My mesh items keep partly de-rendering?

[Gylphie]

Hi, fairly new to SL here so I'm not sure if this is an easy fix (my mistake if so!)

I'm wearing a mesh avatar as well as some mesh clothing; every so often it will partly derender/the LOD will drop, or something. My graphics settings are fairly high because I have a good computer, my objects and avatars LOD's are set to max, and my avatar complexity max is set to about 250K so I'm a little confused as to why my ~60K avatar is having issues. Usually detaching and reattaching the object fixes it but it's a bit annoying to have to do that every so often.

Also, there doesn't seem to be an eventual load-in time, the items never render in unless I detach them and reattach them.

If this helps at all,  computer specs:

Intel Core 17-6700K
16GB RAM
Gefore GTX 970
Running Second Life off an 256GB SSD.

Edited October 14, 2017 by Gylphie

[Rolig Loon]

That is annoying. To a certain degree, it's normal and unavoidable. If you are in a busy area -- a club or a crowded mall, for example -- your viewer has to do a lot of work to render everything in your field of view, so it can take a while to render even the things that are closest to you.  It's also true that many creators in SL do not know how to create objects with proper low-LOD models (or they choose to ignore them in order to keep complexity low), so their creations tend to render as odd triangles at times.  There's very little you can do about either of those two problems.  You can of course be picky about the clothes you buy, but you can't do anything about clothes that other people buy. You also can't do much about the computer you bought.  You said that it is a "good computer", but that doesn't really say much.  If it's a laptop with an Intel motherboard graphics chip instead of a dedicated graphics card, it was really designed for light office and school use, not for intense graphics environments like SL  Especially if you are using a wireless Internet connection (not supported by SL), the best performance you can expect is still not going to be super.

You can set the LOD settings in Preferences >>> Graphics to high values to compensate for some of these problems, but you do that at the cost of some performance. You'll have to compensate for that by dropping your draw distance to 128m or lower, dropping your Quality slider to Moderate, setting the Max Non-Imposter avatars setting to 2 or 3, and setting your Complexity slider even lower than it is already.

Edited October 14, 2017 by Rolig Loon

[Gylphie]

Unfortunately I'm thinking it might be bad LOD setup on the creator's behalf. However I probably should have been less vague when describing the computer; it's actually a desktop intended for 3d modeling/animating/rendering, though I should probably drop some specs in the first post. I've tried to optimize a few more of my other settings in order to make up for a high LOD setting, thank you for the draw distance & impostor avatars suggestion as well, I've adjusted those two now. For some reason it still hasn't improved, and some objects still never fully render in, often in a variety of areas.... I've probably improperly adjusted a setting somewhere.

Edited October 14, 2017 by Gylphie

[Rolig Loon]

1 hour ago, Gylphie said:

Unfortunately I'm thinking it might be bad LOD setup on the creator's behalf.

That's sad, but sort of what I expected was the problem for most of it.  Your GTX 970 is a good card, so it's probably not limiting you.  I have a fairly high-end computer and I see a lot of decomposed mesh clothing on naked bodies too, especially in busy regions.

We can't do anything about what other people wear; we can only control what we put on. When you buy mesh clothing, you should always try demos before paying for the real thing.  You're obviously going to be looking to see that the clothes fit and that they fit your personal style, but you should also check out to see how well their low LOD stands up.  TP to a crowded region, zoom out, and see whether the mesh collapses.  If so, think twice about buying it.  Unfortunately, as I said earlier, a lot of creators in SL don't put a lot of effort into making good low-LOD models. In fact, a surprisingly large number of them don't create the mesh at all; they just buy a kit from someone else and add a texture to it. 

[Chic Aeon]

5 hours ago, Gylphie said:

Hi, fairly new to SL here so I'm not sure if this is an easy fix (my mistake if so!)

I'm wearing a mesh avatar as well as some mesh clothing; every so often it will partly derender/the LOD will drop, or something. My graphics settings are fairly high because I have a good computer, my objects and avatars LOD's are set to max, and my avatar complexity max is set to about 250K so I'm a little confused as to why my ~60K avatar is having issues. Usually detaching and reattaching the object fixes it but it's a bit annoying to have to do that every so often.

Also, there doesn't seem to be an eventual load-in time, the items never render in unless I detach them and reattach them.

If this helps at all,  computer specs:

Intel Core 17-6700K
16GB RAM
Gefore GTX 970
Running Second Life off an 256GB SSD.

Rereading your post it "might" not actually be derendering as we think of it but a breaking up of the mesh body and or clothes/ So empty triangles appear in the mesh perhaps, especially after teleporting around and about?  If that is the case (there have been some threads on this lately and I may still have a screenshot in my "forums" folder) then it isn't you or your machine or your setting or (happily) poorly made mesh :D.

It just "IS" and is a pain, for sure. I usually log in and log out to fix it since I can do that fairly rapidly.

 

Found a photo that demonstrates what I am talking about.  At times my Maitreya body will also break up. 

 

EDIT: If it IS an LOD problem then you would see the issue when you have your LOD set down to 1 or 2 and not 4. You would also notice it when your camera moves AWAY from the object in question (like you).  It would NOT show up on a close view like this does. So there are two different ongoing problems. 

IF it is a general rendering issue (crowded places) then I would change my jellydoll setting to 50 or whatever (you will always see yourself so that isn't an issue). In crowds with 250 jellydolls you are rending almost everyone and that is VERY hard on your computer. You can always right click and show the person you might be talking to fully :D.   I pretty much see folks in solid hues but everything runs pretty well. 

My system is similar to yours.

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz (3298.09 MHz)
Memory: 16286 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 15063)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2

 

Edited October 14, 2017 by Chic Aeon

[Rolig Loon]

Wow, Chic.  I've never seen that, thank goodness.  Zombies!

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, Rolig Loon said:

Wow, Chic.  I've never seen that, thank goodness.  Zombies!

Then you missed that thread :D.  Actually (she says knocking loudly on the computer desk) I haven't seen this in the last few weeks. That may just mean that I need to get OUT more though LOL.   Not all that unusual. Only with mesh avatars and clothes of course.  

[Whirly Fizzle]

It's a known bug.
There's been a few fixes for it that have helped but it isn't totally fixed yet.

A few of the bug reports:

BUG-7239 - Starter avatars deformed or missing alpha under some conditions / graphics cards / LOD

BUG-6803 -  Mesh models sometimes fail to load completely

BUG-11309 - Mesh avatar deforms constantly

[Chic Aeon]

And the "zombie" mesh break apart isn't fixed yet either unfortunately as today I logged in fresh, tped to ONE sim, didn't even move -- just cammed, and when I came back to my building pad I was all broken up -- mostly mesh body. Alas.

[Gylphie]

Between Chic and Whirly's posts I'm definitely seeing similarities to what's happening to me, so I'm thinking that must be it... the quick re-equip will have to do until a full fix comes out then