Problems with appearance

Hi there,

I'm hoping that someone can help me with a couple of problems I'm having with my appearance.

Most of the time when I log in I look normal (and fully dressed), except that the skin on my face is different from the rest of my body (it's a lot darker than the skin colour I chose). Is this something only I can see or can everyone see this? Most other people look normal to me but some others (who I presume to be newbies as well) have the same problem.

And sometimes when I log in I'm completely naked, but the skin on my face is the correct colour. At first I thought only I could see that I was naked as in my inventory it lists the clothes I'm wearing. So I was happily walking around Help Island in the nude! It wasn't until I got a bit of unwanted male attention that it dawned on me that everyone could see me naked - I asked someone to make sure. I can never tell when I log in what I'm going to look like, there doesn't seem to be a pattern.

I've tried rebaking textures, which doesn't work no matter how many times I do it. I've trawled the knowledge base and the forums but can't find a solution to my problem.

Does anyone know of anything I can do to make my appearance normal? It's really bugging me.

Thanks heaps,

Ariadne

I tend to change clothes/skins once or twice, then rebake textures by editing appearance to help with this.

Turning down draw distance can sometimes help.

Are you still on the original help island or have you left it yet? If you left it already, try porting to a mostly empty sim and rebaking.

I don't know for sure what the problem is, but it could just be that skin.

Try buying a new one or making a new one.

If that doesn't work, then it's beyond my knowledge.

A very easy way to find out is to go to a skin store and buy a demo. Let it rez and see how it looks on you. You can do this for free and very quickly, or you could just try and make a new skin and see if it fixes the dark face.

Well, I think we have all been having problems with missing textures, but this is the first instance I have heard of someone showing up nude, unintentionally that is .

I have gotten into the habit of rebaking and also going into modify appearance and back out everytime I TP someplace. You might try changing clothes to see if that helps.

I'm hoping that they have done something with this whole missing image issue in todays release.

I know when i see lagg in an area everything starts out GREY like clothing and such, then it starts to load, but can someone tell me why I am seeing alot of avatars with WHITE bidies and or faces and saying "missing" something or another, some will have clothes on but face is white with words on it. what is that?

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll try them when the grid is back up (tomorrow my time). Hopefully, something will work. I was hoping this was a known problem, if anyone else has any ideas that would be great.

Earl, I've noticed the same thing too - avatar's clothes or whole bodies are white, sometimes with black writing on them.

Last patch LL implented a new way to render clothes textures. The parts behind other layers that are covering the inner ones will not be rendered. Or rather, the system makes a whole new texture, showing only the visible textures, then applies that.

A problem (which no one at LL has responded to, to my knowledge) is that some clothes have transparencies that the system doesn't recognise. Layers that should show, wind up not being rendered.

If you are always in the same clothes (A possibility for new Residents just starting), try shuffling to other clothes. The Jacket layer covers parts of both torso and legs, so can effect the whole body, including the skin layer.

Today's update has an image rendering focus, so this may be fixed without doing anything at all.

~Jessy

Thx for the reply I just thought it way me seeing that

There have been a couple entries in the Official Linden Blog addressing the problem of missing textures so we know that Lindens are aware of it and are working on a solution. Don't know if there will be anything in todays release that will fix it though.

Kelly Linden wrote a nice piece explaining the more technical side of baked textures back in September. I would add the link but non-techie that I am have not quite figured out an easy way to do that, Sorry

It's actually always been that way. Whenever you change an article of clothing or go into appearance mode and back out, your client takes all your clothing layers and bakes them in to three or four textures (head, upper body, lower body, and skirt if you're wearing one) and sends those textures to the asset server. Anyone who has you in their draw distance receives those textures from the asset server. That way anyone who sees you doesn't have to load every single clothing, skin, and tattoo texture that you're wearing.

They changed that in the previous update (or the one before that?); baked textures are now stored at the sim-level to help reduce the stress on the asset servers.

The blog also mentioned that it's possible for the viewer to reconstruct a missing baked texture (on an avatar other than your own) by downloading all the layers and drawing them on top of each other but I didn't quite understand that too well .

References:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/09/18/getting-technical-baked-avatar-textures/
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/11/gray-and-missing-image-avatars/
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/11/gray-and-missing-image-avatars/#comment-7581

[Edited to include James Linden's comment about the composite limit and transparency problems with clothing]

Thanks for the links, Kitty I'd missed that post before. And now I know what the outfit composite limit does! I'd heard a lot of theories about it before but apparently all of them were wrong, hehe.

Thanks heaps for your help and suggestions everyone! Thanks Kitty for the links - they were very informative.

So, I went to a quiet sim, that I had completely to myself, with a view over water so there wasn't anything in the background. I rebaked textures numerous times, took off all my clothes, rebaked textures, changed skins, rebaked textures, changed clothes, rebaked textures, went in and out of appearance mode, logged in and out, rebaked textures. Nothing seems to work! I don't even appear naked anymore (except when I actually am), my face skin is constantly a different colour to my body skin.

On my normal skin, my face appears very dark brown.

I have a seperate lighter toned skin, on this my face is pitch black.

I have a seperate well-tanned skin, on this my face is pasty white.

Other people can see it too, I was talking to a really nice guy last night who asked me if I knew my face was black. I don't know what to do? I'll wait a while and see if its different after the inconvenience around the update has died down (by the way isn't an update meant to make things better? I now have really bad lag and packet loss when before everything was relatively fine).

If all else fails I may have to completely uninstall and reinstall second life on my computer and hopefully that would work. If I do this will I still have all my $L, inventory items and appearance changes?

Cheers,

Ariadne

You probably did already but have you tried clearing your cache? (Edit / Preferences / Network; then close SL and relog).

I'd also try filing a bug report if you haven't (they do follow up on those when needed ) and try to get a Linden on Live Help to tp over to you and verify the problem.

Try playing with the different options on Graphics Detail tab in the preferences window as well. (I don't know why but when I do have the occasional problem of things looking wrong switching them around magically solves it ). If Avatar Rendering is set to bump mapped switch it to Normal (or the other way around), or clear the first and third option at the top.

It's already over two years and seemed to be caused by a multi-monitor puter but if that applies to you maybe read over /111/a8/18232/1.html and specially /111/a8/18232/1.html#post174481 which offered a solution that worked for the thread starter.

You won't loose anything at all, all your inventory, L$ balance, etc is stored on SL's servers so there's no harm in trying that.

Hope you get your problem sorted out quickly so you can get on with enjoying SL .

Thanks heaps Kitty, I'll try those things that I haven't before (and those things that I have done before). It's good to know uninstalling will have no effect on my stuff. Hopefully it will work, I've heard stories of bug reports going more than a week without being answered!