Awesome geeky news

Remember my blog post about tinting prim items of clothing so they match up with the system items in an outfit? Once the current Release Candidate 1.22 viewer goes ‘gold’ (that is, once it’s the standard viewer) you’ll no longer have to do this! (Actually, what you’ll have to do is go back and un-tint all your tinted prim items.) Why?

JIRA issue # VWR-8012 – Gray shading all over clothing and avatars in world since the Windlight roll out has been fixed. What this means is that the techie guys at Linden Lab have changed the avatar mesh base colour from grey to white. And with that one change, you’ll see your clothing items the same colour as the prim items; they won’t have that grey cast to them anymore. Skins will be lighter, too.

This is a link to a picture showing what the issue currently looks like. The shirt and leggings are the same pure white colour as the prim skirt, but because the mesh base colour is grey, they look horribly dark against the prim skirt. With this new change, the shirt and leggings will have the same bright white hue.

This will, however, likely bring up new issues. Skin designers that have compensated for this grey cast by brightening their skins may face a complete re-doing of their lighter skintone lines. And those of us that wince when we come across megawatt facelights in SL are going to suffer a lot ;)

Here’s a link you’ll find useful. It’s the link that I followed and found out about this fix from (thanks, Caliah!) – Optimising Windlight for Avatars 2.0. Whether you want a good Windlight preset for taking photos, or whether you just want to see less over-brightness around you, this is a great tutorial.