Thursday, July 21, 2011

A bit of Lion dismay

While it has only been a short time since I upgraded to Apple's OS X 10.7 (Lion!) I've found a couple quirks but nothing truly annoying. Second Life performance even seems snappier as I suspect that some video drivers were changed. But that may actually lead to a problem that I found today.

While trying the graphics settings recommended by Gorgeous Yongho in "How to Take & Publish a Gorgeous SL Fashion Screenshot," a blog post by Hamlet Au, I found that activating the Lighting and Shadows feature in my viewer Graphics Preferences completely borks the picture.

Before activating Lighting and Shadows

After activating Lighting and Shadows
Aside from setting the Windlight choice to Nam Optimal Skin 1 (as recommended by foneco zuzu in the post's comments), the only other variable is that my machine won't let me activate Ambient Occlusion, as shown in Ms. Yongho's settings. Perhaps that is why I look ghosted and sickly in the second photo. Well, the lack of prim eyes doesn't help. Without them, eyes go black when shadows are activated. But it is obvious that the installation of the new operating system is a more likely cause than the lack of Ambient Occlusion as I did not have this problem the day before the upgrade.

Maybe in the next version or two of the Official Viewer or Kirstens, the two viewers I tried, will iron out this problem. But other than changing to a Windows machine or going back to OS X 10.6, feel free to post any ideas you have.

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