black areas on AV

For almost the past month, since my AV was about 2 weeks old, I've had black areas randomly appear on the skin. I can't find a pattern, though they usually appear when putting on clothes (shirt & pant layers more so than underwear layers) and I can sometimes get it to go away for a period by changing skins or removing all clothes. The areas that turn black are the back of my neck, back of my arms, and my calves. I've tried clearing cache, rebaking, new skins/shapes/clothes by different creators, AOs off, etc etc ad nauseum. I've tried it on 3 different computers with no improvement. The graphics card on the usual comp is outdated, but another I use infrequently is brand new and shows the same black areas. Any advice/resolution would be greatly appreciated.

Eoin,

There's a few possibilities but it would really help if you can give us exact specs on the operating system and G-card you use, as well as internet connection. Those kinds of techno details are important when trying to nail down the cause of a lot of SL glitches.

Thank you Milla, the most used comp runs XP, Intel 82865G card, and a T1 LAN. 2nd most used run Vista, don't know card atm, and is cable internet. This weekend I tried it on a comp that uses XP, unknown card, and DSL. All three share the black spot problem. Please let me know if there is more info I can provide.

Did you try to rebake textures Ctrl-Alt-R?

When I'm running on my 2nd monitor (dual displays) I always get "black areas" on my AV - sometimes my entire body. It has got to the point where I only change clothes/attachments on my primary display.

The same thing happens to me. I have assumed it is some failure in my graphics card to correctly manage the second monitor.

Rebake does nothing for me. I can understand it being a graphics card issue on my primary comp, but even then why would it be visible to others in SL? Why would it carry over to a new comp with a good card?

I love that I know this one, I'm so often lost on issues lol. For those talking about dual monitors, if you log in with your SL window on your 2nd monitor you will apparently (pretty much) ruin one or more article of whatever you are wearing. I have a rather expensive skin that went black on the head (and later the entire body) because of this before I figured out the issue. If you want to run SL on your 2nd monitor, just be sure to log in on the 1st and move it over after. Then there should be no problems at all. Well, thats just one possible cause though I have yet to see another that has such a simple fix. =)

Edit to add: Over time most things that I ruined with this issue returned to normal. The expensive skin did not, it was flat out trashed and has always remained black. I dont know how or why, but it is. So some items are lost for good, some arent. *shrugs* Go figure.

I believe that when you rebake your textures the actual baking is performed client-side and the baked avatar texture is then uploaded to the server. That is why a problem that is caused by a graphics card can nevertheless be seen by other people even if they have better hardware - if your local graphics card mucks up the avatar textures and uploads mucked-up avatar textures, those are the textures everyone else will see.

Someone else with more hardware smarts can undoubtedly give a more precise explanation.

I had an problem where if i clicked out the SL screen the textures i had would suddenly pickup my wallpaper when i clicked back into the window. Rebaking helped sometimes other times I had to go to the network preferences and empty cache to clean it up.

Can try the cache to fix some issues.

Quoted for truth. Everyone listen to this person.

hi everyone, i am having this same exact problem, it started out onthe underside of my the fingertips, then a black stripe down my back, then in front of my ears and top of my head, and now, in addition to ALL this, its on the inside of my ankles too. Now i am confused about something, when you say dual monitors, do you mean to literal pc screens? Or, do you simply mean running two windows of SL at the same time (i.e. running primary avi plus an alt, but both on the SAME COMPUTER with ONE MONITOR, just the two SL windows opened side by side on same monitor)..

any help would be greatly appreciated, i am running a Dell Studio 17 w/ Vista 32, Intel Chipset 965 graphics card (integrated, and not a good one, all drivers have been updated) and have a good speed DSL connection.