Death of Invisiprims

Just to give the community warning (i've already bug reported it) Invisiprims do not work in preview. They have done some cleanup in the rendering engine. A bug i haven't reported, its impossible to select invisiprims.

I think it's just a rendering bug. If you turn off shiny/bumpmapped rendering (I forget the proper name of the menu entry) from Debug, invisiprims still vanish.

I can't seriously see LL getting rid of invisiprims at this point. It'd break too much existing content.

Ditto. There's no way they would intentionally get rid of this without giving us a viable replacement.

May I please refer to this, instead of "Death of invisoprims" as "Inviso-Culling"? And I also would be very, very suprised if it's intentionally broken, seeing how widespread they are used.

Hopefully they'll make invisiprims "official" now... there's way too much content that depends on them.

I'm hoping they would just give us alpha-channel support for avs already and make this buggy hack obsolete.

Invisiprims are being used for lots of things other than avs too.

However, I do think its fair to say that by far the *majority* of uses for invisiprims are avatars.

Very, very unoffical rumor is that they were trying to fix a different issue (skirts. alpha textures and alpha things not rendering behind them) without knowing it was related to invisiprims (since no one knows what creates the invisiprim "bug". But it's being looked into.

Thats not actualy true. In the higher eschelons of the FIC it is understood. Since you asked...

Background:
The two textures used for Invisiprims are used with the generation of the texture for the ground mesh. The textures them selves are single channel tga's.

Since they lack an alpha channel they are marked as solid, (not alpha). There is a hook in the rendering engine that tells it to render these two images instead of as black and white as the alpha channel on a white texture (probably when generating land textures a different texture is provided for it to be the alpha channel for). At render time since these images are marked solid, they are rendered with all the other solids, not with the alphas (of course if you make your invisiprim semi trans it renders with the alphas). The net result is it gets rendered in the wrong group. A fox in the hen house.

LL should make it a feature.

95% of the time it's used to hide avatar bit, it would make sence to just enable the alpha channel on avatar textures (yes it can be done, my understanding is that it's a simple setting in the client configs).

I like the "alpha channel on skin" idea, except that the alpha channel on skins already seems to be used... I've had skins that just tint the av, the Linden facial hair and coloring shows through. The texture portion of the skin really seems to have been intended for tattoos, not to replace the Linden skin settings completely... which seems to be what they're used for.

So, they'd need to either add a flag to make the texture alpha override the Linden skin settings, or add more layers.

BTW, this wouldn't make the av invisible. You'd still see their eyes and teeth.

A simple checkbox on the body part, maybe. "use alpha channel as true transparency"? This would solve teeth (as they're part of the head skin) and eyes could have the same checkbox.

I don't see teeth and eyes as being a problem, actually.

I don't believe think are part of the head... when I was at two billion meters and my av was coming apart in the air I'm pretty sure I could distinctly see both eyes and teeth as separate objects. It was kind of hard to get a clean snapshot of it, though.

They're seperate objects, but they also have user-modifiable textures, is my point.

What if they just gave us an additional option to edit the base skin? It would preferably be a single image (rectangular, e.g 512 x 1024) and use the tattoos for then layering on-top, modifying and allowing for simple variations.
Alpha in this case would remove chunks of the avatar, also, being a single image it would make lining up top to bottom textures is made vastly easier.

I know most of you read it - but Kelly posted in Scripting Tips that invisiprims will be there in the final release, and probably before that!

Invisiprims work again in the current (1.9.0.9) preview. Script scheduler still sucks

I have it working with just one of either textures; 2 aren't required...nor is switching back and forth between them every so often (like the free "Invisibility Prim Public" script by Beatfox Xevious does). The only thing necessary is for one of the textures to be:

1. 38b86f85-2575-52a9-a531-23108d8da837: U repeat 0, U texture offset <=.472
   
2. e97cf410-8e61-7005-ec06-629eba4cd1fb: U repeat 0 (for full invisibility but can do partial invisibility if more), U texture offset <=.468

For either, enabling reflection ("shininess" or bumpmapping ("bumpiness" results in shiny/bumpy surfaces being visible.

Nothing else matters, I've found.

Making prims that are both shiny and transparent is one of the main things I use invisiprims for.

Same.

I don't see how you can since invisible prims HIDE shiny, bumpy, AND transparency effects...

You can adjust the transparency of the invisiprim by adjusting the texture offset.

Kinda, but only in one direction and it depends on the texture (the blotchy one, depending on V tiling, won't fade uniformly like the linear gradient one does). That still hides the shiny/bumpy effects tho...

Try changing horizontal repeats per face and horizontal offset on the linear one. You can make it shiny, transparent and the bump map can show too, all at once.

Hmm, only if the invisible prim has bumpmapping (which I already stated in a previous reply) but it depends on the texture. The default (wood) texture (or blank) remains visible but any other texture with shiny or bump on it won't stay visible behind the invisible prim no matter what I do (texture offset/repeat tweaking can show them but then avatars/transparent/masked-textured objects are visible). If you have specific invisible prim settings to get this all to work right I'd like to see...