High rez vs custom and SSAO and shadow smoothing?

[Myra Wildmist]

I was going through my advanced and debugged settings, and came across two settings in Firestorm that might affect my photos. I customize a lot of settings in phototools when I take a photo, I set the DoF, Ambient Occulsion, and set my photo size to custom - 1920x1080. So I'm wondering if I need to worry about these two settings:

 

Should I have High Res Snapshot checked? (Advanced - High-res snapshot.)

 

What is SSAO/Shadow smoothing? (Developer - Rendering - Advanced Lighting Model)

 

Thanks very much for any help.

[Chic Aeon]

Well since no one has answered you I will take a stab at this. BUT these are just guesses.  I have had high rez snapshot checked for 8 years and I set all sorts of special things in Phototools. I "think" that it takes a png type file instead of a jpg or something like that. Some research in Google says that it enables high rez snapshot (well duh) and that it doubles the size of the photo (it doesn't do that -- any longer anyway,) but it MAY double the pixels. As far as I know there is no reason NOT to have it checked. I typically take  5000 x 2690 and then crop and resize down.

 

I THINK that shadow smoothing is now on the photo tools in Firestorm (maybe the Linden viewer too?)  If it is the setting I am thinking about, it has a tendency to crash all but the heartiest machines. The shadows do look better but  not worth crashing. You can also choose OPTIMIZED under Avatar Shadows in Preferences and this helps if you have any crashing issues. I doesn't change the shadows too much --- BUT now that I think about it, I have been having a nasty flicker the last couple of weeks and the new server codes may not like that feature. It is definitely something to do with shadows for me. So I think I will change that setting and see if it helps stop that nasty flicker.

 

So good that I at least tried to answer. Good luck.

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

 

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Myra Wildmist wrote:

Should I have High Res Snapshot checked? (Advanced - High-res snapshot.)

this is used with the "quick snapshots" feature, the one you get by pressing Ctrl+`

normally, a quick snapshot gives you the same as your viewer's window dimensions. When you enable high resolution snapshots, both dimensions are doubled, giving you 4x the pixels. (For example, if the window was 1024x768, the high res snapshot will be 2048x1536).

What is SSAO/Shadow smoothing? (Developer - Rendering - Advanced Lighting Model)

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this is the same as choosing the ambient occlusion option in the regular graphics settings.

 

[Jackson Redstar]

'high rez snapshot' is a short cut is all. doubles your screen size. there is no magic there

 

when you turn 'everything on' SSAO  comes on by default

[Myra Wildmist]

Thanks, everyone.

I'll take a look at all of this, next time I log.

 

@Jackson, are you saying that High Rez doubles the size of the snapshot? So if I have my snapshot settings on 512x512, my photo size would be 1024x1024?

I'll experiment with this a little today. I see what Obvious and you are saying, but I'm curious how and if it affects the Custom settings when I take a snapshot manually, the one with the filters and where you can control the snapshot size.