avatar mesh question

lately ive noticed alot of flaws in my av that no matter what i cant seem to fix

lumpy weird looking wrists, ankles and shoulders are bugging me the most

i have a great skin and shape but there are weird angular lumps i cant get to go away no matter what i change

what can i do about his? what should avatar mesh be set at to make things look their best?

A little bit of body fat does wonders for smothing the lines. Wrists and ankles are pretty much hosed no matter what. Same with elbows and knees when the joint is flexed all the way.

I would guess the settings you choose depend on your PC and maybe the viewer you're using (ex. Windlight). Have you tried playing around with your settings already? Has it made any difference at all? Is this a recent development, or have you always looked 'lumpy'?

im using the new updated viewer not windlight ive always noticed certain corner body parts look weird but its buggin me bad today cuz i was making a ring for someone..im not a skinny girl have body fat tried changing hand size more body fat less body fat arm length for over an hour nothin makes them look better this sucks /cry and stomp foot LOL

oh well its gonna suck then im trying to do certain pics i have planned

if someone wants a copy of the body shape i have to see if they can make adjustments IM me and ill send you one

Hm well I have the same problem but with my face... it may just be a glitch, hopefully it'll be fixed some time.

I've read similar reports before and am trying to remember what factors are involved. I THINK it's to do with video cards. Making sure your drivers are up-to-date is wise, but also clearing cache and possible jiggling the sliders and saving might force a refresh. If it's a low-end card there's not much to be done.

You might check your graphics pref settings in case they've reset to below what you are used to.

checked my vid drivers up to date
played with sliders in preferences and on avatar itself

this pic shows the issue im talking about:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24396363@N02/2312517630/

hopefully someone can help me figure this out

vid card is a geforcefx5500 i know i could probably get a newer one but its not in the budget right now

First read this: http://www2.actden.com/writ_Den/tips/sentence/puctuate.htm

Then ask your question again. Because with the way it's written now, I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to say.



What is this picture supposed to be showcasing? Since your previous post mentioned a ring (I think), I would assume you think something looks wrong with the fingers. But the caption under the photo says the wrist looks funny. Both look fine to me, except for what might be a little triangular protrusion near where the thumb meets the wrist. But that could just as easily be an element of the texture in the background. It's hard to tell.

How about explaining exactly what you're talking about, in full detail, with complete sentences? Be as descriptive as you can.

I do notice a couple of things you could do that would immensely improve the look of SL for you:


1. Anti-alisaing.

It's not just that the wrists look jagged in that picture. EVERYTHING looks jagged. Open up your nVidia Control Panel, and assign a profile for SL. In that profile, turn on anti-aliasing. Your video card is quite old, so you probably won't be able to give it much AA without slowing things down more than you'll like. But even a small amount goes a long way. Try giving it 2X sampling, maybe 4X at the most.

If you don't have the nVidia Control Panel, or if it doesn't allow you full access to your settings (it didn't on a lot of older cards, which was always really silly), download a program called nHancer from http://www.nhancer.com. It's a great little utility, which picks up where nVidia used to drop the ball all the time. It will grant you full access to all your video card's settings, and will even give you good written explanations of what they all are. Use it to assign a profile for SL that includes as much anti-aliasing as your system can handle without slowing down too much.

The more AA you use, the better and smoother everything will look. But also, the more AA you use, the slower SL will run for you. You'll have to experiment to find the right balance.

Don't be afraid to drop your draw distance a little if that's the only way to add the amount of AA you want. I'll take a better looking picture with less stuff in it than a worse looking picture with more stuff in it any day.


2. Anisotropic Filtering.

Notice how the stone wall texture is blurry on the left side of your screenshot. AF will fix that. Without AF, textures blur when they're not directly facing the camera. AF prevents that from happening.

You'll find the toggle to turn AF on in your SL preferences, on either the graphics tab, or the advanced graphics tab, depending on which viewer you're using. With your card being so old, the option might be grayed out, in which case you won't be able to use it. But if it's not grayed out, switch it on. You'll see it makes a huge difference.

