Honor McMillian found a glitch in one of her photos. It has to do with how the viewer renders reflections of mesh objects. Bounce over to her site and see: Redefining Avatar in Second Life.
Render Problem with Mesh – Images by: Honor McMillan
Notice the ship’s reflection. One must include avatars in the reflection settings to get mesh items to show a reflection.
I would call that a bug.
Honor points out another problem she ran into while shooting pictures. That particular problem is the reason that photographers use viewers with the Derender feature. The feature allows you to right-click an object and select ‘Derender’. It then disappears from the scene. Unfortunately the SL Viewers do not have the feature. Firestorm does… if I remember correctly.
You can derender objects in the SL Viewer 🙂 It’s just that derendering avatars has become more problematic.
I think (and I’m not a techie so they’ll cringe at my attempt to explain my theory) that orginally the viewer code identified avatars by using the fact that they are “mesh”, or at least not the same construction material as everything else, i.e., prims.
Now that mesh has really been introduced the viewer can’t distinguish between an avatar and a mesh car (for example).
This is my working theory anyway. 🙂
Your thinking is as good as any. We could ask one of the TPV Dev’s.
To clarify, if you want to derender an object in the LL viewer:
Advanced/Highlighting and Visibility/Hide Selected
Then whatever object(s) you click on will be hidden as long as you keep the edit screen active. I just click on things and minimize it while I’m doing the photos. 🙂
I did not know that. Thanks.