Textures look different: prims vs clothes

Those of you who are experienced clothing designers probably already know this, but I'm flummoxed right now. (And I love that word)

I'm creating some prim skirts that also use the regular avatar skirt or jacket under them to cover the butt, applying the same textures to both the prims and the skirt/jacket so they hopefully mesh with each other.

When I do, the prim texture is very crisp and bright but the skirt/jacket texture looks dull and darker. They do not match even though I'm using exactly the same texture file on both.

Part of the problem may be that my source is a high-resolution fabric texture that is so good I can see the individual cross-hatch of the thread weave. I'm not sure. The way it's looking right now the only way to solve this issue might be to lower the resolution on my prim textures, and I hate to do that.

Any experience or input/advice on a problem like this?

Not a definitive answer by any means (just a theory) but I have noticed that the "step-down" (if thats a word) on the textures on prims and clothing is different for each.

If you are using anything higher than a 512x512 texture you are kind of wasting your time on clothing as I believe the system automatically lowers the resolution to that simply to control the immense lag that used to be caused by folks using 1024x1024 textures on clothing. So if you are using higher than 512 I don't think it will ever display anyway.

Similarly, the resolution of the texture on eh prim that is served to your client depends on what the original resolution was but also on various algorithms designed to present your client with the best resolution for the situation. So I think the "rules" for each situation are different maybe? I would try the same clothing at several different texture resolutions to see if there is a size at which the textures match better.

I think there might be other issues at work also though, this is just one consideration only.

I would agree that you do not want to use a texture that is more than 512 x 512 resolution. Clothes can only display a max of 512 x 512, while prims can display higher resolutions. So if you had a 1024 x 1024 fabric texture, the version on the clothing gets reduced by SL 'on the fly', and won't look as good as it would if you have scaled the texture to 512 x 512 in oyur graphics app, before importing it. It would also not match the prims.

There may be another factor here, however. A bug was recently reported where if local lighting is on, prim objects illuminated by a local lighting source appear brighter 'at night' than everything else. It's been driving the makers of some prim-based avatars (mostly furries) crazy, because the heads and paws and other parts look like they are glowing at night, when they used to be perfectly matched to the textures on the avatar skin and other non-prim parts.