Animesh trees vanishing and flickering

[Rick Nightingale]

I've recently bought some large animesh trees. (20m high, group of five animated trees as one animesh item). They are constantly vanishing, and sometimes flicker very rapidly visible/invisable when I look at them. Even cammed right up to them. It's just these trees; nothing else. It's random when it happens but is frequent enough that there must be a problem.

My LOD factor is usually 3, draw distance well beyond the trees and I'm well within their first or second LOD switch point. The effect happens even if I'm stood right next to them. They can be visible one moment, I'll turn around and they are gone. Highlight transparent does not show them. Sometimes I'll TP in to my land, and the trees are not there. Sometimes the shadow of them remains, while the trees are invisible. TPing out and back sometimes brings them back, camming far out and back (to try to get the viewer to redraw them) does not. The flickering was the weirdest thing; I thought my viewer had crashed (latest available Firestorm) and relogged. Then it happened again the next day.

Graphics settings are Ultra on a decent PC with a GTX 1080, I've not tweaked anything in debug settings and I can see other animesh items without a problem. (I've even been expermenting making some myself - no problems seeing those either).

Any advice? I've also contacted the maker of the trees; awaiting a reply.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight
Spelling (where's the spell checker when I need it?)

[Coffee Pancake]

Animesh comes with a fairly high Li penalty, so it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the creator has been over aggressive with the LOD meshes in the uploader.

Expect an reply from the creator telling you to set your LOD to 4 or higher

(don't do this)

[Rick Nightingale]

I'm sure it's not LOD switching; it happens stood next to the trees and the first switch point (from high to medium) is 500m at LOD factor 3!

Even the lower LOD models on these trees have enough left to see the tree is there. Lowest model has 308 triangles, unlike many other trees around here which drop to one or two for the last two LODs.

Yes, I know. I spend hours tweaking low LOD models myself to make sure the object still works as far as it can be seen as more than a point on the screen :) Even if it reduces to a photo on a crossed plane, which is remarkably effective if the thing isn't meant to be retextured.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight

[Coffee Pancake]

Verify the issue with the Linden viewer.

[Rick Nightingale]

Yep, doing that. (I hate that viewer).

The issue seems to reproduce on initial testing. The trees have vanished competely twice; once when I TP'd out and back and once just when I turned around. Both times I was only about 50m away (Ultra settings, 250m draw distance). All other (non-animesh) trees around the same place were there. Both times though the missing animesh trees suddenly appeared after a few seconds. I'll have to just do 'normal stuff' with the viewer and see how they do, since the issue is random. Urghh. Linden viewer.

Edit: yes, definitely repeates in a fresh install of the Linden viewer. I'm looking at my land right now after TPing away, waiting a few minutes, and going back. Both rezzed sets of the animesh trees are missing, everything else around them is there. I can even see the animating shadow of one set of the trees on the side of the hill. But not the trees. I'm cammed right up to where one set should be and can clearly see the animating shadow. Still not there after walking and camming around for five minutes, trying to provoke them to appear. I've walked right through where one set should be. I'm stood underneath them now, seeing animating shadows on the ground of phantom trees.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight

[Rick Nightingale]

After a chat with the maker (who is very helpful) it seems there is an issue; they've seen it too. I can only think there are issues with the viewer code that cause the trees to not be displayed. There's nothing wrong with the trees themselves. (I've made a little animesh, like an animated mermaid... I can't think of anything you could do wrong with it to cause this effect).

They did have one comment I hadn't thought of that might be relevent to others... Maximum Avatars setting. Since Animesh is effectively an avatar, that might cause problems if set too low.

LL... you need to look at animesh rendering!

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight

[Candide LeMay]

I have seen animesh characters simply disappear from my view standing right in front of it, repeatedly. There are definitely problems in that area.

[Rick Nightingale]

Yep, definitely. Thinking about it, I might have seen it before with other things too. Not often though.

These trees though... are unfortunatley useless to me. They are missing as often as they are there, leaving gaping holes in my landscaping. I'm about to replace them. Shame... they are really good trees, fantastic LOD behaviour, nicely animated, exactly what I needed for long distance (and closer) trees on my land. Would be perfect if not for this issue.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight

[Rick Nightingale]

Some interesting points:

I can select the trees even though I cannot see them. Render Metadata shows their collision skeletons.

When selected, the Object LOD Behaviour details in FS's edit window are not what the trees should be. It's currently telling me an object radius of 0.966, first LOD switch at 4.1m and similar extrememly low switch points (for a 25m high group of trees) on the rest.

By contrast, selecting a group of them which is currently visible gives an object radius of 58.754 and first LOD switch at 275m.

It's like the object is just collapsing to some minimum 'thing'.

[Qie Niangao]

Can you remove the animation(s) from the object contents?

[Rick Nightingale]

Hmm... good idea (although it would be a shame to lose the nice animations.) At least I could still use the trees. I'll try shortly...

 

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight

[Rick Nightingale]

Nope. Unusually for trees from this creator, they are no mod.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

If when one vanishes, dos toggling wireframe restore it?

[Rick Nightingale]

I'll try next time. I've removed most of them but will put some back for testing.

The animations can be turned off in the menu; I'll see if that helps too. Wish I could untick 'Animesh'.

Edit: Who told my trees they're being watched? They are behaving now, lol. It won't last (unfortunately).

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

1 hour ago, Rick Daylight said:

Who told my trees they're being watched? They are behaving now, lol. It won't last (unfortunately).

Is the region stable? This can happen when things or avatars come and go, behaviour changes.

[Rick Nightingale]

Very quiet. It's a homestead I rent a third of. Hardly ever see anyone and there's not much around (except a gazillion snow rezzers someone on the opposite side rezzed; it's blacklisted/blocked).

