Half Man Half Dog

After much fiddling with graphics and debug settings in Emerald, I was finally able to get shadows to render on my ATi HD3450. Some uploaded alpha textures disappear, only prims cast shadows and it drops framerate by 50% but it’s fun to play around with:

Like so many other new features (Reflective surfaces, alpha channel avatar skin, 1 bit alpha image uploads), I doubt it will be part of the mainstream viewer any time soon but hopefully alternative viewers will improve it to a usable point before then. While Emerald’s shadow rendering works, Kirsten’s viewer is reputed to be the most advanced. I could never get it to work with my graphics card >_<

The bewildering variety of debug settings can sometimes be a little too tempting to fiddle with… becoming invisible, setting LOD on sculpties are fairly safe and simple, but idly fiddling with render settings can make things very strange indeed…with black fur the effect is relatively small, with a white skin it turns the avatar into an eye watering glowy…thing.

I cannot remember quite what I did to make my skin glow, but thankfully a relog reverted any changes I’d made.

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