How to?

[nahladahl]

I was wondering how to get buildings in the background (circled in red) to load completely and clearly. I have my draw distance up, anisotropic filter checked. I tried right clicking and texture reloading but it still looks the same. Also this picture was taken in the Firestorm viewer. Any advice?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/105927378@N06/14292644344/

[Chic Aeon]

Nice photo .

There has been lots of chatter on the board about textures in the distance never loading. It appears to be a bug in "Project Interesting". Or perhaps that was the plan and as photographers there are less choices. I haven't actually noticed a problem so it could be graphics card dependent. I have ATI HD 6950 (old). I would be surprised if ATI cards got an advantage though. That is not the norm.

There is a workaround perhaps (sorry, since I don't have the problem I didn't note it carefully - something about a full rez texture option) but it seems to slow framerates down to nothing and you have to redo it each time you log in.

 

My best advice  -- if your machine can do it and it looks like it can -- would be to embrace depth of field. I am sort of kidding, but if I had your problem that is what I would be doing .

 

Good luck.

[Dresden Ceriano]

Perhaps the textures on those particular buildings are completely rezzed and just of low quality.  Honestly, the sidewalk texture looks to be of rather low quality as well and they're in the forefront.  Is this an issue that you've experienced elsewhere?

...Dres

[Dresden Ceriano]

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Chic Aeon wrote:

Nice photo

.

There has been lots of chatter on the board about textures in the distance never loading. It appears to be a bug in "Project Interesting". Or perhaps that was the plan and as photographers there are less choices. I haven't actually noticed a problem so it could be graphics card dependent. I have ATI HD 6950 (old). I would be surprised if ATI cards got an advantage though. That is not the norm.

 

There is a workaround perhaps (sorry, since I don't have the problem I didn't note it carefully - something about a full rez texture option) but it seems to slow framerates down to nothing and you have to redo it each time you log in.

 

My best advice  -- if your machine can do it and it looks like it can -- would be to embrace depth of field. I am sort of kidding, but if I had your problem that is what I would be doing

.

 

Good luck.

---

You may be right, but I don't believe that Firestorm has yet to include the project interesting code... I may be quite mistaken about this, though.

...Dres (I like your idea of using depth of field... that would certainly solve the problem, though perhaps not in the manner of which the OP is asking.)

[Griffin Ceawlin]

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Dresden Ceriano wrote:

Perhaps the textures on those particular buildings are completely rezzed and just of low quality.  Honestly, the sidewalk texture looks to be of rather low quality as well and they're in the forefront.  Is this an issue that you've experienced elsewhere?

...Dres

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I was gonna say... Those buildings look fine to me, it's the sidewalk that looks like crap.

[Ren Toxx]

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Chic Aeon wrote: [...] 

There is a workaround perhaps (sorry, since I don't have the problem I didn't note it carefully - something about a full rez texture option) but it seems to slow framerates down to nothing and you have to redo it each time you log in [...]

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TextureLoadFullRes, a debug setting that can be added to Firestorm's customizable Quick Preferences panel for easy access, toggling it on when needed (for example, when about to take a high-res snapshot) and off again when done, no need to relog -though it's indeed a non-persistent setting and would default to off anyway.

For me it doesn't slow framerates per se (and even if it did, this wouldn't be much a problem for still photography); it's just that, when switched on, it'll force the viewer to re-check all the scene and reload whatever wasn't already fully loaded; this of course takes CPU time, but nothing out of the ordinary, and once done, the framerate stabilizes.

The real issue is that TextureLoadFullRes is a bit extreme, and thus risky, way to avoid texture blurriness. Under normal operation the viewer considers the total amount of textures in the scene and, if it thinks it'll surpass the graphic card's available memory, it will start loading some of them half resolution or less (hence the blurriness); how much it does this can be tracked by a value called “Bias” in the Texture Console (Ctrl+Shift+3): if it stays at 0, all the textures are fully loaded, and as this value climbs some will be loaded partially (often visibly so) by the same factor. The problem is that this Bias thing is either not always fully aware of the graphic card's capabilities, or it's just been programmed a little too paranoid, and for many of us it starts acting up way, way before truly necessary (for example, my card has 3 Gb. memory, yet often Bias starts going crazy when the current scene hasn't even reached 800 Mb).

Now, activating TextureLoadFullRes is akin to telling the viewer “I don't care how freaked out you are about the scene's complexity, just load everything full-res and keep it that way”... but, of course, sometimes the scene will in fact be too big a fish for your card and you'll get a viewer crash, often accompanied by a texture overload or graphics driver failure message.

 

Still, it's a handy setting to have, if only to use it at the exact moment of taking the shot and then switching it off again inmediately; and in my experience, the very fact that I've almost always successfully used this trick without crashing proves that my card was actually capable of handling the scene and the Bias was badly overreacting. It seems that the sweet spot should be somewhere in between what Bias currently does, and what TextureLoadFullRes forces the viewer to do; but alas, I've seen the Firestorm team trying to fix this and they seemed to imply that Linden Labs had tried too, to no avail so far; some viewer releases seemed to ameliorate the problem, others worsened it, but it never seems fixed for good :smileysad:

[nahladahl]

I haven't noticed it elsewhere but I think its because I haven't really tried it. I shall go visit other sims later and see if the buildings in the background are the same. I always forget about depth of field since I usually whenever I need to blur  I just use the numerous blurring tools in photoshop. I'm honestly scared to use the texture load full res because if it crashes my graphics card than I'm screwed. I have a Macbook pro and their graphic card replacements are ridiculously expensive. 

[Ren Toxx]

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nahladahl wrote: [...] 

 I'm honestly scared to use the texture load full res because if it crashes my graphics card than I'm screwed. I have a Macbook pro and their graphic card replacements are ridiculously expensive. 

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By “crash” I mean that the viewer sorta tells you “sorry, too many textures, I'm closing myself and you'll have to relog and try again”... well, a bit less informal than that, but you get the idea, lol. Sometimes for me, it evolves into a system-wide failure, meaning it's not contained to the viewer, and then I have to force the computer to reboot; still not a big deal, though obviously I'd rather don't do it regularly. My partner, with a much less powerful hardware, suffers crashes far more often when trying TextureLoadFullRes but, in turn, they're very rarely system-wide crashes... they're more often merely viewer freezes, which just need to go to your operating system's program manager, force the frozen viewer to shut off, and launch it again; once more, no big deal.

What it most probably doesn't do, is damage your graphics card physically. Though reports of that sort of thing happen now and then, they're usually dismissed as at least partially myths, often on the argument that if your graphics card phsyically “burns” in such situation, it was gonna burn sooner or later anyway during normal heavy load (i.e. merely using SL normally) and thus due for repair or replacement all the same... not to mention, it's pretty much the same that could occur if you happen to be in a place where some griefer uses one of those crash-inducing objects. So if you're that worried about your graphic card's longevity, there are several other steps you should take to guarantee it, even when not doing high-quality photography.

 

Anyway, it's your call... only you know how often these blurrings occur, how much you'd need eliminating them (and mind you, sometimes relogging does get rid of them... it's just the annoyance of loosing your angles, lighting settings, etc), and how much sense does it make to use TextureLoadFullRes in your case (i.e., is your hardware powerful enough that, if you don't use this option, you will be consistently asking of your computer far less than it could do?).