screen shots are horribly broken when shadows are enabled

[Nimil]

i am a photographer in second life and i take very large screenshots
in order to do fine detail work on them in photoshop. i switched to
exodus a while back because strawberry singh blogged that she was able
to take photos without issue. i tried it and unfortunately i still had
those faint lines that appear when i take an image larger than
screensize. i mentioned this on her blog, and someone named Ayamo
Nozaki said they were going to fix that (i'm assuming that was
directed at my comment since it was right under mine). well i just
installed the newest update that you guys put out and i am sad to see
that my images are now 20 times WORSE and there is no way i can fix
them in photoshop. the faint lines i had before were easy to fix, as
they were just a little line i had to scrub out. but now my photos
contain large areas of unshadowed places, as well as black squares for
absolutely no reason.

for example sake, here are some screen shots to show the change.

previous version of exodus: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1473229/122911_001.png
as you can see its not so bad, lines are a little drastic cause of the
blinds in my skybox but usually i can fix those lines.

as it is now: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1473229/142012_002.png
completely un-fixable :(

[Geenz Spad]

Second Life has always had problems with taking large screenshots in deferred rendering, but to narrow things down a bit, what graphics settings are you using?

-- 

Geenz Spad

Sent with Sparrow

[Nimil]

ultra everything. anti-aliasing off, ansiotropic filtering off as
well.

and yes i do know the lines are a problem across all viewers but this
update has broken them to the point where i cannot use the viewer for
photography which renders it useless to me, and i was really enjoying
it otherwise so i wanted to make sure someone knew about the drastic
change.

On Jan 4, 2:30 pm, Geenz Spad <ge...@exodusviewer.com> wrote:
> Second Life has always had problems with taking large screenshots in deferred rendering, but to narrow things down a bit, what graphics settings are you using?
>
> --
> Geenz Spad

> Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)

[Geenz Spad]

Can you try disabling High Precision mode?

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Geenz Spad

Sent with Sparrow

[Nimil]

could you explain where high precision mode is located?

On Jan 4, 2:56 pm, Geenz Spad <ge...@exodusviewer.com> wrote:
> Can you try disabling High Precision mode?
>
> --
> Geenz Spad

> Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
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> On Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Nimil wrote:
> > ultra everything. anti-aliasing off, ansiotropic filtering off as
> > well.
>
> > and yes i do know the lines are a problem across all viewers but this
> > update has broken them to the point where i cannot use the viewer for
> > photography which renders it useless to me, and i was really enjoying
> > it otherwise so i wanted to make sure someone knew about the drastic
> > change.
>

[Geenz Spad]

It's located in the Visuals window, at the bottom of the HDR tab.

-- 

Geenz Spad

Sent with Sparrow

[Nimil]

that was not checked. only differed rendering.

On Jan 4, 3:04 pm, Geenz Spad <ge...@exodusviewer.com> wrote:
> It's located in the Visuals window, at the bottom of the HDR tab.
>
> --
> Geenz Spad

> Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
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> On Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Nimil wrote:
> > could you explain where high precision mode is located?
>

[Geenz Spad]

I see.  I'll try to reproduce this on my side, and see if I can track this down for the next release regardless.

-- 

Geenz Spad

Sent with Sparrow

[Paola Tauber]

i think this is a duplicate of Jira SH-2378. can't wait for a fix! :D

[Qarina R]

I am seeing the same thing as Nimil. I am a blogger who switched to Exodus after Strawberry Singh's posts because I was having issues with snapshots (mainly pixelation and not being able to use shadows.) To my joy, shadows now work in Exodus and I get a great lack of pixelation in my pictures. However, instead I get ...shadowed squares on my snapshots. These are fine lines in squares that appear laid over the snapshot. I take snapshots in very high resolution, around 5000px by 2500px (I don't have Exodus open right now to check the exact numbers) so that I can have the best view to remove green screen etc before cropping and making vendor ads. The squares on my snapshots are a show stopper for me.Here is an image that i uploaded to image shack so you could have a look at what I am talking about - http://imageshack.us/f/33/snapshot005w.png/ it is a very large image so be advised

My settings are pretty much ultra everything, everything turned on that can be turned on.

