Avatar hair incessantly not rendering properly

[WholisticApproaches]

Hi a friend of mine has had a great problem with her hair on her avie not rendering properly. It displays properly for everyone else though for her it's all several long jagged grey things. 

Would anyone have any ideas?  

 

Thank you. 

[MoiraKathleen]

21 minutes ago, WholisticApproaches said:

Hi a friend of mine has had a great problem with her hair on her avie not rendering properly. It displays properly for everyone else though for her it's all several long jagged grey things. 

Would anyone have any ideas?  

 

Thank you. 

That's a strange sounding problem.  

 - Do you know if the hair is flexi hair?  (sometimes when I used to wear flexi sleeve ruffles, I would get long jagged lines extending form them). 

-  Which viewer is she using?  Is it the current version?  Has she tried other viewers to see if that fixes the problem? 

- Does she see other people's hair properly?  Has she tried wearing a different hair (ie., is the problem related to a particular hair, or is it all hair that she tries)?

- Does her hair fully rez after a bit of time?  Does everything else rez fully or are there other 'missing' or misformed objects?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

This is most likely caused by the hair being rigged mesh (probably Bento), and her viewer doesn't support that feature.

The first thing your friend should try is change to a more recent viewer, like the official SL viewer, Firestorm, or Black Dragon.

[Sasy Scarborough]

I agree on the bento possibility, if she is using Singularity I find that a lot of people did not know they updated to include bento and just don't think it works.

[Nalates Urriah]

Wulfie likely hit on the problem. We would need to see an image to know for sure.

Old viewers may not render Bento mesh. They produce a spiky looking thing. But, it would have to be a really old viewer as Linden viewers and third-party viewers have supported Bento for a long time, (Dec 2016) and across several versions of viewers. Firestorm added bento support with version 5.0.1, which is the current third version of the viewer... meaning 3 versions back. The new 6.0.1 with Animesh support will make it the fourth version back when 6 goes from Beta to main. Shortly after that 5.0.1 will be blocked and no longer be usable.

Sasy is right. If your friend is using Singularity that may be the problem. Singularity supports Bento but only in their Alpha version. You have to have picked that information up and gotten the link for the Alpha viewer from their in-world group. They do NOT make it clear on their website. It is sort of an insider's secret.

Typically when asking a tech question it is smart to include the viewer and computer information from the viewer's HELP->About... Otherwise, we can only guess and you get to deal with all our bad guesses.

[Kyezell]

Can you guide me as to why my render is looking like that around the hair line?

I'm using

Firestorm 6.0.2 (56680) Feb  8 2019 23:11:19 (64bit) (Firestorm-Releasex64) with OpenSimulator support
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Eight-Core Processor (1374.4 MHz)
Memory: 16053 MB
OS Version: Linux 4.18.0-17-generic #18~18.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 15 15:27:12 UTC 2019 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 1070/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGLSettings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey)
Window size: 1853x1025 px
Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)
Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 1024 m
Bandwidth: 3000 kbit/s
LOD factor: 8
Render quality: Ultra (7/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: Yes
Texture memory: 2048 MB (1) Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 390.116

The hair in question comes from this store: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/168100 (DOUX - Audrey Hairstyle)

Edited April 10, 2019 by Kyezell

[Maitimo]

@Kyezell that is a conflict between the alphas on the hairbase and the alpha texture in the wisps around your hair. When two alpha textures are placed one over the other, they conflict with one another. That's just the way SL works (or doesn't).

You can fix it by changing either the hairbase or the hair to Alpha Masking instead of Blending.  It will probably look awful if you make the hairbase Masked, so try with the hair first (assuming it has Modify permissions). 

Select the hair, choose Edit from the menu. Then tick the "Select face" button and click on the wispy bits. In the Texture tab, change the texture from Blended to Masked.  It will look horrid at first, but click on the threshold numbers and raise it slowly until it starts to look more natural. It'll never look as good as it would if it was on Blended, but it will stop that effect.

If you want to try making the hairbase Masked, that's done on the HUD for your head (assuming it has that feature).

The other option is to wear that hair without a hairbase.

[Kyezell]

@Matty Luminos Thank you for sharing your insights. I was just merely taking a photograph of a random person on a sim. That avatar isn't me. Just wanted to know how i can make it look better in my viewer/PHOTOGRAPHS.

[Maitimo]

4 hours ago, Kyezell said:

@Matty Luminos Thank you for sharing your insights. I was just merely taking a photograph of a random person on a sim. That avatar isn't me. Just wanted to know how i can make it look better in my viewer/PHOTOGRAPHS.

Ah, unfortunately if the avatar is not you, there isn't anything you can do, except edit the photo in Photoshop/whatever after you've taken it.

[Skell Dagger]

@Kyezell

My guess would be twofold:

• Your cached version of this hair is corrupt, which is why it's rendering like that for you. The clue to that is in the 'squaring' effect that's also causing issues with the bun on the top left of the image and in the longer sections behind the neck. Alpha glitching on the hairbase would be understandable if the hair itself has feathered textures that would negate the need for one, but from the look of the ad image it doesn't.
• In addition to the above, she is standing against an alpha texture (the palm fronds behind her), which is glitching through her hair.

There is also the faint possibility that you were cammed in very close from a great distance away, which could also cause that kind of glitching, regardless of your draw distance and LOD settings.

Your settings seem to be fine, although I would lower your LOD to 4 at most (there is no need to override the defaults to change it to 8, and any creators who tell you that you need to do so in order to see their items at their best are simply not optimising their content well enough) and pull down your draw distance - unless you're taking landscape shots where you need to render that far out; it's simply not necessary to have it that high when you're doing close-up avatar images. At that high an LOD setting - combined with your draw distance of 1024 - your GPU is having to render in incredible detail the tiny prims on a necklace that someone is wearing in the next region. And, while your rig is powerful enough to handle that, it's just not necessary, especially if you're working up-close.

Optimise your settings according to what you're shooting inworld. You can save multiple graphics settings in Firestorm, which - as a photographer - I'm sure you know already, but you'd be surprised how many people don't

Edited April 19, 2019 by Skell Dagger