Software Avatar texture baking, please?

Is there any way to bake an avatar texture entirely through software?

The way I understand it, as it works now, when an avatar has to bake a texture, it downloads all the texture layers to the client's computer, composites them together, and then posts the result back to the [asset?] server. From there, it's downloaded by the client of anyone who asks for your avatar texture (ie, anyone who can see you).

The problem is that textures are composited in video memory using video hardware acceleration (or so I understand). At the moment, when my computer attempts this, the alpha blending step completely fails, adding each layer as completely opaque. This rather understandably horribly breaks my avatar, requiring me to log on through a friends' computer and re-bake my textures.

Is there any way to set avatar texture baking to pure software? Alpha compositing is not a particularly CPU intensive operation, and I would much rather have correct textures, a bit slower, than turning black and purple when I try to change clothes. The debug menu mentions "Software blending SSE" under the Character menu, but that does not seem to do it.

I'm sure that there is a bug somewhere in the access to my video card that is causing this draw anomaly, but it would seem so easy to provide a fallback for. Is there a way to do it? I have some nice MMX-and-SSE accelerated alpha compositing code around if LL needs any...


REPLY (since I can't actually reply to the post any other way):
I'm running in Linux under Wine, so I'm probably not "supported". I know the card is not *supposed* to do this, but it does. Doing the usual rebake tricks ensures that it'll rebake incorrectly, because the baking stage acts as if the alpha channel is set completely opaque. Is there a way to bake textures through software, to avoid this problem?

Hi Solar--I don't know a way to do this at present, but what you describe is related to a number of other avatar bake problems you are likely familiar with. For example, sometimes, when I alt-Tab very quickly between SL and other applications like Firefox, particularly when I'm in Appearance mode (and thus multitasking), I end up "wearing" what appears to be a web browser window on my skin!

I wish I knew which graphics card you have, because if it's supported and your system is solid and stable otherwise, it shouldn't do this.

I wonder what happens if you do the usual workaround, which is: going into Appearance, slightly dragging a slider related to the affected parts (Height generally works well), Save All, and leave Appearance. Also, if you look "normal" when you go into Appearance, that's another telltale sign of what's happening. This is a "forced rebake" method.

However, in any case, there is a larger avatar project on the horizon which will hopefully implement a far better way to bake your avatar textures without these sorts of nasty side effects.

Take care!