[Geenz Spad]

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried thaking snapshots like this on the official viewer?

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Geenz Spad

Sent with Sparrow

[Paola Tauber]

yep. the lines are there both in the official viewer and in the dev versions i've used. if you want, i can post the exact version numbers later. lines where present also in Kirsten s21 releases.

[Geenz Spad]

This sounds like it could be a problem caused by Runitai's rendering changes.  The Second Life renderer has underwent a few major changes to make it perform faster on most hardware, fix compatibility issues, and generally look better in some circumstances.  It's hard to say what changed to provoke this bug.

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Geenz Spad

Sent with Sparrow

[Nimil]

i honestly can live with the lines, as they were rather easy to get
rid of in photoshop, just completely unusable in the newest version of
exodus which means i have to go back to firestorm or use the old
exodus version before this new one, which sucks cause i love the new
changes D: if there is some way i can get the previous verson's photos
with this new version that would be enough for me. i can't photoshop
out huge blocks of light and black boxes, i can photoshop out a faint
line.

On Jan 5, 1:59 pm, Geenz Spad <ge...@exodusviewer.com> wrote:
> This sounds like it could be a problem caused by Runitai's rendering changes.  The Second Life renderer has underwent a few major changes to make it perform faster on most hardware, fix compatibility issues, and generally look better in some circumstances.  It's hard to say what changed to provoke this bug.
>
> --
> Geenz Spad

> Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)

[Geenz Spad]

I've seemingly tracked down the issue for practically all deferred related snapshot issue, and am devising a means to fix it for the next release.

The goal for the fix is to provide vastly improved snapshots with deferred rendering for the next release, to the point that you shouldn't need to make any touch ups in Photoshop to remove any odd lines, or discontinuities in your snapshots.

-- 

Geenz Spad

Sent with Sparrow

[Paola Tauber]

Geenz, if true, I want babies from you xD

[Nimil]

holy crap if you fix this i am going to marry you lol

On Jan 5, 3:36 pm, Geenz Spad <ge...@exodusviewer.com> wrote:
> I've seemingly tracked down the issue for practically all deferred related snapshot issue, and am devising a means to fix it for the next release.
>
> The goal for the fix is to provide vastly improved snapshots with deferred rendering for the next release, to the point that you shouldn't need to make any touch ups in Photoshop to remove any odd lines, or discontinuities in your snapshots.
>
> --
> Geenz Spad

> Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
>
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> On Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Nimil wrote:
> > i honestly can live with the lines, as they were rather easy to get
> > rid of in photoshop, just completely unusable in the newest version of
> > exodus which means i have to go back to firestorm or use the old
> > exodus version before this new one, which sucks cause i love the new
> > changes D: if there is some way i can get the previous verson's photos
> > with this new version that would be enough for me. i can't photoshop
> > out huge blocks of light and black boxes, i can photoshop out a faint
> > line.
>

[Qarina R]

What they said, I can't take a pic any more without crashing, grr.

[Geenz Spad]

Hey everyone, just a bit of a update on this.

A fix is currently in the process of being made for this, and some progress has been made.  Right now, there's just one more bug that needs to be fixed with the new fix, and snapshots should look just fine.

We're working hard to get the fix into the next version of Exodus, which should be released fairly soon to fix this issue completely.  Do note however, the memory requirements for snapshots in deferred will increase with this new method (there isn't much we can do about this, sorry!).

New High Res Snapshots.png

You can see the current results of the fix in the above screenshot.  As you can see, I'm also adding better color grading to the viewer as well, and the current problems with the fix have to do with how we're resizing the frame buffer texture, and will be fixed before we release the next version.

