Visible seams in skin. SOLVED

[Charolotte Caxton]

So lately I have noticed that the seam on my neck is very visible and almost as if my head texture is not fully rezzing. I tried changing skins and even tried some free demos. All skins are having this visible neck seam issue.

Has anyone else encountered this or know how to fix it?

I have cleared cache, both through preferences and by removing the texture cache in application data roaming and local.

Edit: Thanks, Peggy, but  this problem is new. The seam was never this noticable before. I have been in this same skin since January and have only recently noticed this issue. See also above the seam it's kinda 'blocky', like squares of some sort? I am wondering if I have corrupt data or something.

Here is a photo from January on the left and one I just took in the exact same outfit just now on the right. See the noticable neck line in today's picture but not in the one from January?

Edit: Thanks, Chic, the windlights are the same and I tried to get the lighting the same, but I think I was facing the sun more in the older photo. However, I did just recently buy new skin, and it has the same problem. In fact, every skin I put on has that noticeable seam, I even got several demos from different stores and they all have that problem.

So I am thinking some bit of data is corrupt somehow that is causing this weird glitch.

 

Edit: Solved!

So, I did a character test and rebuilt myself piece by piece, when I replaced my brow base, immediately the culprit was found! The picture on the left is with the brow base that was causing me problems, the picture on the right is with a different brow base, everything else is the same. Only when I put on that particular brow base does my skin become 'damaged'. 

Now, I don't know if the brow base itself is the culprit, but replacing it with a different one solved my issue.

Edit: I just tested some more, and a funny thing is happening. If I put on an entire outfit, my head texture is damaged, but once I change brows, it becomes fixed again, but the one that is causing me problems is the one that fixed my issue above, and replacing it with the one that caused problems, fixes it. So, the brow base is not the problem, but somehow the act of replacing brow bases causes my head texture to fully rez properly. Weird.

 

New Edit: After a day or so, the problem came back, no amount of changing brow base, clearing cache or anything was solving it for me. I submitted a support ticket and was linked to this page: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Troubleshooting-avatar-appearance/ta-p/1256955

Following the steps for If your avatar appears discolored or misshapen solved my problem. As a side note, they answered me on Thanksgiving, so a big thanks to them.

Hopefully this lasts :) 

[Peggy Paperdoll]

It's the different templates that skin makers have to deal with.  The head and upper torso templates are at different sizes which makes it near impossible to match the textures perfectly........which, when resized to the 512 x 512 texture size, causes the pixels to be either jammed tighter or spread out.  The color and detail for the two different textures don't match up like you would expect them to.  The problem also exists for the upper template and the lower template (and even for the front to back of those two templates (though to a much less noticible degree due to the sizes are not nearly as different as the head template to the upper template.  Some skin makers are better at it than others, but if you look closely at even the best of the skins you'll see it.

By the way, it looks like the skin maker knows about the problem and softened the difference by blurring the edges a bit.  That only works to a point though........blur too much and you get a drastic difference in the texture detail.  I've played with varying the tone to try to make it better but l've not had a lot of success (where it makes it "better" it makes it look artificial (almost cartoonish).  The darker toned skins seem to show the problem more for me.......lighter skins don't show it so much.

[Chic Aeon]

While I guess it could be a texture going batty, my experience with that is that it is WAY worse than what you see. It could be something as simple as a different Windlight setting. I can see that they are not the same in your photos OR you were wearing a facelight in the older and not in the later one. It could be a facelight issue too. Or an update in your graphic's driver maybe.

 

I had a skin with a bad seam in the waist area and didn't notice it for many months (it was a guy skin so I didn't wear it often .).  I attributed it to a change in Windlight. You might try playing around with that and see if it is as noticeable with other lightings. And you can always go skin shopping. Eleven months is a long time with technology moving as fast as it does. Good luck.