Alpha sorting or LOD bug?

I've built a lot of avatars, but since the LOD glitch was introduced I've had a serious problem: The eye prim of my avatars keep "popping" in front of the head prim! Like most anthro avatars mine use one prim with an alpha texture for the head and blink animation, and a second, smaller prim inside with a non-animating eye texture.

The problem is that when the camera zooms out, the eye prim can be seen in front of the head prim. Now it's either an alpha sorting bug or LOD, but I don't know which, and I don't know how to fix it. Here's a the frustrating part: other avatars don't do this and I can't figure out what they're doing that I'm not.

I've attached two screenshots showing what I mean. The first shows the textures I'm using, with the head prim path cut to show the eye texture. The second shot is the glitch that my avatars suffer from. Any ideas on how to get rid of this?

There's an easy way to tell if it's an alpha sorting issue. Put a 24-bit texture on the inner prim, and see if the problem persists. If it goes away, then you know it was from the alphas, and you can explore alternate construction methods, perhaps using cuts to shape the inner prim instead of transparency. If the problem remains, then it's a LOD issue, and probably the best solution in that case would be to shrink the inner prim or expand the outer one.

I've tried all of that and still have the problem. The inner prim is already a good deal smaller than the outer one, any smaller and the other prims will start cutting into it. Any cuts made to the inner prim make it poke out even more. The inner prim already has a 24 bit texture on it. I usually use JPEGs for any any textures that aren't alpha, a habit carried over from my Poser hobby. I tried it with a 24 bit Targa, and got the same effect. I'm stumped :/

Hmm, that's a thinker. If you're sure the inner prim texture is 24-bit, then alpha sorting is definitely not the issue. It's got to be a LOD problem. Are your object detail settings all the way up?

Yeah, but it's not so much that it bothers me, it bothers my customers. All of my friends see it too, and we all have the object detail sliders at max. It's not just me. I don't really mind it that much, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I hate to see a nagging problem like this. What really bothers me is that it's not a common problem, the big-name avatar makers aren't affected nearly as badly. From what I can tell by taking various avatars apart, I'm doing the same things they are! x_x

EDIT: For the record, I've also tried saving the textures from GIMP as opposed to PhotoShop. The results are hard to guage. I still get the pokethrough, but I'm not sure if it's any better. I use PhotoShop 7 so I thought its alpha oddities might be affecting things, but apparantly not.

Newbie question. I know about the alpha sorting glitch. What is LOD?

TIA,
-Sylvia

LOD = level of detail


Maya, I thought of two things you might want to try. First, if the outer prim is hollow, try making it solid instead. It's possible the problem is from alpha sorting between the inner and outer surfaces of the sphere.

Second, try redoing your texture on the inner prim so that the background is black instead of white. That way, if the problem persists, at least you'll be seeing through to a surface that matches the outer prim, which should serve to make it far less obvious.

LOD=Level of Detail

Many games will increase or decrease the level of detail on individual meshes depending on distance from the "camera" to increase performance. The idea is that an object that is far away need not be rendered with the same detail as one up close, because you will not see much of a difference anyway, and reducing the level of detail can speed up the rendering process.

This is why you get "popping" of hair or terrain or other objects when you get closer to them. The "pop" is a change in tesselation.

It's always been solid.



That would work for the black dragon, but not the others. They're not all the same. Making a seperate set of eye textures for each individual color scheme would take more time and energy than is really practical.

Thanks for the suggestions. Looks like it's something odd that I'm doing rather than a real glitch. :/