Disabling LOD on Prims?

Sorry if this is the wrong forum, I wasn't sure where to post it.

I am building a beach villa and as such, I am using quite a few prims hollowed out with the cirlce shape and cut in half to make arches. The thing I am noticing, is when I scroll my camera a little way away from the arch prim, the cut doesn't look so clean, and protrudes out.

I am thinking it is the LOD for the prims which seems to drop detail horrendously close. Is there a way to disable the LOD? I found how to do it on avatars via the menu Client>Character>Disable LOD. Is there also a way to do it so it is prims that are affected too?

Thanks for helping.

No way to do that.

Even if you could, it would only affect your view, and not anyone else's perception of the build.

Dang, Ok, thanks for the answer Ceera. I did realise other people would still see the orginal, it was more for my own benefit lol : )

I'd love to have more choice in LOD culling, both for my personal view, and at the prim level. I have sculpted beautiful terrains that suddenly become horribly distorted at a distance. But LL does that LOD culling across the board, and their choices rule (and often ruin) what we see.

It's a trade off between rendering speed and perfection. And speed wins.

I think there's a command in the debug settings in the Windlight viewer to disable LOD. If you scroll through the listed commands, you should be able to find it. I think it's one of the ones that starts with the word "render".

As Ceera said, it will only affect your own view. LOD is strictly a client-side operation.

Two options I would love to have:


An estate level checkbox, probably on the same page as the place where you can upload a .raw file, that would allow you to turn off LOD culling for terrain in an estate. I can't count how many builds I have seen that look great up close, but when you back off, the cliff face LOD gets coarse and suddenly you see the foundation and basemet walls of the house atop the cliff!

A prim-level checkbox, disallowing LOD reductions for that linkset. Imagine how much better most prim eyeglasses would look if they didn't get dirtorted from ovals into octagons as soon as you back off a short distannce.

Ceera, those things would be great in principle, yes. But in practice, as with large textures, sculpties, and twisted toruses before them, the potential for stupid management of them would be enormous. If you think SL's slow now, imagine how unbelievably slow it would be if every jackass had the power to override your LOD settings. And you know they would.

LOD is culled in order to keep the poly count on your screen reasonable. No one should be able to control how much is too much on your screen except you. It's bad enough when one person has the power to built a million+ polygon tree, completely out of hundreds of ridiculous sculpted pillow-shaped blocks, and lag everyone in a 2-sim radius all to hell and back. Imagine if that same person now had the power to stop your machine from culling the amount of polygons in any way. That would be crazy.

Anyway, as far as eyeglasses go, here's a little work-around. Twist the cylinders a little bit. The extra polys added by the twist will keep the shape from getting too angular as you back out your view. It works great. (Works for spherical lenses too.)

That is a good point, Chosen, and an excellent tip on the glasses.

What bugs me in particular though is how rapidly LOD is allowed to screw up the terrain representation, which is already a very coarse mapping. It's usually no big deal, if the terrain is simple rolling hills. But even in a very flat sim, I have had the grassy terrain next to a sidewalk encroach on the walkway when you zoom back. And I have had cliff-top castles where, even though the terrain of the cliff was perfect, I had to add a wall of terrain colored prims inside the terrain wall, just to keep the cliff face from dissolving at a distance and showing the caves inside the hillside.

Another trick in some cases is to use tubes in place of hollow cylinders. Apparently the tubes get LODed down less.

I'd vote for the opposite.. To be able to set a maximum LOD, there's some useful shapes crop up on prims at lower LODs, and it'd expand possibilities being able to say "don't add any more detail than that"

Thank you Seifert! I am having some sorta serious LOD issues with a bunch of twisted pipes made with pipemaker. The straight pieces are cylinders, not tubes. When I put some tubes next to the cylinder parts, they look WAY better (far away that is).

Now I gotta go replace about 100 cylinders with 100 tubes. Sigh .

Seriously, this will make things look much better. Thanks again. These forums are great.

Doug

edit - ugh. Turns out that Tubes have a different orientation/axis than cylinders (probably why they have different LOD characteristics). I'm trying to figure out the mathematical relationship between the two but am not having much luck. I'd like to be able to simply change the cylinder to a tube, then add (or subtract) the correct number of degrees from each rotation setting to get it to line up. (I also need to change the hollow and hole size settings but those are straight forward. )