What causes the "holes"

in prim skirts? Sometimes I wonder if I did something wrong cuz the skirt looks invisable in some places. Ive attached a picture, its kind of small. Is there anyway around those?

I can't see what is going on in your picture very well, but I'm assuming your skirt texture has an alpha channel? Any transparency will cause alpha flicker. When I make skirts, I put another layer of flexi prims under the upper layer with the same texture but minus the transparency, and it dramatically reduces the flicker.

I can't really tell from the picture, but I suspect you may be describing the results of the "alpha texture glitch". It's a problem that affects a lot of things in SL that use transparencies in textures.

Yes, that's exactly what it is. I seem to remember describing the alpha sorting problem to you in an earlier thread. This is it again. Betty is right. You can make this a two-layer skirt, making the inner layer without an alpha channel, as she suggests. You can create a nice shimmery effect that way sometimes. Or you can make a non-prim underskirt. Both methods are popular. In the end, there's no way to avoid having flicker if you put an alpha channel in a texture you want to use for a prim skirt. Build it into your design and live with it.

EDIT: Here's a photo of a simple skirt that uses the two-layer approach. The flicker gives it a nice, ethereal look. Soft and feminine......

By Alpha do you mean transparency in the texture of the skirt? I dont have any of that. Heres a better pic of what I mean.

How is that done? do you make 2 skirts then link them together? I have a problem with the skirt matching the color depth of the upper clothing let alone adding a transparency to it and I upload my own color panel just so everything I make inworld matches.

Yes. Are you saving your texture as a tga or png? I haven't tried png on anything that wasn't supposed to have transparency, but I've read this can happen with png textures even when they don't have any transparency. If you're saving as a png, I'd resave it as a 24-bit tga, and you shouldn't have this issue.

Incidentally, this isn't a PNG issue. It's an issue in the way the program saves the file. Gimp is capable of saving 24-bit PNGs... and 32-bit BMPs! I discovered that when I uploaded an image as BMP to try and make sure it had no Alpha channel and it ended up Alpha anyway.

Let's get the language straight. The problem is an overlap of 32-bit textures, which you can create by including an alpha channel or by saving a file (TGA or PNG or BMP) as 32-bit instead of 24-bit. The point is that the extra 8 bits beyond the 24 that carry RGB information in each pixel may end up being interpreted in SL as transparency. When that happens, it is quite possible to see the "alpha sorting glitch," as the OP has. Her first posted photo is a nice, classic image of the sorting problem -- flicker between 32-bit textures close to each other and in the line of sight. Her second one is similar, but patchy, as you might expect when some portions of the texture have spurious data loaded into the non-RGB channels. The advice remains the same.... Don't use transparency if you don't need it, and be careful not to create it accidentally by saving a file as 32-bit when it should be 24-bit.

Yah, the confusion is that some programs (I'm looking at YOU, Photoshop) don't let you specify explicitly what parameters and layers you're including in a file... even if you explicitly flatten the image before saving it to eliminate any alpha layers or channels.

If Gimp had better structured layer handling I'd never use Photoshop again.

There's no reason to flatten a Photoshop image before you save it. And you CAN select which layers will be active in the saved image. Just turn off the eye icons on any layers you want to de-activate. If your problem is that you have an alpha channel and don't want to use it in your uploaded file, just save TGA as 24-bit.

This one comes up now and again. PS does make PNG alpha optional, but the switch isn't available unless you take a detour into Save for Web (oh so helpfully, Adobe calls it PNG-24 there even if you're getting 32 bits of data).

Even if you only select a single layer, even if it's the background layer, Photoshop will save a PNG as a 32 bit image, and it will save a BMP as a 24 bit image.
Whether I am saving as TGA, BMP, or PNG, Gimp allows me to select whether I'm saving a 32- or 24- bit file in the save dialog.
Well, thanks. They really need to get their act together and settle on a single save dialog.

No argument there. I don't know why Adobe put the 24-bit PNG option in a place you wouldn't think to look for it. It IS there, though. It's mentioned often enough in this forum that maybe people who use PNG will learn .... until Adobe finally does an update that pulls it into the daylight.