Safeguarding your Mesh against 32 bit Skin Textures

Safeguarding your Mesh against 32 bit Skin Textures


‘borrowed’ with permission from Galathir Darkstone ^.^

If you make a rigged or fitted mesh product that supports skin appliers and clothing layers over the skin, it is likely that at least one of you customers has run into a problem with the ‘skin’ seeming to vanish under the clothing. This is caused by a conflict between the overlapping 32bit textures. This is likely related to the long time alpha sorting issues we’ve seen on prims and un-rigged items for years now. I’ve been trying to get the word out to skin makers that they should use 24bit textures for their appliers… but as you can imagine, getting everyone notified… and then convinced it’s worth the time to redo the appliers is a challenge.

Well there’s good news. Thanks to Server Side Rendering and Materials, you have an option to make sure that 32bit textures are not an issue: Alpha Blending Mode. Now this is something you could set by hand in the Edit window, but testing seems to indicated that applying a 32bit texture -can- change it from your manual setting. So… the best solution is to make sure you set this in your scripting right after you apply the incoming texture. Now that the Parameters are live across the grid, this is simple enough.

This line of code, supplied with your link number and face number, will take care of it:

llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(linknumber,[PRIM_ALPHA_MODE,facenumber,PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_NONE,0]);

PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_NONE basically turns off the alpha channel, even if the texture is 32bit. Boom. No more vanishing skin.

Hope this helps.

~Galathir Darkstone
The Architect of Sin
Owner/Creator, Sinful Needs

Want more information about this problem?
http://slpoweredbyomega.com/galsboobies/