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

I think there's some performance limitations with homesteads, but I've no experience with them. I know object count is down but I also believe they run four to a core rather than 1, and then could impact on things like script performance.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[animats]

What's your setting for "number of non-impostor avatars"?

Animesh count as avatars for rendering purposes, and can be impostored. The impostoring system is not very good at objects that don't have roughly avatar dimensions.

Making trees out of animesh, while possible, probably isn't that good an idea.

There are lots of good trees on Marketplace. OPQ and Anna Erotica have big selections at reasonable prices.

[Rick Nightingale]

Yes, I noticed script performance is low; hovers around 50% scripts run on the stats panel, and there's a touch of time dilation. Doesn't seem to cause any issues for me (well, assuming the animesh isuue isn't related to that).

Max avatars is at 30; there certainly aren't that many skeletal things here.

The stupid trees are still behaving! That's the first time in three days (since I rezzed the trees) that they haven't vanished more often than not.

[Henri Beauchamp]

What happens if you right-click at the place the ”invisible” animesh trees are ?... There is a known bug in all viewers, that causes some objects not to appear after login, TP or region crossing, and right-clicking where they should be (i.e. selecting the objects) suddenly causes the objects to pop-up into existence...

This is likely a race condition somewhere in the code (between the avatar position/region setting, the viewer object cache data updates, the render pipeline culling or rebuild queue... Probably one or several of those).

FYI, the Cool VL Viewer got a workaround for this issue (that I even perfected in today's release), which auto-selects all rezzed objects on login, TP and region crossing, so to make sure all objects appear (and in the right position since some objects may appear in the wrong position after a sim crossing, for example). It also got a manual trigger for that ”objects rebake” of sorts: ALT SHIFT R.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Henri Beauchamp

[Rick Nightingale]

They vanished again.

@Profaitchikenz HaikuI can see the trees in wireframe. When I exited wireframe, the trees momentarily became visible, very briefly, then vanished again.

@Henri BeauchampRight clicking doesn't bring them back. I get the context menu for clicking them (rather than the land menu if I click a little away), so the viewer knows they are there, but no visibility.

@ everyone, I can right click on the invisible trees and access the trees' touch menu. The ones that vanished were the ones I had disabled the animation in previously (in the menu), so that makes no difference. I can see the shadow animate when I turn it back on and change related settings like speed, but still no trees. No other menu options, such as texture changes, make the trees visible.

I can also go into edit on them and see the much reduced object radius and LOD points, as mentioned above. I can't help but feel that is key to this somehow; it's the only thing I've seen that seems informative in some way. (don't know how though; I don't know that much about how animesh is handled).

Edited December 18, 2021 by Rick Daylight

[Henri Beauchamp]

This might be a complexity issue: when mesh objects got too many vertices, they may get evicted from the render pipeline (along with their render group, meaning several other objects may disappear as well). Try this: increase the ”RenderMaxNodeSize” debug setting value (say, to 256000 KB), and see if the trees reappear...

Here again, the Cool VL Viewer got a work-around for this issue (governed by the ”Mesh objects boost factor” in the Graphics preferences).

[Lucia Nightfire]

9 hours ago, Rick Daylight said:

They vanished again.

@Profaitchikenz HaikuI can see the trees in wireframe. When I exited wireframe, the trees momentarily became visible, very briefly, then vanished again.

@Henri BeauchampRight clicking doesn't bring them back. I get the context menu for clicking them (rather than the land menu if I click a little away), so the viewer knows they are there, but no visibility.

@ everyone, I can right click on the invisible trees and access the trees' touch menu. The ones that vanished were the ones I had disabled the animation in previously (in the menu), so that makes no difference. I can see the shadow animate when I turn it back on and change related settings like speed, but still no trees. No other menu options, such as texture changes, make the trees visible.

I can also go into edit on them and see the much reduced object radius and LOD points, as mentioned above. I can't help but feel that is key to this somehow; it's the only thing I've seen that seems informative in some way. (don't know how though; I don't know that much about how animesh is handled).

I went to the location in your bug report and saw no issues with the animesh trees while using low LOD factor and draw distance. The tree's LOD trangles look ok to me, too.

Did you check your non-impostor value in Prefs > Graphics as animats suggested?

If it is lower than the amount of users + animesh in a scene, the farthest users or animesh will become sprites and "flicker" if their animated image location(pelvis bone translation) changes enough to cause their ranking to change.

Edited December 19, 2021 by Lucia Nightfire

[Lucia Nightfire]

9 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

This might be a complexity issue: when mesh objects got too many vertices, they may get evicted from the render pipeline (along with their render group, meaning several other objects may disappear as well). Try this: increase the ”RenderMaxNodeSize” debug setting value (say, to 256000 KB), and see if the trees reappear...

Here again, the Cool VL Viewer got a work-around for this issue (governed by the ”Mesh objects boost factor” in the Graphics preferences).

Depending on hardware and scene, increasing RenderMaxNodeSize could cause a crash.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-9439

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-230919?focusedCommentId=669858&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-669858

Edited December 19, 2021 by Lucia Nightfire

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Depending on hardware and scene, increasing RenderMaxNodeSize could cause a crash.

I did not say that it should be kept forever at a high value. I am just trying to diagnose his issue...

Also, it must be noted that when people see this happening (e.g. in high mesh count/density places, when you get closer to some objects and they suddenly vanish), it is often wrongly diagnosed as a LOD issue, and people increase the LOD factor, making the issue only worst (since a higher LOD means even more vertices)...

Edited December 19, 2021 by Henri Beauchamp