O Noes new viewer :(

The new viewer was supposed to fix it so that prims don't have to be greyed down in order to match. Well it did, and then some...

I uploaded a texture to use on a skirt insert (part of the actual texture is bordered in blue to show what color it was in PSP). I used to upload the texture, grey it a bit and get an ok match. But the insert shown is not greyed at all, and is a LOT darker. I can darken a prim but I can't lighten it.

I can see a future of many uploads till I get the texture for the insert to match the skirt. Any advice?

edit: sorry it's all so dark but was trying to show the colors (shades of black actually) as I have them in PSP

Yikes. If your pic is any indication, there are going to be a lot of pissed off attachment makers.

I'm wondering what approach they took to try to fix the problem. Did they simply darken the diffuse multiplier for attachments, or did they actually try to fix the normals? My understanding of the issue has always been that the reason it's so hard to match colors is because avatars reflect light differently from prims. The proper solution, therefore, would be to make the two reflect light the same way (which is probably much easier said than done), not just to lighten or darken the coloring of one or the other. Does anyone know what was actually done?

I don't know what they did, I've been trying things on like mad to see what I am going to need to fix...and so far, anything I have made in lighter colors (like teal and rose which I use often) is going to need a fix...my dark colors all seem to be fine. (The one above must fall into the lighter category because even though it is supposed to be black leather, it is more of a medium grey with lots of shading and highlights). But yes bleh...I can't imagine how many textures I will have to upload before I figure out just how much to darken or lighten them so that the prim matches the clothing.

Well this won't do at all. You could previously leave your attachment as mod so people could make it darker but if you have to make the actual textures lighter it would be unfixable by the user if another change happens in the viewer. What to do? Release broken unfixable content or sit on you hands intil this gets fixed?

Is this what you are all on about?

"Fixed: VWR-8012: Gray shading all over clothing and avatars inworld since 1.19.1 Windlight (note: murky grey shading on the avatar was removed!) [EDITED on 21:20 PDT to mention this]"

Link here:
http://forums.secondlife.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=2353215

Also… Winter Ventura says:

Second Life Viewer 1.22.11 includes a fix for VWR-8012, a VERY longstanding issue with the way that avatars are rendered in Second Life.

Before today, if a content creator wanted a prim attachment to match a skin (or clothing item), the texture on the prim had to be darker than the texture on the avatar. MANY content creators worked around this problem by applying a 25% grey shade to all clothing-integrated prims.

With 1.22.11, these darker textured, or shaded prims will no longer match their clothing counterparts. If you had items before today where the prims were "too light" you may find a happy surprise that those items now do match up properly.

But many people are going to encounter this, and perceive it as "Breaking content".. which in reality, it is breaking the workarounds. While many will incorrectly blame Linden Lab for breaking their favourite pants, shoes, shirts, or whatever, many many people will be turning their ire and confusion towards the content creators whose items looked great yesterday, but don't today.

As a content provider myself, I have taken a number of my most popular items offline, while I work today to provide a patched set of prims in the packages. I am sure I can't be the only one doing so. I am personally quite excited that this issue has finally been fixed, because it will make creating content easier and more intuitive in the future.

Seriously... this one, Linden Lab got right.

Awesome work guys!"

actually, no.

What happened was that they did the fix, fine. But when you upload a texture to put on a prim that is the exact same color as the clothing texture you uploaded, once on the prim it is too dark.

Previously, it was too light, and you could just use a bit of grey on it to darken it just a little and make it match.

When the texture is applied now, the prim is too DARK. (in many cases).

You could grey down a prim that was too light. But you can't go any lighter than pure white on a prim that is too dark.

So now, if I want a prim to match a skirt, I will need to just keep uploading the texture, until I have lightened it enough so that the prim will match the skirt.

ok I see, or lighten the fabric enough so that you know you can darken it to match, like before.

I have hundreds of outfits and avatars that I pulled that 'touch o' gray" out of and they're a perfect match now. As long as the prim texture and the mesh texture are identical, it will appear that way to me when worn. I wonder if it varies from one computer to the next? (O.o)

yes actually, I tried on everything that I sell to check it. I did have to remake one complete dress in all colors (luckily it was still on my HD and not stored on disc), and redo 2 colors of another, but thankfully it didn't hit me as hard as I feared it might. Go figure the one dress I had to redo completely was one of my biggest sellers or I might have just binned it

And the good news is that now new things will match easily without having to mess with the greys.

The matching problem now is really the same one you get when two different prims with the same texture don't always seem to match. Even through they now get lighting in the same way, the angle against the light source (sun) will be different for each so attachments will vary from the avatar and each other as the avatar and light source move :/

Pre-Windlight, avatars did get different lighting, but this wasn't documented and took the Windlight people by surprise. So, the gray casting on the avatars came in as an initial fix attempt. Then they found and turned off the brightness boost, but overlooked the gray thing that wasn't rediscovered and removed until 1.22.

Really strange, when I go into appearance, the colors match perfectly LOL.