glitchy hair on black dragon viewer

[MessyOracle]

i'm not sure what settings should i tweak but i noticed this glitch look on my mesh hair when i use black dragon viewer. photo attached. anyone knows?

[NiranV Dean]

Welcome to the pinnacle of SL glitches, where everything comes together to create a massive bugfest of rendering!

This is a combination of several things you are seeing here.

For once shadow precision in Black Dragon is a lot more accurate, this means more shadows are cast where you'd realistically expect them (objects very close to each other, under hair, chin, nose, lips etc), something that you will most likely never see in other Viewers due to the lower shadow precision.

The other thing you see here is an issue with how shadow rendering works, alpha blending surfaces (such as your hair, windows, anything that is transparent either via setting or texture) are separately rendered, they are not part of the main rendering stack and thus fall out of the post processing that you see everywhere else, alpha's are not light-softened, are not part of the depth map properly (which causes issues with Depth of Field and/or Volumetric Lighting), are not subject to Ambient Occlusion calculations and are not lit by the main lighting process, which means all of these things either need to be faked or done twice in some way that emulates what the rest of the objects do. This essentially means shadows on and from alphas are pixelated (due to them missing the light-softening pass).

Add both together and you see pixelated shadows. There is no fix and no solution, alpha blended objects being troublesome is not limited to SL either, it is a widespread issue in rendering and sadly there is no easy solution (or any at all), in terms of SL this means you can't fix it, you can only work around it, either by increasing shadow resolution to the point that they at least are sharp (which will look marginally better if at all) or reduce shadow precision to the point that most shadows from objects close to each other will either not properly connect or outright vanish.

This issue only gets worse at altitudes above 9 with every times 10 becoming worse (10,100,1000,10000) to the point that shadows break completely and your mesh starts jittering and "melting" how people call it.

Edited July 3, 2021 by NiranV Dean

[MessyOracle]

17 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Welcome to the pinnacle of SL glitches, where everything comes together to create a massive bugfest of rendering!

This is a combination of several things you are seeing here.

For once shadow precision in Black Dragon is a lot more accurate, this means more shadows are cast where you'd realistically expect them (objects very close to each other, under hair, chin, nose, lips etc), something that you will most likely never see in other Viewers due to the lower shadow precision.

The other thing you see here is an issue with how shadow rendering works, alpha blending surfaces (such as your hair, windows, anything that is transparent either via setting or texture) are separately rendered, they are not part of the main rendering stack and thus fall out of the post processing that you see everywhere else, alpha's are not light-softened, are not part of the depth map properly (which causes issues with Depth of Field and/or Volumetric Lighting), are not subject to Ambient Occlusion calculations and are not lit by the main lighting process, which means all of these things either need to be faked or done twice in some way that emulates what the rest of the objects do. This essentially means shadows on and from alphas are pixelated (due to them missing the light-softening pass).

Add both together and you see pixelated shadows. There is no fix and no solution, alpha blended objects being troublesome is not limited to SL either, it is a widespread issue in rendering and sadly there is no easy solution (or any at all), in terms of SL this means you can't fix it, you can only work around it, either by increasing shadow resolution to the point that they at least are sharp (which will look marginally better if at all) or reduce shadow precision to the point that most shadows from objects close to each other will either not properly connect or outright vanish.

This issue only gets worse at altitudes above 9 with every times 10 becoming worse (10,100,1000,10000) to the point that shadows break completely and your mesh starts jittering and "melting" how people call it.

wow thanks!