The SL fashion world has spawned a bizarre and mysterious type of device known as the anti-inspect shield. The primary purpose of these devices is to deter other people from checking the names and creators of attachments you are wearing, so that they can’t go and buy the same things you did and copy your “style”. The shields accomplish this by surrounding your avatar in many layers of transparent prims, so that other people can’t right click and Inspect your other attachments — their click will hit the shield instead.
Anti-inspect shields are a contentious issue for many reasons. Not the least of these is that it deprives designers of the new customers they could have gained from people seeing and admiring your outfit, and finding out who made it. But just as bad is that they severely reduce your framerate and the framerate of everyone around you, as Gabby Panacek has demonstrated.
Hurting the creators of the items you love, and slashing everyone’s framerates in the process? Well, that’s pretty vain and selfish, but maybe it’s worth it to stop “copycats” from stealing your style? Perhaps it would be, if the shields actually stopped people from inspecting your attachments — but they don’t.
In fact, there’s an extremely quick and easy way to completely bypass the shields, and you don’t even have to fiddle around trying to get the right camera angle. All it takes is 3 easy steps, which I’ll demonstrate with Caer Balogh’s lovely brown paper bag “Advanced Fashion Shield 1.0″, which Gabby kindly passed on to me. It’s just as useless as the real shields at stopping people from inspecting, but doesn’t hurt your framerate, and is way more stylish.
- Enable Advanced > Rendering > Hide Selected. (Use Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D to turn on the Advanced menu if you need to.)
- Open Edit mode (Ctrl-3) and click on the shield to select it. It will disappear from your view (except for its outline). If the person is wearing multiple shields, you can hold Shift and continue to click them until you have selected (and thus hidden) them all.
- Click on the attachment you want to inspect.
Even the biggest, primmiest, laggiest shield, whether scripted or unscripted, sculpty or nonsculpty, can be bypassed in just a few clicks using this method.
So if you have a shield, please, take it off. All you’re doing is making SL less enjoyable for yourself and everyone around you.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
People actually wear giant shields to hide their utterly fictional and totally purchased “style?”
Will wonders never cease?
September 18th, 2009 at 7:05 am
Great Job, Jacek! And thank you so much for everything.
@kanomi Stupefying, isn’t it? You, however, have an Inspect-At-Will lifetime pass. Click me anytime you want <3
September 18th, 2009 at 8:15 am
[...] found via the comments is Jacek Antonelli’s article on How to Bypass an Anti-Inspect Shield shows you how these things are very silly [...]
September 26th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Wow. And I thought I’ve seen it all, hon.
OT: Does anybody know if there is something like Adobe Bridge that works with Blender? Thx! :)
October 9th, 2009 at 1:54 am
I found ResourceSpace via BlenderNation.com. It’s an asset management system that’s based on your web server with PHP, MySQL, and Blender.
http://www.blendernation.com/resourcespace-open-source-asset-management-for-blender/
I have a small Intel Atom-based server running Ubuntu Server 9.04. It has LAMP, but not X Window since it’s headless. I suppose I could apt-get install blender, but that little box was never intended to run Blender, just serve MP3s and MP4s.
October 10th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
[...] effects of this *amazing* device: Just Say No! and Jacek Antonelli shows how to bypass the device: Bypass an Anti-Inspect Shield in 3 Easy Steps If you discover a reason to wear one of those things, please enlighten me. AKPC_IDS += [...]
October 10th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
As I stated on another blog, these aren’t only used to stop copy cats, but also used by copy cats.
Those who wear copybotted items sometimes rely on anti inspect to hide it.
But do not run around accusing everybody with it of that, make sure the person is not wearing it for the reason of “style protection” before you go bonkers and hit them with ban or accusations.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Thanx..thats a very Vendor friendly way to keep you away from our Stores ;-/