Alpha Blend Shading Issues
Rental Rizzler
Light sources including projections cause issues with alpha blended textures. Alpha Blended textures often appear much brighter than Masked, or Opaque textures.
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Gryphon Ronas
This problem has been happening for ages.
PBR didn't change it.
And as always, you ask LL about it and you get "Hey! Is that a squirrel!?!"
If they don't know how to solve it they should just say so.
AlettaMondragon Resident
This has been happening to me for ages both on Firestorm and the SLV. We're not alone with it, it's definitely a thing. Most noticeable on hair but also on some clothes, accessories and even plants. However in my experience it's not the alpha blended textures that are brighter, but the alpha masked textures stay too dark. Without any direct light on these surfaces the alpha blended and masked faces look the same. When the surfaces are under any projector light, alpha blended faces seem to reflect light properly or at least close to how I'd expect, while alpha masked textures don't seem to be affected by the light. Therefore an item with only alpha masked textures can still look incorrect under a projector light.
PBR changed this experience a bit, and some alpha blended textures seem to be affected less by light than before (these textures are still applied as BP, not as PBR materials) which means they also seem darker than expected in a dark space under a projector light, but generally the issue seems the same.
Rental Rizzler
I updated and logged into the main release SL client. Note the alpha blend portions of the hair have dramatically different shading. If you see the non-alpha blend parts of the hair the shading is what you would expect.
This can be easily reproduced by having light sources (Projections, and non-projections) near alpha blended textures. This is mostly noticeable on hairs as there is a good mixture of alpha blend and opaque/masked textures.
Second Life Release 7.2.1.17108480561 (64bit)
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Second Life Server 2025-07-25.16512260888
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Dan Linden
When filing a Canny please provide more details of your problem. Without this information your Canny will be closed as Needs More information and will not be triaged.
Please include:
- Which version of the client are you using? (This can be found in Help, About Second Life)
- Your computer specs (from Help, About Second Life)
- A description of the problem, explaining what you do / see / don't see, including any error messages displayed
- Step by step Directions on how to reproduce your experience.
- A screenshot of what you are seeing. (Which you've added. Thank you!)
It looks like you may be using the FireStorm viewer. Does this issue reproduce on the Second Life viewer - https://secondlife.com/downloads ?
Rental Rizzler
Dan Linden Hi, please check my comment I added above
AlettaMondragon Resident
Dan Linden I'm wondering how you got to the conclusion "It looks like you may be using the FireStorm viewer." when the OP showed a single photo showing no UI or any specific detail and didn't mention which viewer they were using? Was this a copy-paste reply that wasn't supposed to contain this sentence?
steph Arnott
AlettaMondragon Resident, its a library reply.
Crexon Resident
AlettaMondragon Resident its because there is a required About Info field where people place details from the viewer. Since this may contain some personal info such as what hardware and OS you are running and what current region you are in this field is not visible to regular users and only Linden Lab.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Crexon Resident I know about that but as you can see the OP added the details in a comment 3 days later that we all can see. If the OP had that info in the "hidden" field there, Dan's response wouldn't include "It looks like you may be using the FireStorm viewer" since it would be clearly written there.
And of course nothing happened to this bug report ever since, no matter the OP gave the requested info and confirmed it was also happening in the SLV. It is fairly easy to reproduce, it happens to almost every mesh hair under a projector light and to many clothes that have transparent parts (or the creator forgot to remove the alpha channel from the texture before uploading). It's not fun when half of your hair or your dress looks gray because of this.