Mesh items messing when scrolling/walking away from them.

[Destrey Shamen]

This is a problem I've had before, I found the solution once and now I forget how to fix it. With some mesh items, when I scroll out or walk away from them they turn into triangles. But when I get closer to them, they go back to normal. It's kind of like when you first loading in and every thing is loading, that's what it's kind of like. It's driving me crazy because I don't know how to fix it! :(

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Destrey Shamen wrote:

This is a problem I've had before, I found the solution once and now I forget how to fix it. With some mesh items, when I scroll out or walk away from them they turn into triangles. But when I get closer to them, they go back to normal. It's kind of like when you first loading in and every thing is loading, that's what it's kind of like. It's driving me crazy because I don't know how to fix it!

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This is because mesh items are built with a series of different "levels of detail" ("LOD'S") for when they're seen at different distances from them. There are mesh makers in SL who make objects which fall apart at greater distances because the version of the mesh seen LOD's used for distance viewing are badly made/and or have very little detail - either because they didn't 'realize it or they intentionally sacrificed detail at a distance to reduce land impact.

The ultimate solution is just to not buy mesh made to look like that, but of course that isn't a real option day-to day. However, if you go to the debug settings and go to the debug setting "RenderVolumeLODFactor" you can increase the value of that setting until things look better from reasonable distances. A lot of people recommend using a RenderVolumeLODFactor setting of 4 which works for most things - I use 2.5 myself. It causes more video/system memory to be used and means that mesh makers will have an excuse to keep doing what they're doing now but it will improve how things look immediately.

[ChinRey]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

This is because mesh items are built with a series of different "levels of detail" ("LOD'S") for when they're seen at different distances from them.

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Yes. It is strongly recommended never to buy any mesh items unseen. Not all mesh makers have the skills and understanding necessary to be able to make LOD resistant mesh and unless you know the maker well or he/she provides proper information about LOD (and few do), you can never be sure of an item's quality just from reading a listing on the Marketplace.

 

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

A lot of people recommend using a RenderVolumeLODFactor setting of 4 which works for most things

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A word of warning there: setting the RenderVolumeLODFactor too high can actually make matters worse. What happens when you increase that factor is that you force your viewer to use higher LOD models than default for all objects in the scene whether they need it or not. This adds quite a bit of load on your graphics card and if/when it becomes overloaded, it resorts to the lower LOD models because it doesn't have time to render the more detailed ones.

Oh btw, there are lots of people who claim that increasing the RenderVolumeLODFactor has no negative effect. If you believe that, I can offer you a very good deal on a ticket reservation for the first passenger shuttle to Mars...