this bug, it bugs me

There is a tree outside my house and because the tree and the wall are both alpha textures, the tree shows through on the wrong side of the wall. Like this:

Neither the tree nor the wall belong to me, it's a rented property, and I cannot edit them. Does anyone know of a workaround to fix the problem?

Far as I know you cannot - in other situations when this has been asked it was always suggested to move one or the other- can your landlord/lady help?

On the bright side- it is a lovely tree.. you could maybe frame it and pretend it is a window?

Afraid the only "fix" you can apply is to move elsewhere. Sorry.

You could put a solid prim in front of or inside the wall. If you make it from a hollow cube you might even be able to preserve the window, although you would still have the tree in front of the panes.

I had the same problem, and discovered the tree's prims were making contact with the wall. I moved the tree a bit, and while it's still an issue, the effect is much less pronounced.

Hehe turning a bug into a feature...

There's a lot of software companies out there that are familiar with that one *grins*
Of course the clever ones then turn the new feature into an upgrade

It's not actually a bug. It's a fundamental part of the way real-time rendering works (known as the alpha sorting glitch). It happens in pretty much every single video game on the planet, and even in professional 3D modeling programs that cost thousands of dollars. And believe it or not, SL is actually far better at handling it than most programs are.

The only reason you don't see it in games and such is because professional game artists know enough to build around it. No game artist in the world would ever put an alpha-textured wall right in front of an alpha-textured tree like that. The reason people think it's an SL-specific problem is because most SL builders are amateurs who don't know enough not to do that sort of thing. And even those who do know aren't immune, since they can't control what their neighbors might do.

In order to solve your particular problem, you'll need to work around it, just like the pros do. That might mean rethinking your whole design, or it might mean just making a few adjustments here and there.

The first thing I'd do is split that wall into multiple prims. Put an opaque texture on all the stonework parts, and use an alpha texture only for the window. That will prevent the tree from being visible through the wall, which in itself might be enough.

If there are still issues between the window and the tree after that, either move the tree further from the wall, as someone already suggested, or else put something opaque in between, or both.

Another option is to make the wall out of a much thicker hollowed cube. Cut away 75% of it, so you're left with just one of the cube's original 4 sides. Your interior wall is the then surface of the hollow cube's hole, and center of the cube will be more toward the middle of the room instead of inside the wall itself. Since the glitch is center-point-dependent, that will often do the trick.

I recently used this strategy in building my new house. (I build a new one every month, it seems.)

A few houses ago, I was using one prim for the wall, and I would cut a window out in the wall using the alpha channel for the wall. I had very bad occlusion problems, with objects as far as 5m behind the walls showing through, depending on camera angle.

In the most recent house I built, I used "hollow" on my wall prims to cut out the windows. Then I used a second prim for the window, inside the hollowed area. The wall had a texture without alpha channel; the window prim has the alpha texture. So far, I have noticed absolutely zero occlusion problems.

Building the latter way uses a few extra prims, but in the long run, the visual effect is much, much nicer. Also, building the latter way makes texturing a lot easier. Instead of making a unique texture for each wall, I can more easily reuse textures for different walls, and even apply tiling textures much easier. And, another added benefit is that with separate window prims, I can more easily script open/close actions into them (a project on which I will be working in the near future).

This whole posts reinforces for me how it is good that these things don't stay just in the Tech Fora- I would never have read about these work arounds.

Re the OP, though- he cant move the tree, change the wall or much of anything else- it is a rental and he has no edit rights. If his ll helps that wd be different

Amity,
I actual design complete walls with everything on them, so all are with windows, blinds that are half opened and closed and in some textures there are even shutters included. Using a script for a texture changer that was designed for me it gives the effect when selected, open, half open, closed blinds or even closed shutters. This is what I named the 8 way privacy window system. Anyhow its very effective but problematic when using 32bit textures on adjacent/touching and joining walls.

As Chosen has mentioned;
I am by no means a professional but there are workarounds that I use to eliminate most if not all of the Alpha Glitch problem.

For example, some of my display houses have a garden and flower bed around them, the flowers are also 32 bit textures and most are less than a metre away from the walls of the house which are also 32bit textures.

To eliminate the Alpha Glitch I added extra prims where it was most problematic and then made them blank, set the texture repeats and offsets exactly the same as the exterior and interior walls.The prims are exactly the same size of the offending walls but slightly thinner, enough not to show any flashing, then using a texture alignment tool I centred them within the prim that had the alpha glitch problem, no longer do the flowers show through the wals as had before.

Another issue that is common is when 2 walls touch and both are textured with 32 bit textures, when you cam aorund the textures on both walls will move in the corners, to eliminate this I added a cut hollowed cube to the corner and again set the interior/exterior repeats and offsets the same, made it slightly thinner and centred it on both joining walls. This eliminated the movemont of the texture completely.

For the OP, the only option he has is to either get edit rights and learn a little about building and possibly add a few more prims as Chosen has said or try some of my examples or move.

So you think we should just do away with categorization altogether, and have one giant free-for-all forum? I can assure you if that were to happen, you'd never read about anything at all, things would be such a mess.

If you've made some sort of decision to steer clear of the content creation forums, you've done so at your own peril. Both you and the OP would have known everything there is to know about this issue had you just headed over to the building & texturing forums and done a little reading. This kind of question comes up all the time.

No offense, but there's so much critical need-to-know information in the content creation forums, only a fool would choose not to go there. Don't be a fool. Come on over any time and join in.


Oh, I missed that the first time around. Thanks for pointing it out.

In that case, I can only think of three possible solutions:

1. Direct the creator/owner of the place to this thread so he/she can learn how to fix the existing mistakes.

-OR-

2. Build your own interior walls right on top of the existing ones, to block the existing ones from view, assuming that's not against the rules of whatever rental agreement you've got.

-OR-

3. Follow Larrie's suggestion, and put some thin, opaque-texured prims inside the walls, assuming the walls are thick enough for that to work.

If you can live with the odd visual effect you can just put one invisiprim inside the wall.

God- I just can't win one -

It's not a decision- when I need to know something I use the Search feature. If I don't find it I ask- but sometimes I don't know to ask something.

I never said anything remotely near get rid of categories - all I said was I was glad this stuff cropped up here or I would have over looked it.

Thank you anyway - your input was very educational.

When I first started I did that because I could only find a script that could only change the texture on all sides of the prim. I thought, no problem just redesign the interior walls on another set of prims, given the prim count this was no way justifiable, looked good, took a day to rez and created bucket loads of lag on the sim. So I searchd the forums for help.

Fun though, after reading the forums, Texturing Tips, Building Tips and Resident Answers for wrong posters you could find a lot of useful information(mostly written by Chosen (get a 1st Life Chosen) ) but I must agree with Chosen, Texturing is texturing and building is building, searchiing those forums taught me lot likewise with the scripting library. Most things that people want are there and have been asked before, just keep your search to a minimum or browse the specific forums.

Its all there and more.

Hahaha. I think I used to have one of those.

What can I say? SL got its hooks into me, and I've been trapped here ever since. My second life ate my first life long ago.

Seriously though, I do get out; I promise. What you see from me on the forums is just the result of years spent working from home. People who work in office buildings have the water cooler. I have forums.

Well... I was going to try some of these work-arounds - I can't edit the wall but I can put an opaque prim inside of it and I have prims to spare. But when I got back to the house, the tree had been moved further away from the house and the effect is gone.

I suspect my landlady is reading my blog