Nalates Urriah

This comes down to trying the demos. Some make skin for specific brands of heads. But, that has been more about the appliers than the UV Map, which gets things where they are supposed to go... like the nose skin on the nose part of the mesh. All heads use a similar UV Map. The tweaks I have see are minor. But, my experience is limited. Catwa's CSR @Skell Dagger is more knowledgeable and while likely has some bias has been what I consider honest and objective in the answers I have seen him giving. I am saying I think you can trust him to give you an honest answer. Because they are all similar I think we will find more and more skins for whatever brand are interchangeable. Head-brand is likely only an issue if you plan to use the Applier. So when you see a skin you like try the demo of it with your head and body.

Once upon a time... this was true. The newer SSD's have much better longevity. SSDs made in the last 2 maybe 3 years can stand about as much read/writing as a hard disk and now fail less often than a HD. Life expectancy for business use is like 10 years. (Reference) There is another limit they talk about with SSDs, total data written to... in general it is now 150 Terabytes. Think about that. But, only the bits being repeatedly written to die. The typical home user is not going to see a SSD fail before the computer is too old to be worth using. So, life of SSD is not an issue, except in special cases. Any app that needs to store or read a lot of data to or from the storage can benefit by having its data on the SSD. For instance the viewers cache. But, if you do a lot of building and spend a lot of time in various viewer panels it can be nice to have the viewer's program files on the SSD too. However, for best performance buy a lot of system RAM and use a RAM-Drive, which is WAY faster than an SSD. One also has to consider how the SSD is connected to the system. They need lots of PCIe bandwidth. But some drive replacement SSDs use the SATA interface that HDs use. Those interfaces are designed for HDs and are too slow for an SSD. So, you pay for an SSD to get only slightly better than HD performance. Low cost motherboards have a narrow PCIe bus that has to carry the graphics and data plus storage traffic. Not ideal.

The English language FS Support Group in-world almost always has a number of people answering questions during 6 AM to 9 PM SLT. Outside those hours it gets a bit hit and miss. There are other language groups for FS and they likely have different hours. I only speak English and Profanity so I am not familiar with those other groups.

See if you can get to the viewer's HELP->About... You don't have to log in. Copy paste the information from About in this post.

Or... you can always try rolling the computer back to a state before the problem started. Works for 8 and 10. The 'restore' app you need can usually be found by typing Restore Point into the Windows Search in the lower left. You can Google Win8 or Win10 restore to an earlier point for more detailed instructions. Upgrading to Win10 from a 8.1 can take some time, like hours. Any misstep can wipe your data. So, backup. Once installed do a Create Restore Point. That gives you a good point to revert back to if something goes wrong later on.

I think you can email letmein@lindenlab.com. As a new user your chance of getting permission is slim. If you have an older account, use that.

At SL17B I found a section of psychological tools designed for rapid attitude adjustment. I think this one should work well. The guns are almost big enough. Black Dragon is way fun for making poses on the fly, which I did in this snap. I should probably have 2 of these for this thread... Yeah... good description. And I agree. There is a section of posts here where people talk about why they don't care about the likes, what the likes mean when they click... There is definitely a diverse crowd here each with their own ideas. I suspect most post here simply post because they like to. Some of us like to showoff... Anyway... I think that section of posts proves your observation is on point. There are a load of great images here. Some gorgeous avatars. Some awesome talent. I think many of us enjoy seeing the newbies making their first posts. I see this as a fun thread for all but... some seem to forget the fun part. It isn't hard to ignore the drama queens and virtue signalers that respond to them... but it is often more fun to talk over their heads while ignoring them and skipping image to image.

Actually, you don't. It is a viewer bug. You will have to wait until the Lindens fix it.

I suspect most people have no idea of the history of BLM and many think there is no BLM organization. After all, that is what the media is telling people. YoungRappa59 puts things into perspective, getting real. Listening to one of the founders of BLM is enlightening. Enjoying the sound is one thing. Hearing the message is another. Be informed and know who you are supporting.

