Jagged Edges

[Charolotte Caxton]

Lately I have noticed that my avatar inworld has jagged edges, as in, where her body curves, such as shoulders and arms, it is like a series of lines connected at angles instead of a smooth natural curve. Is this normal? I don't recall it being that way. Thank you.

P.S..

What is hardware skinning and what is avatar cloth?

Second Life 2.6.0 (225006) Mar 24 2011 15:11:42 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         960  @ 3.20GHz (3208.02 MHz)
Memory: 12279 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0010.1065
OpenGL Version: 4.1.10524 Compatibility Profile Context

 

[Cinnamon Lohner]

This is a function of Antialiasing.  The higher the setting, the less jagged edges you have.  You can set it in Preferences - Graphics - Hardware - Antialiasing.  Of course, its a balance like everything in SL.  The higher the quality, the lower the speed performance.:smileysad:

--Cinn

[Griffin Ceawlin]

• Hardware Skinning: Formerly Avatar Vertex Program, this allows some aspects of avatar rendering to be handled by your graphics card to improve performance.

 

• Avatar Cloth: Allows the rendering of flexible cloth on avatar clothing, such as shirts and flared pants.

[Charolotte Caxton]

Antialiasing is set to 16x.

[leliel Mirihi]

Try setting it to 4x and restarting the viewer. If it still doesn't look good can you post a screen shot.

[Peewee Musytari]

As you have an ATI card, disabling VBO in graphics hardware can smooth out a lot of weirdness on some systems.

[Ishtara Rothschild]

I think what you mean has nothing to do with anti-aliasing. SL uses pretty old low-polygon avatar meshes, which causes these edged contours.

You can see what I mean if you switch to wireframe mode with Ctrl+Shift+R (hit Ctrl+Shift+R again to leave wireframe mode), or if you download the avatar models and open them in a 3D application such as Poser:

Anti-aliasing can't help with that. I wish we had a polygon smoothing option for high-end PCs. Complete new high-polygon avatars would be even better, but that would break all current skins and clothing.

 

ETA: For comparison, this is what a high-polygon model looks like (DAZ3D's Victoria 3). The shoulders and arms are actually round and not dodecagonal:

Looks like a lot of rendering work. But if people wear sculpted fingernails and eyelashes with the current avatars, as well as sculpted feet that consists of at least 22 prims (usually more, because the border between avatar leg and foot attachment has to be concealed with an anklet or something), they carry just as many polygons around. So it wouldn't really make a difference.

[Charolotte Caxton]

Hi, leliel, I set it to 4x and am editing to include screenshot. Notice the shoulder? I don't know if that's because I have a better graphics card now and am running on a higher setting now and I just wasn't able to see this much detail before, or if there's a setting I need to adjust. Also, should I change settings in my Catalyst Control Center? Right now I have reset them to default and have allow application decide enabled, when I tried maxing out all the settings in CCC it made my inworld experience choppy. Thanks.

[leliel Mirihi]

Looking at the picture I'd say Ishtara is right and you're seeing what the avatar really looks like. Unfortunately there's not much you can do about it. The only thing I can think of would be to turn on deferred rendering which would clean up the lighting, that way the jagged avatar mesh wouldn't be quiet as noticeable.

[Charolotte Caxton]

Hi. How do I turn on deferred rendering?

[leliel Mirihi]

Go to Preferences -> Advanced and check "Show develop menu". Then in Develop -> Rendering check the following; Framebuffer Objects, Lighting & Shadows, (optionally) Shadow Maps, SSAO. The last two will cause a big performance hit, but your card should be fast enough to have shadow maps enabled on a good portion of the grid.

[Charolotte Caxton]

While you make a valid point and it is true in some systems, it does not seem to be affecting what I am seeing but I will make note of it if I begin to experience wierd flashings and such, thanks Peewee!