Prims wont Show in Viewer 3 but will in Firestorm

[Syle Devin]

So the situation is that there is a bowling lane that has pins that are rezzed when they are set up. The pins then are never re rezzed instead they are set transparent and moved inside the body of the lane when it is not being used. When it is they are moved to their playable position and set with no transparency. 

 

Now the issue is this:

• During set up all the pins rezz and you can see them, they all show up. 

• When set up is done only a few of the pins will show up and be clickable.

• Second life acts as if the rest of the pins don't exist and they aren't even still in the body of the lane, it's as if they are gone.

• Sometimes the pins that did rezz will stay transparent and when you select them they will go untransparent.

 

The issue is not a rezzing issue because we know the pins are there. If you go into firestorm after not being able to see the pins in viewer 3 all the pins show up and are clickable, there is no issue with other viewers. We don't know if this is a script issue, a prim update issue with the viewer, or what. 

 

Any advice or thoughts on this problem? Has anyone experienced a problem like this before?

 

 

Video demonstrating the issue. If you notice pin 1 isn't even selectable in Viewer 3 but it shows up in firestorm.

[Sidnella Riler]

the draw distance, since the pins are far away, i had a problem like this with a bowling alley

[Chosen Few]

Most likely you've got different settings in the two different viewers.   As SID said, the first thing to check is your draw distance, in each.  If it's set too short in one viewer, then the pins would end up culled fairly quickly in that viewer, well before other objects in the room, since they're so much smaller than the others.  If it's set longer in the other viewer, you'd have to get further way before the pins would be culled.

Another setting to take a look at is LOD factor.  If it's too low in one viewer, then the pins will drop to lower LOD's over shorter distances, in that viewer.  If the pins are mesh models or sculpties, and if they're not well built to be "LOD-proof", then they could certainly seem to disappear when the lower LOD's are triggered, if the low LOD models are tiny enough.  If it's set higher in the other viewer, you'd again have to get further away before you'd see the effect.

Set everything the same in both viewers, and you should see the same kind of behavior in both.

 

That said, do keep in mind that everybody uses different viewer settings.  So, even if you solve the problem on YOUR machine by changing YOUR settings, that's no guarantee that other people won't have problems. 

One soultion that should work for everyone is simply to make the pins bigger.   As you probably know, you can do that without making them look bigger.  Here are a few suggestions.

If the pins are mesh models, then it's super easy.  Simply add an invisible triangle, a good distance away from the rest of the surface.  If that triangle is, say, three meters away, the pin will now be considered three meters larger.  Keep the physics model the same as it was, and the extra triangle will not affect the way the pins fall.  (That assumes you're using physics to knock them over.  If you're not using physics, then it's even less of a concern.)  You can also make sure to put enough detail into the low LOD models, to ensure they still look like pins, even when viewed from quite far away.

If the pins are prims or sculpties, link each one to a larger transparent prim.  This will affect physics, though, so if that's a concern, you really should use mesh.   If you're not using physics, then it doesn't matter, of course.

 

Another possibility is that your cache for one of the viewers got borked.  To check for that, simply clear the chache, and relog.

[Syle Devin]

I forgot to say this isn't a view distance issue because it doesn't matter how close to them in viewer three you are, the pins that are rez zed don't appear until clicked on and then the other pins won't appear at all even though you can see all the 10 pins in a different viewer.  Also the pins are sculpted so no mesh issues and they are already linked to an invisible prim for physics.

[Rhys Goode]

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Chosen Few wrote:

....  Simply add an invisible triangle, a good distance away from the rest of the surface.  If that triangle is, say, three meters away, the pin will now be considered three meters larger.  Keep the physics model the same as it was, and the extra triangle will not affect the way the pins fall.

 

I am still learning how to pair mesh and physics models.  For me, the physics model seems to automatically scale to the size of the bounding box.  So if I had the pins modeled as a cylinder say, just as high as the pin, then when I added an invisible triangle 3 meters above the body of the pin, I would expect the physics model to end up as a 3 meter high cylinder.  Is there some way to prevent this, so that I would not have to do some tweaking of the physics model too?  

Actually, thinking about a bowling ball hitting a pin, I guess having the physics shape extend a bit too high would not be a problem, the ball rolls on the alley, hardly ever flies through the air.  But I did not get the sense that that is what you meant.

 

[Chosen Few]

Hi Rhys.  The answer is simpler than you might think.  Make the extra triangle really small, and use the Analyze feature in the uploader. 

As you probably know, Analyze is usually not a good idea, but for a case like this, it serves as a good hack.  It tries to streamline the physics shape, so ignoring a tiny stray triangle is right up its allley.

I went ahead and double checked, while I was writing this post, to make sure this little trick still works.  Indeed it does.  I whipped up a quick bowling pin in Maya, with a teeny tiny little triangle a couple meters above it, and uploaded it.  Without Analyze, it triggers an invalid asset eerror, every time.  I assume this is because that trinagle is so small, SL has no idea what to do with it for physics.  With Analyze, it uploads just fine, and the physics work perfectly.

 

A side benefit, by the way, of making the triangle super small, is you don't have to waste a material to make it invisible.  It's virtually always smaller than a screen pixel, so it never gets drawn.  As you can see in the attached screenshot, I had to blow the pin up over 15 meters tall, just to be able to kind of sort of see the triangle, and even then, it was only visible by its selection outlines.  See that little yellow pixel, near top of the image?  It might take you a while, but if you really study the screen, it's there.

When the model is not selected, the triangle is impossible to see, unless you happen to fly right up to it, and even then, it's pretty tough.  If you try to zoom in on it, it gets to about 10 pixels wide, before the camera's near-clip culls it. 

And that's at 15 meters tall.  At regular size, there's no way anyone would ever have a prayer of seeing it.

[Chosen Few]

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Syle Devin wrote:

I forgot to say this isn't a view distance issue because it doesn't matter how close to them in viewer three you are

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Are you going by how close the camera is, or how close the avatar is?

 

And have you gone through the settings in both viewers yet, to see what is different?

[Rhys Goode]

Very cool stuff!  Thank you!

[Syle Devin]

Both it doesn't matter how close your avatar or camera is.

No but I can. Though I don't think it should matter what the setting are anyway as the pins should work without having to edit the settings. I guess the settings could tell us the issue but I'm not so sure.

 

Rhys are you making a bowling lane too?