Every so often I decide to tweak my shape. I think I make it better, of course. And I have a whole arsenal of SL weapons I can use on those that disagree... I mean... just to prove I'm right... 🤣 After I made the image I noticed the second 'do' looks like I just took out the box-braids... I switched to the darker eyes a couple of weeks ago. I like the lighter eyes, but I think they look awful in any image other than a close up image. I am playing with another shape adjusting guide for facial features. Using Black Dragon to play with facial expressions has given me more respect for those making animations for mesh heads. I am also more curious about what works better in SL for looks and use with animations.

I've seen some building-outsides. But, not a large drug store with an interior. You may have to search Flickr for an image that will work. You can 'over' remove noise to get a more virtual world look.

If your friend is using Black Dragon (BD) viewer your ACI is likely well over its default limit. BD uses a different algorithm to calc ACI. So, if he uses the recommended ACI limits most people talk about, he'll have problems. My FS setting of 150k needs to be something like a 1,000k+ in BD. If you have been wearing three bodies I say your ACI would be well above 38k. However, your name tag only shows a 5 digit complexity number. So, we are all guessing your friend has a super low ACI limit. There is little you can possibly ask that has not been asked several times before. Not knowing something is not stupidity. Nor is SL a puzzle one has to figure out. It does have a high learning curve. Ask your questions to get help and get past the tedious frustrating parts and to the fun stuff.

...just the skin on the face... With makeup and post-production below

Belinda, see if this helps. I wrote it for someone that as here years ago and is now back. It is a bit simpler. When the viewer sees a BOM attachment worn it just does not render the part of the avatar under it. So, head, upper, and lower are the individual parts that are ignored. If you wear a mesh BOM body that does not have hands or feet, you won't have hands or feet as they are part of the upper and lower parts automatically not being rendered. So you'll know WTH is wrong... the transparent parts render as waring colors. The head is the third part... no alpha. The render engine just ignores the whole thing. So that alphas work as we expect they can't just be ignored. To avoid confusion the BOM viewers render an alpha'd ignored part with a warning color. The colored parts are to give us a clue we did it wrong. So, no mesh texture to render plus only a classic alpha to render equals a warning texture, red, blue, yellow. There is NOT supposed to be an alpha on the classic body as that is just another texture to be loaded that is not going to be used. You have LOTS of company! Over the last 3 or 5 years new people have come in and climbed the rather steep learning curve that Appliers created. BOM serves several purposes. One of those is to reduce the learning curve down to the easier classic avatar level the viewers are designed to support. It also makes it easier to make tats, makeup, and skins. For you, it adds a new learning curve and that is a PITA. Sorry. Plus you have to dig into the history of SL and the older ways of doing things with the classic avatar. Many of us have the old experience as a foundation for understanding the SL avatar. Orwar is right. BOM is a big improvement. Both performance-wise and learning curve-wise. I know it doesn't seem that way to you. If you decide to make a tattoo, you'll be surprised how easy it is to do now compared to making an Applier tattoo.