-- 

Geenz Spad

Sent with Sparrow

[Paola Tauber]

fab! thank you guys! can't wait! fingers crossed the requirements won't be too taxing and the tool will still be usable :P

[Chocolate Chinchilla]

Yeah, this lines problem has been there since day one of 'Second Life with Shadows'. Bet it has to do with the fact that Second Life just calculates each part of the images, and then pastes them together, though some Shadowing/Occlusion is used at the borders causing these lines, at least that's my theory as a non-software engineer. How come it seems so easy to fix though? You telling me Linden Labs never bothered to solve this? :/

[Ash Qin]

 

How come it seems so easy to fix though?

There was more time spent than a single day on this technically speaking.

 You telling me Linden Labs never bothered to solve this? :/

 

If you look at where people are complaining on the Jira, there is a lot more people raising issues with display names and so, they're going to be changing that system yet again. You can't really blame LL from prioritizing things based on what the majority user base appears to be making more noise about.

[mail.mo...@gmail.com]

The easy fix would save to not use SL snapshot feature, but instead do a screengrab with whatever tool you like for that?

[Ash Qin]

The easy fix would save to not use SL snapshot feature, but instead do a screengrab with whatever tool you like for that?

That's more of a work around and the issue with that method is that you can't take really high resolution pictures which are larger than what your screen resolution is.

[Chocolate Chinchilla]

Based on how you said it, it made it sounds easy enough, especially considering how long this issue exists. Also, with how long this exist, sooner or later someone would have pointed it out to Linden Labs I assume. With how large the Flickr community is for Second Life photography enthusiasts, it would have made sense that Linden Labs would've fixed this regardless of how busy they are. I'm simply surprised and assumed that this issue wasn't solvable.

[Koli Contepomi]

The problem is that LL only really have one graphics programmer, being Runitai. He also has to work on other things not related to graphics, which is a shame since he has a lot of neat ideas to be added in, but doesn't get the time to do so.

[Qarina R]

Just want to say that Geenz you may have a marriage proposal if you fix this snapshot issue. Thank you for paying attention and working on this.

Also want to give two cents on the complaint that windows do not save where you put them. For example, I don't use the ui ao, I use the one I bought which by default attaches to the left hand side, which, guess where there's default buttons. So every log in I move my ao over so it's not overlaid by system buttons. Every log in, it's back where it was. this is my first experience with huds etc not staying here you put them.

So i dunno if this is an issue in the official viewer too or hat but it's annoying as hell. The same goes for other bits of the ui. For example. I *regularly* use the cam window. I have two issues with the cam window (view window) in Exodus and also other viewers. 1, it's not resizable and that puppy is at least twice the size of it's original camera window. and 2, it doesn't stay where you put it. So again, there you are opening it and moving it on every log in.

The same goes for the move window. Now this one really bugs me. I'm used to holding down the page up button and yay fly. Now, I can only fly if I click the fly button on the move window which means i gotta have the move window open a lot more. annoying! And as above with the cam window, it is neither resizable nor does it remember where you left it.  So if we could have resizable bits of the ui, and if we could have huds and other windows remember their last position, that would kinda rock. Thanks for all your hard work and listening to the users. <3

[Ash Qin]

Also want to give two cents on the complaint that windows do not save where you put them.

Please keep comments like these in future on the relevant threads, or we're going to have difficulty finding specific input on features and/or issues (we're going by subject title after all).

Now this one really bugs me. I'm used to holding down the page up button and yay fly. 

You can actually change this setting in exodus preferences.

[Qarina R]

I did a little more investigating because i'm also crashing every time i try to raise the size of the snapshot to something over the screen size. I get an appcrash and it tells me it has to do with the llcommon.dll.. well i searched that, it seems that it causes crashing on all viewers since viewer 2 it was fixed in snowglobe according to a jira i found but it's evidently present again in the current code. something about how that dll is not working properly or something. just a thought.