The extra processing required for AF will slow your graphics card down a bit, though. With such an old card, you're probably not getting stellar frame rates to begin with. If AF slows you down too much, you might have to live without it.

Generally AA is much more important than AF, so if you have to choose one or the other, go with AA. If you can use both, though, definitely do it. Without those things, SL really looks like crap. With them, you'll notice it looks just about as good as any last generation video game (amateur level artwork not withstanding).

Check out Vint's tutorials. You'll have to do some graphics manipulation on the screen shots.
http://www.vintfalken.com/tutorials/

ok i turned on aa on my graphic card for sl
i turned on af in sl

still has lumps

the reason i mentioned a ring earlier was because it made me really notice the wrist lumps while i was zoomed in

here are 2 photos after i turned on aa and put it at its max and turned on af

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24396363@N02/2312732620/
and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24396363@N02/2311930325/

You sure you've got AA turned on in those photos? I see jags everywhere in them. Did you restart SL after you turned it on? Did you save the profile specifically for SL? Changes to graphics card settings can't affect programs that are currently in use. You have to shut them down and restart them first. And profiles will only apply to the specific programs to which they're assigned. Something went wrong somewhere in whatever you did. The settings did not get applied.

In any case, it appears that what you've got circled in that one image are not "lumps", but simply the edges, corners (vertices), and faces of the polygons in the avatar mesh. Here's your closeup image, with polygonal edge lines roughly drawn over the top:



All 3D objects on computer screens are made out of triangles. If you've got enough of them, so many that they become too small to see individually, or if you employ trickery with light, then you can make something look very smooth. Otherwise, you'll see them for what they actually are, just a collection of flat faces.

The SL avatar is fairly low-resolution. In places, the triangles are clearly visible for what they are. With a better video card, you'll notice it less, since those tricks of light I mentioned can be better applied, but ultimately, a triangle is a triangle, and that appears to be what you're seeing here.

Try cranking up the avatar mesh detail slider all the way in your preferences, if you haven't already. That will help smooth things out. If it's already maxed, though, then that's as good as it's gonna get.



(Note, those lines might not be totally accurate, if anyone's measuring. They're just roughly based on what appears to be going on in the screenshot. I didn't reference the actual mesh while drawing them.)

ok restarted sl and its not quite as jagged but still lumpy

and now writing and such is kind of fuzzy looking

i know i need a new vid card but my computer guy wants to build me a new computer but it has windows vista and i dont want vista i know it causes sl problems and can cause problems for other games i play

One more thing just occurred to me. I realize it's possible that by "lumps", maybe you meant not the polygons, but the two bony protrusions on either side of the wrist. It's hard to tell, since you circled the whole wrist, not any specific part of it.

If that is indeed what you meant, then those are normal anatomical features, if perhaps a bit cartoonized in SL. In RL, everyone's wrists have those. They're more pronounced on some people than on others, but we've all got them. We also have them at our ankles, as the design of ankles is similar to that of wrists.

Here's another version of your closeup image, showing roughly where the bones of the wrist would be:



Again, not everyone's wrists in RL are quite that exaggerated, but we all have those bumps to some degree. The one on the ulna is called the ulnar head. I'm not sure what the one on the radius is called.

i know we have them in rl..but if mine stuck out like that in rl id cry

guess ill have to live with it

Sometimes you'll see these sorts of problems if your AV is not average-height. I'm relatively petite, and as a result, some poses which were designed for average-height AVs appear to break the wrists or put odd twists in them. For the same reason, many ground-sit poses are unusable for me because they place me partly under the ground.

Very tall AVs have a similar issue. I've seen male gorean slaves using kajira kneel poses designed for women....and they float above the ground because they are taller than what the poses were designed for.

To "fix" this sort of issue, either change to be average height, or spend time searching for poses and animations which look good for your height. Amora creations has some ground sits for various height AVs (also kajira poses). Sometimes you can find child poses which will work as well.