I'll try to explain in terms that will make sense to someone from the classic body era. When I came in in 2007 the classic avatar was all there was. Skin and tats were just skin and tats. Clothes were shirts, skirts, underwear, socks, jacket... OR they were a prim attachment. Along came mesh and we got mesh clothes and a bunch of problems we had to work around. A solution to good portion of the problems was Standard Sizes. The idea was we fit our avatar to the mesh clothes we attached. That turned out to be unpopular. So, some clever people figured out how to make Liquid Mesh. This was mesh that responded to some of the shape sliders. Now clothes sort of fitted the body. At this point the Lindens decided they needed to do do something. They cleaned up the Liquid Mesh hack and made Fitted Mesh which responded to all the shape sliders. Now clothes fit... sort of. With fitted mesh clever people begin to make better bodies and heads. And of course clothes. But, each designer was doing their thing so stuff is/was not interchangeable. So, you need clothes made for a Slink body if you wear a Slink body. The big problem is/was the avatar is the only thing/object in SL that can handle texture layers. For us to be able to put makeup on a mesh head we needed some way to stack textures as we do with the classic avatar. Makeup on top of tats on top of skin... etc. The mesh solution was onion skins... Russian dolls... one inside the other. So, mesh bodies had a copy of the body for skin, another slightly larger for tats, another slightly larger for makeup, hair, lipstick, blush, etc. Basically 4 or 5 copies of the body each a tiny bit larger. Now there was the problem of getting a skin on the skin layer. And how were we going to select the tat layer that existed between the skin and underwear? Scripts were the answer. Thus APPLIERS were invented and became all the rage. For those people that came in during the last 3 or 5 years, Appliers is all they have known. Once again the Lindens stepped in. In the last year they released BOM. This system lets us take the original skin, tats and what ever we see in inventory as skin and tats and put them on our classic avatar and via BoM they appear on our mesh body attachment. (This was done to reduce the explosion of 1024 textures being worn by avatar - think performance) We had to have someway to talk about all these things and be clear what we were talking about. I doubt we ever actually achieved clarity. But the try was made. So, the Classic skin you know as Skin with its own icon in inventory became Classic or system skin or system layers... same icon in inventory, just a new name for users to use. Nothing has really changed since your day... technically we changed away from system skin to applier skin and now we have changed back. But, there is a generation of residents that is feeling very lost. If you with your old knowledge of SL talk to them... you get really confused. So, with bodies and heads YOU want BOM ready stuff. Then it will work just like your classic body... and look much better. Ignore everything Applier labeled. As you get the hang of things you'll see that appliers are still useful. A classic avatar cannot make use of the materials system in SL. That probably has been added while you were away too. Mesh bodies and heads can as they a basically a fancy prim. With a mesh body I can have 3D water drops that dynamically reflect (reflection changes as the avatar turns) local lights. They can be shiny on a mat skin. On the classic avatar they are 2D and skin and water are both mat with any reflections painted on and static. To use materials on a mesh body we still use an applier. There are tech issues not solved that keep materials incompatible with the classic avatar. I hope this helps you make sense of things.

I wanted to play with the Plastik skins I got. This is one, Aleatrice. I am still playing with facial expressions in Black Dragon. They are more difficult than I thought.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Fears Trebled/52/32/68 - There are no large images here. Everything I can see is at max 1024 and a couple may be less. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bay City - Maddequet/225/104/26 - There are some wall paintings on prim cubes less than 2m x 2m that probably use 1024 textures. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bay City - Brewster/248/113/25 - Again this areas has maybe 2m by 3m prim cubes with a texture image likely 1024. In none of these areas was anything special or unusual done with the images. Nor are any of these what I would consider large images. I consider them typical. I think your question comes from misunderstanding what you are seeing on your screen. Consider. Your computer screen is likely 24” (0.61m) and that is measured diagonally from bottom left to top right. How can you see a 2x3 meter prim on that little screen? Because the computer is scaling the image. The scaling is very fluid. Roll your mouse wheel. You can zoom out to the point a 2x3m prim is a single dot on your screen. Or zoom in until only a tiny tiny part of the prim fills the whole screen. Now consider that prim having a 1024x1024px texture on a single face/side. When the prim is so small it is 1px across on the computer screen then the computer has to figure out how to place all 1024x1024 = 1,048,576 pixels in one pixel (dot) on your screen. At the opposite end you zoom into the point where maybe only a 10th of the prim is visible to fill your whole computer screen. You can only see a 10th of the 1024x1024 image (102x102 = 10,404px). Those 10k of pixels have to fill your 24” screen that likely uses 1920x1080px = 2,073,600px. The computer is figuring out how to fake (2,073,600 - 10,404 😃 2,063,196 pixels. The viewer and the computer cooperate to provide what it thinks is the best render of those 10k pixels on its 2mega pixel screen. Depending on what you are doing the image will render as blurry or pixelated and possibly a blend of both..

Slink's new packages come with 5 feet... ummm... foot positions. The body, feet, and hands require one attachment point. Or there is a separate body, feet, and hands.

