Is it possible to have a dynamically changing skin?

For my new AV, I'm wondering if I can create a skin that constantly changes, or at least can rotate in some way. I kind of doubt this is possible, but if it is, I would like to know. Also, through scripting, is it possible to have a texture that's constantly changing?

Thanks in advance

You can wear your media texture and play video on yourself - yes, I know, that's not a very helpful answer.

In theory - if you have RLV (Restrained Life Viewer) it would be possible to make a script that would change your skin ever X seconds, but it wouldn't be very efficient or practical. even cached, it takes several seconds to apply a new skin.

wonder how long it takes for changes in the client folders to take hold (or how often they get pulled)

I think the only way to do it without the rez delay is to use a full prim avatar and change the texture by animating them with a script, this isn't realy a changing texture but rather a texture that shifts so that after every change a different part of the texture can be seen, theoreticly you can also swap textures for other textures using a script but this will give problems with slow rezzing and should only be done if there is no other choice, like a photo frame that flips trough pictures stored in the prim.

Thi also answers your other question, yes you can have a script change the textures on a prim.

/me blinks.

Does that actually work?

edit: ...without using prims?

This is how i wear my skin in SL - i keep it in the character folder.

The skin displays changes immediately after a rebake.

Sometimes the skin reloads at odd times. I prefer to keep my skin client side since i do so many changes to it. It also releases my tattoo slots so i can apply my face makeups without changing the face skin texture.

I don't think it's quite that easy, but it should be possible. The complexity is that the viewer bakes up a new texture combining all the layers. If a modified viewer instead pushed the parcel media texture instead of the baked avatar texture, it should work. Alternatively, the viewer log records the identity of the baked avatar texture, so setting the parcel media texture to that should work, too.

Yep yep. That's why I added the "without prims" bit.

If you had a prim outfit, it might be easy as those aren't included in the baking..

The simple answer is "Practically speaking, no."

Mizu, watch someone while they change their skin. It's not pretty. This would happen on each skin change. There's a thing called "baking" going on in the viewer of the person changing skins -- the viewer adds the new skin and clothing layers and "bakes" them into a single set of textures, so that viewer seeing the avatar doesn't have to redo this work.

And it's a little more complicated than that, because the client also sends out the skin and clothing textures separately, and the viewers for the people watching do the slow thing until they get the baked update. However, I believe they're removing this complication. Just be aware that it's more complicated than I'm making it sound.

Textures on objects can change two ways
1) a script can change the texture explicitly -- causing texture re-rezzing if it's not in someone's viewer's cache
2) texture frame animation -- the texture has a "slide show" and cycles through them at a given rate, based on parameters a script sets once. This does not have the re-rezzing problem.

Neither of these options is available for avatars, using normal viewer. As mentioned above, a modified viewer could support option 1, but re-rezzing would be bad. Option 2 is not a possibility, unless everyone who sees you uses a modified viewer (and those using a normal one would see strange stuff).

You mean, make a skin where all 3 sections were the texture you set as your media texture, and just wear that skin?

Would that work outside your parcel?
So, even if the avatar is wearing a skin made of media texture, after baking it would end up with a different UUID and so wouldn't work. hmm. Again, one is back to a prim.
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I think the only way to get it on a skin is to have a hacked client say that the baked texture is the media texture uuid - no idea if the sim would like that, though.

Only if they had the same media texture uuid that you have.

Grabbing the baked head texture UUID and making it the media texture, then playing a talking head video onto it, would be interesting. Maybe something you could do on a model bot.

It used to work (without prims) - dunno atm.

Update: Right now it just changes when you hit "rebake" although if you go into Appearance you can see the movie.

Max Headroom!

I wish. I have always wanted a tattoo that is just a horizon of the ocean. It would be great if the sun and moon could rise and set on your tatoo in conjunction with the Linden day.

Is there a kosher (and easy!) way to do this?
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eyes pop ;0 i gotta try that...

p.s. darned, no it don't. :\ oh well, too much to ask for thru baked layers i guess... ;0 sure would be neat! :0 i saw some live clips of 'the presents' stageshow and they had giant electro-heads kinda onstage; would love to mimick that effect... yah guess you'd hafta resort to 'prop' prims to do so, for cross-viewer compatibility.

Rebake and when the download has finished look in your texture cache for the most recently changed file. The file name should be the UUID.