Blarn Boo

Been playing secondlife on a Mac for years, and doing secondlife photography for a good long time too and I can confirm there isn't much of a difference between viewers for us Mac users unless you're willing to either use Parallels, Wineskin or run Bootcamp (not available to apple silicon M1 Macs) to get into the Black Dragon viewer. However, I think the choice is mostly between Alchemy and Firestorm for us. Alchemy has the best fps hands down, it's much more optimized for Mac users however it doesn't work on M1 Macs and hasn't been updated to EEP, although I find standard wind light to be just fine for photography. If EEP is a must, Alchemy has a project viewer that is somewhat regularly updated called Shrewdshepherd, which has EEP and runs on M1 Macs through rosetta, you can request access on the Alchemy discord. Firestorm has EEP but is less optimized for Macs, I find I get less FPS, particularly on older Macs. However if you got a newer model that can push through the poor optimization, I've found I get just fine fps and my photos look just a little better. Firestorm gets the edge as well because the amount of sliders and customization you have available is quite a bit more, particularly with shadow quality and ambient occlusion. The latest update also has the neatest depth of field focus lock, so you can move your camera away from your subject and still remain focused on them. Lastly I will say Black Dragon isn't exactly /not/ user friendly, but has a learning curve. It offers an extensive amount of sliders and customization for your photography, so if you make the effort to get it running on a Mac, be prepared to spend some time on it to get the most out of it. It certainly is the best for photography though.

This is great! This clears it up for me and is in line with what I am experiencing. I never used to push my resolution so high so I must just be experiencing this for the first time at this scale. Now I just wish the preview window was a little bigger so I could see the little artifacts before I hit save, haha. Thanks!

Just continuing this in case someone else has this problem and stumbles here. I'm still not sure what causes the issue, but I have found something that helps reduce the shadow artifacts from appearing. Photo on the left is with unconstrained proportions, specifically high res of 7860x7860 (like my original example), photo on the right is with constrained proportions 7860x4320. Less shadow artifacts if any, and the DoF effect is more evident, now idea why and with complicated shadows such as my previous hair example it still gets messed up. Seems the higher I push the resolution of the snapshot, the more DoF/Ambient Occlusion/Shadows struggles and differs from what the viewer presents.

Oh great! Maybe I'll find a solution somewhere there, if not maybe another user here will tell me the probably painfully obvious mistake I'm making somewhere. Thanks!

Hey! First time posting here, hoping someone could either tell me what I'm doing wrong or confirm whether or not this is a bug. Whenever I take a snapshot, the resulting image is never identical to what the second life viewer is showing; particularly with shadows, ambient occlusion and DoF, in short the effects from DoF and ambient occlusion that I'm seeing in the viewer are not present in the snapshot image or are greatly reduced. I have to really over apply DoF to see an effect on my snapshot, and no matter how I fiddle with ambient occlusion, its effects on shadows isn't evident on the snapshot image. Shadows will look smooth and accurate on my viewer, but a snapshot will produce random shadow artifacts and jagged edges as though ambient occlusion wasn't turned on. I've tested this on Alchemy's project viewer, LL's viewer and Firestorm (example below is from Firestorm. I would try Black Dragon as well but have yet to set up Parallels for it.). Every time I have graphics on Ultra, save for draw distance which I minimize. Quality of shadows is maxed when I can depending on the viewer, specifically on Firestorm I've tried to max/fiddle with the extra shadow and ambient occlusion settings to no avail. I will add that I'm on a M1 iMac and am getting decent performance regardless of settings, so I don't believe it's because of hardware but I could be wrong. First image is a Gyazo screen capture to attempt to show what the viewer is displaying, smooth shadows and no weird artifacts. Second image is a copy of my high-res snapshot, shadows are suddenly not smoothed out and appear in random positions, as though ambient occlusion was not turned on.

If any sim within secondlife is worth such an exception it would have to be Hangars. Many countless times it has been the sole reason for myself to continue logging in; it is one of the very few sims that still instil a sense of wanderlust, a unique gem in a sea of so much...well if you've played secondlife before, you should know. As Lawrence mentioned before, it's such a work of love and labour where each piece of it is in essence, handmade. It goes far beyond than just the build, the music and the whole atmosphere of the place all work to captivate you. If anything within this silly game is worthy of considered being art, I feel as though Hangars is. I logged in here to add my two cents to this discussion hoping with some luck that it'll land on LL's ears.