Skin texturing problems

I have started making skins but the texture on the head always looks different to the rest of the body when applied to an avatar mesh, why is that and how do I fix it?

Perhaps you are referring to image resolution? The head texture is a much higher resolution than the other two body sections. This will cause seam issues at the neck, and even within the head its self. The solution is to blur some sections of the texture a bit to match the lower resolution areas.

If your issue is something else, like color, then please describe it a bit more and maybe one of us can help.

Yes it is the colour. The seams are fine. But the head colour looks darker than the colour on the rest of the body.

It could be highlight and shades layers you have on your body. Even if the base color is the same, if you have highlighting and shading layers on your body it will have a different shade of color than the head.

..oh and check your base color to make sure it is exactly the same .. best you actually copy the color base from the body template to the face template

..check the opacity and blending mode ..could be an accidental change you did without noticing ( happened to me )

Wearing a face light?

Check to make sure your head texture is fully opaque (except in the eyelash area) and is the same file type (i.e. TGA or PNG). You need to be working with the same file types, or you will run into color issues. I recommend TGA. It has better color over PNG IMO.

this may sound stupid, but shouldn't the colors be idnetical for either format (assuming lossless compression on the png settings)? or is this a matter of the order of storage and a difference in handling by certain programs? (I don't use PNG for this sort of thing, so I really am clueless)

I'm no expert here......no kidding. But different formats handle different parameters differently. The very end result of any color (or any other digital expression) is the result of how it is handled to produce the desired effect. Compression taken out to the equation it boils down to just exactly how one format would interpet the same binary numbers to get to the final product. TGA has it's parameters, PNG has it's parameters....they are not identical (obviously) so the result is very likely to be different. In a perfect world it would not matter at all............but this in not a perfect world. Plus if every format handled every set of binary numbers the same then there would not be a need for different formats. Haveing a slight difference in colors is to be expected.

I'm just wondering if it's a matter of the specific program/library used to de/encode the file (perhaps different applications of color temp?), or the format which seems unlikely since both tga and png lossless should be handling 8bits per channel, + 8bit alpha (although how those are separated might make it possible for it to be a format issue, I suppose)

in other words is this an actual file type issue, or a specific program issue?

It's not a file type issue. Most applications that support both file types (like Photoshop) will handle the colors with no problems. This problem appears to be application specific, namely within SL. Since skin makers deal with extremely tight color tolerances they are usually the first to notice issues like this. Phenecia is not the first to complain of this color issue. There is at least one other thread floating around some place that talks about this very same thing (a mismatch in head to body color). The solution was to pick a single file type and stick with it.

All avatar textures get reduced to a single flat lossy J2C file by the time they come out the other end of the pipe, so there is a bit more going into the translation than what happens in an image editing application. I don't know exactly what is causing the problem, but I suspect it has something to do with the way SL is handling file translation with transparency. Just a guess.