accidental escher

I have been trying to build a large marble porch (about 125 prims) with pillars, balustrade, balusters and hopefully roof. But depending on where an avie stands and the direction of the camera (and regardless that the numbers say things are correct) parts look above, below, behind, in front. Take a step any direction and it changes. I had to walk away from it for a bit because the optical illusion was making me nuts.

All parts are stone with a light beige marble texture. Ive tried the tint change on parts to force shading, unlinking and relinking, etc. and its still like walking through an Escher painting.

How can I fix this?

Thanks!

I don't know if this is the same situation, but I've had a problem like yours with a light marble floor. It seemed as if for some reason part of it was transparent and gave the kind of optical illusion you describe. Try changing textures and see if that fixes the problem; it fixed mine.

It sounds like what's happening here is a very common problem with alpha sorting. When you have two objects, one in front of the other, both with 32 bit textures on them, they tend to fight with eachother. Often they will appear to switch places as the camera moves or to cancel eachother out so they both disappear.

There is a pack of marble textures it seems most everyone has that was apparently saved incorrectly. They are all 32 bit when they should be 24. I remember when I was new one of my first builds was a Parthenon replica, and the marble texture I had was driving me nuts. Sections of the roof would appear to vanish, columns would seem to switch places. After a few days I realized this was an alpha problem and I fixed it.

The solution is to export the textures and resave them as 24 bit instead of 32. To do that, double click on the texture name in your inventory to open the texture viewer. Now go File->Save Texture As... to save to your hard drive. Open it up in your favorite graphics editor (Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, GIMP, etc.) and then resave it as a 24 bit TGA file. Upload it to SL, and all will be well.

Tatiana,

Love the thread title.

Actually, judging from your description, I would say that probably the thing would be worth leaving as it is, or even developing it further so that it became a tourist attraction.

one of the marble textures has an alpha layer, use a different texture or if you have full perms on it which I think you should, save it as a file, convert it to bmp and re-upload it.

I like Escher.

Post a picture!