Black spots on skin

Ok I have seen this happen twice...and it is not just in my viewer but others are seeing it also. Suddenly a skin get's black areas on it. Any ideas? The bottoms of my friends fingers have turned black and she has skin from the same maker I do...I am worried it will happen to me next! And no we checked...she does not have any gloves on. The last person I saw this happen to, got a large black patch on his back and on both of his legs. He had to go buy a new skin to fix it! What is going on?

I had the same kind of issue only it was the main skin going black, its most likely you need to update your video (graphics) drivers, or you may need to upgrade your card. Do you know what card or on board graphics you are using?

The problem is most likely on the systems of the people whose avatars have the black spots on them, so those are the folks that might need to update their drivers or upgrade their cards.

yeah, we just have to wait for a reply now to see what kind of drivers they would need. Most likely it'll be Nvidia ones seeing most ATI cards fail to work with Second Life

I find it hard to believe that one person's graphics card will change the way their avatar looks to others. I am not the only one who has seen this, we all have various set ups. And one day they are fine and then another they log in to find black spots on their skin. This is just down right odd!

Each avatar's visible skin texture is "baked" on the machine running a particular avatar. Several textures are sent to the avatar's computer, such as the base skin, the undershirt, the shirt, jacket, etc., where they are blended together, then sent to the Linden servers and the baked textures is sent out to the other avatar's in viewing range.

So if a user's video processor messes up their skin in the baking process, other people will see their skin messed up.

You can see this effect in action when you change a skin; you see the skin appear clearly once, made from the local copy of the baked texture, then it fuzzes out and appears clearly, made from the copy that has been uploaded to the Linden servers and then downloaded back to the local viewer.

It's an example of distributed processing, relieving the Linden servers from the task of compositing textures for all the avatars in a sim.

There are of course other things that can go wrong, but there is no question that avatar skins are in general baked on the avatar's machine, sent to LL, and then sent out to the other users that can see the avatar.

This is explained at, among other places, http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/11/gray-and-missing-image-avatars/#more-425 , which says in part:

and that post references an earlier blog post also explaining it at http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/09/18/getting-technical-baked-avatar-textures/

Thank you that makes a lot of sense...I appreciate your input

yeah ^^, when I first got my 8500 my av's clothing was all black and others were seeing it and at first I blamed it on SL like any other noob to technology and processes would do X3 later I found all that out and it really makes sense.

I don't know if this is helpful to this conversation, and I'd be curious for feedback from others about this. When I first started going into SL, I was having the blacked out skin problem and a SL mentor asked whether I was using 2 monitors. I was because I use a laptop with a second monitor attached. He suggested that that was causing the skin issues.

I have been shutting off the second monitor while in SL and the issue has not cropped up again.

However, I wonder if this is really necessary. Are any of you using 2 monitors (one for SL, one for everything else...) with success?

I use one monitor for everything, even on my laptop.