Female skin anomaly!!

I have a very good friend who has a very strange and intermittent problem with her high quality skin. These skins are not cheap and she has already bought the same skin again to try and alleviate the problem but to no avail, as now the anomaly has returned

The skin creator has replaced the skin but to be fair, it's not any fault of the skin creator.
Every now and then, the skin develops stripes across various parts of the body, usually the legs and occasionally chest area. Recently the stripes, which consist of slightly lighter and darker tints of the existing skin.
The skin was fine when bought as you would certainly notice these marks almost straight away.

Some one did mention that it could could be a problem with the Second Life asset servers and also client side cache was mentioned....which was emptied and member relogged but still same problem.
I was able to see the stripes and so did another person. It also shows up in photographs taken by me and the person who owns the skin.

Skins, which are just basically textures, cant change by themselves!! but the stripey pattern returns. Maybe if the file or texture skin had become corrupt then it would explain some graphic corruption..but obviously not then go away!

Anyway, I presume its okay to upload an example of what I mean so please take a look and see what you think....

http://www.filebucket.net/files/1451_xlare/J-Stripes.jpg

Any constructive advice, ideas etc would be appreciated

Taz

Definitely odd and if others are seeing it too then it isn't your graphics card, probably, as you said, a corruption, but more likely in the SL program on your end. You may want to just remove SL completely from your computer....do a disk clean up and then re-install SL from the web site.
If your version has somehow become corrupt, that's the best way to handle that. I've had weird things happen with textures...but never anything that re-bake didn't solve, so this is just my best guess.

Since you're both seeing it and it comes and goes, could it be the viewer you're using? The skin looks might 'oily', as in baby oil. Maybe the new RC (Windlight) is causing the 'reflections' on her skin to appear differently. After all, many do dislike windlight for how it makes there skin look.

Have your friend delete the file at C:\Documents and Settings\'User Name'\Application Data\SecondLife. This is where the cache lives, but sometimes problematic data remains after the cache has been cleared. If your friend keeps chat logs and didn't change the default path, they'll also be in here, so she may want to move them first.

Is that a 'wet' skin or is she using another layer? I'm just curious if it's this other layer that could be causing it.

Hmmm...I use body oil layers on my skins all the time and I've never had that happen......and I use windlight exclusively and skins always look great. The only issue I have with the body oils is I will have to change the tint slightly depending on the skin tone, to give it the proper sheen.

But, it could indeed be the rendering of that layer that is buggy and keeps coming back in the cached memory. Still...it shouldn't appear like that 'normally'....especially when most folks aren't having that issue. *shrugs*

There is no 'oily' layer applied. Her orginal skin looks like that. It does make her skin look very realistic and she has had many positive comments on it.

Because of the stripes, she did look for alternative high quality skins and we found some that were not too bad...they just looked dull in comparison!...and less realistic.
I dont know what many regard as 'the best' in female skins on SL but if anyone has any ideas, please mention!! . The place she bought her skin is very highly regarded

As I said, we did go and shop for other high quality skins and then looked for a 'body oil' to make it similar to her old one. The only trouble with that was the 'body oil' highlights didnt look very realistic around the arms, armpit and neck!. We (she) tried several.

Anyone know what is possibly the best 'body oil' texture?? (she would still prefer to just get a HQ female skin and not apply any 'body oil' as she has never had to before!


Appreciate everyones feedback..please keep them coming!...she's feeling pretty crap about it!!!


Taz

I use Nyoko's bodyoil and have never seen this happen. Not sure if it is the 'shiny' layer on the skin that was just my guess.

Two ideas.

1. Perhaps her avatar, not her skin, has actually become corrupted. To start over with a new avatar, make sure you know the names of your shape, skin, eyes etc., then go to:

Client > Character > Character Tests > Test female

This will give you the default female avatar. Log off. I would delete the cache file, as Ann suggests, at this time.

Log in and put all your normal look back on.

2. If that doesn't fix it, then perhaps her local texture baking for her avatar has something borked in her video card (a "flattened" prebaked version is uploaded from the client to the server, so everyone would see the problem). I'm not sure how the menus for this work in Windlight, but in older clients you'll see in one of the Graphics preferences screens a box for "composite layers", which is normally set to 5. Set it to 2 and relog. Hang out for a minute or so. Then set it to what you want and relog again. That should clear out any gunk.
.

Her 'shinyness' is intergrated as part of her skin..like a sort of 'baked glossy texure'
There all like that in the shop..no need for oily layers or textures after.
It's how they come.

"Perhaps her avatar, not her skin, has actually become corrupted."
Well when she re-bought the same skin again, problem went away!..that was a couple of weeks ago and now its back.

Wouldn't a corrupt avatar always show these sort of 'artifacts'?

It's a possiblity

Chosen Few's alpha channel rundown in the Texturing subforum describes an image corruption problem that hits a certain kind of alpha'd image seemingly at random. I don't know if it's the same type of corruption, but you may want to tell the skinner about it.

Look for "automated alpha": /109/32/80851/1.html

is she using a dual monitor set up?

or on a wireless connection?

sometimes these things can cause weirdness with the avatar

I had a similar issue, but it was with eyes. The eye area had some odd white areas. I changed the skins thinking it was skin...tried different makers. I tried different eyes...tried different makers. No Luck. I accidentally put on an old shape I had made prior to the current one the AV was wearing. Lo' and behold, the old shape cured the problem for me.

Apparently, the newer shape I had tweaked in SL had developed some sort of anomaly. I am not saying this will cure the issue you are having, but you might give it a try if you have created your own shape.

back in the day I had a similar problem with a corrupt default av, no matter what I did it kept coming back...

eventually traced down a sort of fix, tweaked the shape, saved, and poof, all back to normal... have you friend try this with or w/o clthing layers, just the smallest change, like1-2% on a slider.

What is the name of your skin? I have a skin from the same maker. One of my friends has one too, but lighter skin ton and someone else has the darkest tone, all shiny with oil built in. I have never seen that happen on any of our skins.

Do you both have the same or similar PC set ups and video cards?
I have seen similar lines on walls, do to my graphics card and limited drivers for the new Nvidia 8800GTS 512mb.

Right..were having the same problem with a new skin just bought..from somewhere else!!

tried the idea of teaking shape by 1-2% and resaving but to no avail. She is relogging as we speak..to see if that helps with the tweaking idea

The skin layer and any clothing layers are 'baked', that is to say merged into one texture, by the client. Usually when this baking fails, you can get all kinds of unsual problems with the avatar appearance. It usually indicates a problem with the video card and or drivers, as the video card is used to perform the baking. As previously mentioned, rebaking can sometimes help.