Blue lines on Av/char

First things first - some terminology. What is a Baked Avatar Texture and why do we need them or care? Every avatar’s appearance is made up of many layers of images (skin and clothes), each one with special parameters (all those clothing sliders) that are all layered onto each other to create what we see. Compositing such images in real time is not trivial, in fact it can be a significant resource drain on your local machine. We can do it for a few avatars at a time, but not much more than that. So what we do is we composite or flatten these images down to a single image for each portion of the body - there are upper, lower, head, skirt, hair and eye composites. The last two don’t really get much compositing. We call these flattened images “Baked”. Hence the term Baked Avatar Images.

Each viewer is responsible for baking the images of their own avatar and then uploading them for everyone else to use. Then instead of trying to flatten 20 images based on various additional parameters to create the look of an avatar, there are just 4 or 5 images that perfectly represent all of that information with no baking required. If you think about this you will understand why a bad bake on your machine means everyone else will see the wrong thing, or why a problem in the bake or upload process may mean that you see the right thing (either from a cached copy of the bake, or because you are compositing in real time) while everyone else sees something wrong.