The link lands me on an empty parcel at ground level...

Have you worked with Media on a Prim?

You seem to have a challenge with the idea of an applier. I'll see if I can simplify the idea. When you make a classic/system skin there is a point where you place the skin textures (called the diffuse layer in 'materials' jargon) in the slots provided in a new skin, head, upper, and lower body. This is sort of what an applier does. But, with classic/system an applier is not needed. Just the system skin layer you are used to. Mesh bodies and heads are a type of prim. If you were to put your skin-texture on a cube you would open the Build Panel and edit the prim's texture. You would likely select a face and then drop the texture into the panel. Poof, the texture appears on the cube. That is exactly what an applier does just via scripts. Of course the scripting and prim names and ALL the prim settings make things complexingly tedious to get right for an applier. Making it less a problem is the niche Omega fills. But, it isn't rocket science. BOM was added to take away that complexity and get back to the simplicity of system skin and makeup. So, if you made new skins just as you did 'old' skins, that will work. Advertise them as classic/BOM only and use 1024x1024 textures. If people ask you for Appliers, talk to a scripter. I have a GA.EG head, Jennifer. I use it with a YS&YS skin, the classic version (It came with an applier which I use with my non-BOM body). I wear BOM body and head with the system skin from YS&YS and switch my head's skin to BOM to have the YS&YS skin show. I prefer the GA.EG makeup which is applier style makeups. When I add a blush it goes on a layer (onion skin) in the head that is over the skin. I can then adjust transparency, glow, gloss, environment, and brightness. I have about 18+/- levels of each setting and it is this versatility I like. There are trade offs in using system skin and applier skin or makeup. With classic makeup you provide a number of levels of transparencies. But, you can't have a glowing tattoo. You can sort of get close using colors. Me with a dark skin can simulate a glowing system tat because my dark skin glows far less than the tat. But, there is just one setting that applies to both. With my Applier tat I can control it separately. There is a set of settings for each layer (onionskin). My point being I have more control with the appliers putting textures on an onionskin as it is just like a prim cube with all the same possibilities. When I look for a skin I want a head skin that is bare faced, no tat, no lipstick, no lashes, etc. If it doesn't come with a natural or plain skin, I won't buy it. I do want the skin made for my head. But, that is not a big thing if it isn't. I try a demo and go from there. The GA.EG heads are not a major brand supported by most skin makers. GA.EG makes their own. But, I find the head is mapped well enough that most head skins work well on it... not perfectly as intended by the designer or as depicted in the promo material. But, if one doesn't know what it is SUPPOSED to look like there is no noticeable problem.

But... do you look like a 'natural' potato? There is a standard joke that used to go around SL that even Santa Claus was buff. Some where I have a shirt for Christmas that has a buff Santa on it. No matter what you look like, I suspect the majority of us won't be critical of your looks. But, you may have to deal with a jerk or two. SL has their share. But, wear the wrong political statement and the haters will climb all over you. My point being, looks are not all that controversial and most in these threads will consider anything less than the image of a Grecian Goddess a statement of character. Remember. No fear.

You probably didn't associate this image with the word 'temptress'... Very neat image...

There are no vector image formats available or used within SL. All images are pixel images. All images in SL are stored in JPG2000 format. See SL Image System in the wiki (last update 2007). So, if you see it in SL it is from a JPG2000 source file downloaded from the SL assets system. The conversion from acceptable formats at upload is also why in SL we don't have to worry about infected image files. (Reference)

Gothly's link to the Firestorm wiki is the most complete list of troubleshooting available. Since you have tried other viewers and have the same problem, it has to be the computer. Can you hear YouTube videos? Alchemy's files are likely to be out of date. So copying any of Alchemy's files to the FS folder is a mistake. I suggest you close all viewers, restart the computer, disable virus protection for 10 or 20 minutes, download and reinstall the viewer you plan to use. Also, white-list the viewer's program files folder with your anti-virus. For performance sake white-list the cache folders too. See if these steps help.