, I was initially confused by this, as my avatar hand is alpha’ed out, so it’s not visible.
Then I realized that the alpha just makes it invisible to me, not to the computer.
So it sort of makes sense that the computer renders both shadows.
The question is – how do I make it so it doesn’t?
Is that even possible?
I know I have seen photos by other people where the shadow in the pic doesn’t have this issue.
They could have just fixed in Photoshop (or some other photo-editor), but did they?
Is there some setting I can tweak that will save me having to do that post-processing?
In it, she mentions that sometimes she will derender avatars in order to get the shot she wants.
However, doing so may have unintended consequences.
The system sometimes considers mesh objects as avatars.
I’m sure someone out there with more technical knowledge than me understands why.
It does at least explain, when I go to crowded events and derender all the avatars, why other things can also disappear (like certain gacha machines at the Arcade, for example).
But back to my problem.
As you can see in this photo, there are clearly two foot shadows.
One from my mesh foot, and one from my avatar foot.
A Kat and A Mouse 