Skin Question: What happened to my lips?

The story: I attempted to cobble together a simple head tattoo to wear while I work on making a full skin. In addition to the usual "well, I didn't know that would get stretched like that" issues that popped up, there was an issue with my lip color. They seemed darker and less pink than they did in PSP.

My alpha channel is okay around the lips, and my avatar isn't wearing any lipstick (not that this seems like it should matter, given the alpha channel). And the tattoo looked fine in preview, and I made sure the lighting in SL was good. So can anyone tell me why this happened? Am I just being thrown by seeing the lips against a flesh colored background for the first time?

Are your alpha channel totally white where lips are? If so, it should be okay. But you may want to upload a version without alpha channel just to confirm this.

Some darkness is to be expected as your avatar receives light and shadows, so it WILL look a little different than in your paint program. Could it be that you have a different gamma setting in SL than you use in PSP? That's the only thing that comes to mind right now.


Lis

I've checked the alpha channel; it's fine. I don't know how to check my gamma settings in PSP, though whenever I've changed the gamma setting in SL, it's affected the rest of my computer, so I don't think that's it. Maybe it really is just the shadows, though I've never had anything change color this dramatically, and it was pretty disappointing to see my oh-so-carefully colored natural lips turn into an expanse of brownish hooker lipstick.

Perhaps you can either ask a Linden next time your're online - have one of them over to take a look. You can also send me an IM when online - I'll be happy to come take a look. Or post pics here of lips in SL and as from PSP (just put an X over them or something to make sure nobody takes your texture). May give the people reading this forum an idea what's going on. I've made much makeup, and have personally never experienced what you describe. Do you have local lights or shadows on? They play a big difference when it comes to how your avatar looks.


Lis

The better image editing apps will allow you to use different colour profiles for your work than would be used by your computer. If you work in a different colour profile than what your work will appear in your colours can come out looking rather distorted which is what it sounds like you ran into here. Try to open a SL screen capture with a basic image viewer or a web browser then open it in your image app and find a colour profile that gets it to look the same as the image opened in the other apps. Then use that profile in your future work.

Edit:
Also pay close attention to what the colours are like in the preview window before agreeing to the upload. Open SL in windowed mode then with that in the back ground open your image editor and compare the colours. Adjust the colour profile in your app till they match. For web and SL work sRGB should be a good profile to work with. Once you have the right colour profile the colours you use in your app will then appear in your final work uploaded in world.

No, no local lighting or shadows.

I'm looking a lot more closely, and I think this is another issue of textures warping once they actually get onto the avatar, coupled with overshading on my part. I went for what looked good in my 2D paint program, rather than what would look good in a 3D program, and put in a lot of shading -- and it turned out that all that shading covered a lot of the lips. This all makes me kick myself, of course, because I've never found a skin I didn't think was overshaded (and it's a huge peeve of mine), but at least I know what not to do next time.

Thanks, everyone.

Hi Miriel!

Don't forget that the inside row of what looks like the lips in the UV Map is actually inside the mouth on the model. So, when you shade it, the part that appears to be in the middle of the lips isn't really. It's about where the lips join.

As you can see from this picture, only two rows of polys on the bottom lip, and 3 on the top, are actually visible on the face when the mouth is closed. The middle of the lower lip is between those two rows, and the middle of the upper lip is around the middle row. (But the mouth looks better if you don't color all the way to the outer edges of the polygon lips, IMHO.)



Anyway, you might want to bear that in mind, when you're coloring the head. (If you want to see the polys that are hidden, I have a picture of that here.)

Hope this helps!