Increasing the Render Distance

[TerryShuriken]

In theory could someone increase the distance that MESH avatars/attachments are rendered? You can up draw/view distance to see landscapes miles away but mesh avatars do not render. Prim attachments render but the fitted/mesh bits do not.

Do you think somehow there could be a way to modify how far away one could see mesh avatars? Like if I wanted to fly up 500 meters into the sky and screenshot a large mesh avi that's all the way on the ground? If you edit the settings you can see houses, landscape, and prim attachments and etc fine but mesh bodies vanish after a certain distance. It's NOT editable in viewer settings currently. I'm assuming the answer will involve diving into the viewer files or a special SL viewer or something.

Thanks!

[Fenimore Hapmouche]

I thought that was a function of how the mesh object is made, level of detail? Our Redgrave house is advertised as "LOD-optimized (our houses will never disappear from whatever distance or LOD level, except outside your set draw distance)"

But I really don't know for sure, I am just a consumer.

[Nova Convair]

Over 500m you can't see another avatar. The viewer knows that and doesn't render avatars at that distance - among other optimizations of that kind.

If I understand that right you have a huge mesh avatar. If it doesn't render it seems the viewer isn't prepared for that and still doesn't render avatars over that distance.

You could rez the mesh body on ground to take a picture. Probably it has a land impact of many 1000 so you cant do that.

In the menu of the viewer try develop/avatar/disable lod - but I don't know if that will work.

 

[TerryShuriken]

It's actually a problem for someone else! ^-^ Just wanted to see if I could help them.

Ah so there's  500 meter limit? Good to know. Thank you.

I was just hoping there a a veiwer that could see past that 500m limit maybe. Or a file that could be tweaked, but alas! Rezzing on the ground I thought of, but you can't pose an avatar unless you wear it or export it in said pose. I suppose developer menu is a decent place to poke around though. It fixed some camera issues I had back in the day so maybe it'll help here. 

[Nova Convair]

There is no 500m limit. The viewer does not render small things far away. How far? You need to try. An avatar 500m away from the camera has a size of only a few pixels and therefore is not worth to render. If a 100m tall avatar (for example) is still not visible then the viewer obviously doesnt check the true size of an avatar.

A 100m tall build is maybe visible over that distance - as long as the lowest lod model is defined. I dont know how far that can be. I can see large builds at 500m distance on the same sim.

Just try it out.

[SaraCarena]

RenderFarClip is the debug setting that can override the draw distance setting in preferences. SL viewer limits this at 500m in graphics preferences but other viewers limit at 1000m.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Talk:Debug_Settings

To enable the debug menu check the "show advanced menu" boxes in preferences > advanced.

 

[TerryShuriken]

---

Nova Convair wrote:

There is no 500m limit. The viewer does not render small things far away. How far? You need to try. An avatar 500m away from the camera has a size of only a few pixels and therefore is not worth to render. If a 100m tall avatar (for example) is still not visible then the viewer obviously doesnt check the true size of an avatar.

A 100m tall build is maybe visible over that distance - as long as the lowest lod model is defined. I dont know how far that can be. I can see large builds at 500m distance on the same sim.

Just try it out.

---

Okay, so I tested this today by importing a 100m (I think, I didnt count!) Avastar avi of myself into SL and zooming out, and I'm going to just assume the viewer doesn't think any Avatar past X distance is "woth the render" as you said. None of the client settings or debug view distance options I tried seemed to change the ability to see a avatar from that far away. Only buildings/landscape. From what I understand the "center" of your avi is where the view distance counter begins so a large mesh avi "vanishes" before you can zoom out super far. Close ups work fine obvously.

My take away is that it's probably impossible to show avatars from that far zoomed out since it's not worth rendering. However a lot of debug options allow you to expand graphical settings to computer preformance-crushing levels so maybe there's something! *shrug*

Thank you for the adivce/help though! It's not a PRESSING issue I need to solve or anything. It just got me thinking if there was a solution when I couldn't take a distant wideshot of an aquaintance's giant monster av because of a limitation I hadn't known about.

---

SaraCarena wrote:

RenderFarClip is the debug setting that can override the draw distance setting in preferences. SL viewer limits this at 500m in graphics preferences but other viewers limit at 1000m.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Talk:Debug_Settings

To enable the debug menu check the "show advanced menu" boxes in preferences > advanced.

 

---

 

That was pretty handy for screenshot purposes. Thanks! However it didn't seem to help with avatars, just landscape. ^_^' Good for long distance shots though of land/buildings.

[SaraCarena]

Just a thought...... av`s are treated differently when they are sat on a prim. They become sort of an attatchment of the prim. Maybe worth trying to put a pose in a large prim (does`nt have to be a sit pose, any will do) seating the av and see if that fools the viewer into getting the effect you want.

[TerryShuriken]

---

SaraCarena wrote:

Just a thought...... av`s are treated differently when they are sat on a prim. They become sort of an attatchment of the prim. Maybe worth trying to put a pose in a large prim (does`nt have to be a sit pose, any will do) seating the av and see if that fools the viewer into getting the effect you want.

---

No dice! I did find that control+8 "zooms" out without zooming the camera out though which is cool, but it does fish-eye things a lot.