a curious note about the invisibility prim and black colours/textures

Recently i've been making shoes using the invisibilty prim, however, i have noticed that the invisibilty prims affect black colour objects at time such as black metalic heels would disappear every so often or the skintone of the AV heel will show through at a distance but when you zoom in on a black coloured heel; you dont see any skintone at all.

Other people have noticed it as well when i pointed it out to them. Could it be the last patch on shininess that could be affecting it? Does anyone else have the same problem or know how to fix it?

Not sure completely, but I doubt that it has anything to do with shiny or black.

Probably, you are seeing an effect caused by clipping. When SL displays objects at a distance, it doesn't always display everything. Smaller objects are sometimes dropped from view, probably for efficiency.

My guess is that this would happen with any texture or color, but I haven't tried it. I think the important factor is the size of the prim. A possible workaround would be to link a larger prim to the smaller one that is disappearing. You could texture the larger prim with a clear texture so that it isn't visible, but it's size might trick the SL renderer into showing the smaller linked prim that you want to cover the flesh.

The heel spike which is one solid prim coloured or textured black also disappear every so often even when i use the camera zoomed in on it. It's all a mystery to me.

It's difficult to debug these types of problems for sure. Hard to know if it's SL, your video driver, or what. For example, a while back on my last computer, I had a driver problem that corrupted Linden trees. Cypress 2 would just disappear without warning. Not really SL's fault, but it was frustrating. I still have problems with light sources not casting light in some cases. Not sure whose fault that is. Relog fixes it, but then it stops working again.

There's an SL bug too relating to shearing. If you shear a cube to the max in both directions and make it thin, then it won't render from certain viewpoints.

None of this has anything to do with your problem.

If the heel disappears when you're zoomed in, then it's not a clipping problem. Of course, it's possible that there are two or more issues at work here.

My only advice is to experiment.

I have trouble seeing how the specific color or texture could be a factor, but you can try other colors/textures to see if it makes a difference. You could also try setting the texture blank.

Shininess is easier to believe and that can be turned off to see if it has an effect.

The inviso prim thing is an unsupported feature and might have a problem. You could replace that with a blank texture just to see if the distance thing is related to the invisoness of it or not.

If you can pin down exactly what it is, then you have a much better chance of getting LL to fix it if it's a bug.

Just another wild guess to add to the pile: the foot "shadows" (the grey ovals near your feet) seem to be rendered as a semi-transparent OpenGL primitive. SL has had problems with overlapping transparent objects (i.e. alpha-layer rendering confusion) since about forever. I think this may be a factor, but I know of no cure except avoiding alpha textures on shoes.

Does the same thing occur when you are using prims with solid textures but you have set them to 0 alpha using a script? Just curious if you have tried the alternative to clear textures yet?

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetLinkAlpha(llGetLinkNumber(),0,ALL_SIDES);
    }
}

Put your "inivisible" prim back to a solid texture, then drop this script inside that prim. Make sure you use Edit Linked Parts and have the prim you want the script to go in selected, then drag to the contents of the prim. Don't drag it directly on to the shoes, as the script will default itself into the parent prim.

If that doesn't work, you can remove the script from the invis prim, and simply use the edit menu to reset the transparency to 0. In fact, once it has set the alpha to 0 (transparency to 100%) the script is no longer needed inside the prim. Just that you can't get 100% transparency on the edit menu, it must be scripted.

The invisibility prim is not merely clear. It also makes other things invisible.

The one that Beatfox distributed (see the link), makes any texture with an alpha channel invisible. So it makes avatars and linden trees invisible since they have alpha textures in them.

It has a lot of potential applications, but one of them is to hide part of an avatar, e.g., the legs or feet, so that something else can be built in its place.

This is probably caused by the fact the viewer reduces the number of triangles (the geometry) used to build the avatar when zooming/in out. The effect is that prims/avatar parts that don't intersect in close-up can suddenly intersect from a distance. (We see the same with the 'standard slider' hair for instance). You can influence this (for your client) by setting the 'avatar detail' slider in the advanced graphics tab in prefs.

The fix is to make sure there's enough margin between the object and the wearer, by making it bigger, although this may look weird in close-up again. So basically you have to compromise.

Note that the 'invisibility texture' will sometimes do weird things with other textures. Alpha textures will be visible through it, while non-alpha will not. As sims use different textures it sometimes happens that the 'ground' is corrupting the invisiprim texture etc.. etc.

Now that you mention this, I realize that I've seen a similar effect with land as well.

Sometimes you can see this in waterfall builds that are sunk into the ground. It will look great up close, but as you zoom out, the land seems to change shape slightly and raise up out of the water.

Interesting. Thanks for the info.