Ruth and Cloud Avatars

Overview

Depending on the viewer you use, avatars with an incomplete or a damaged appearance are shown as Ruth avatar (default female avatar) or as cloud. Newer viewers show a cloud, while older viewers show a Ruth avatar in such cases.

This article describes what you can do to fix the appearance of an avatar, so that is shown properly again.

We have to distinguish two cases:

• New avatars without an appearance
• Avatars with a damaged appearance

Both cases require different procedures to fix these problems.

New Avatars

When you create a new avatar, you can choose if this new avatar should use a default appearance, defined by a default avatar, or if that new avatar should have no default appearance.

If no default avatar was chosen, the avatar wears no body parts, no clothes and no attachments. As a consequence the avatar is shown as Ruth avatar or cloud. It is also not possible to open the appearance editor for that avatar.

To fix this problem you need to open the inventory window and create and wear the following kinds of body parts: shape, skin, eyes and hair. After that the avatar appears and it's appearance can be changed.

Damaged Appearances

Sometimes it is possible that the appearance of an avatar is not shown properly after logging in. It can be the case that you cannot see your own avatar properly and/or others do not see your avatar properly.

Try the following:

1. Press Ctrl-Alt-R to rebake your avatar appearance textures
2. If that does not help, quickly go into edit appearance mode
3. If that does not help, try to unwear and rewear all clothes and change body parts
4. If that does not help, do this:
   
   1. In the viewer open the Network tab of the Preferences window
   2. Click on clear cache
   3. Log out of the virtual world
   4. Log into the web based contol panel
   5. Open the user management tool (people icon)
   6. Click on Purge Appearance
   7. Enter the avatar name
   8. Click on Execute.
   9. Log into the virtual world again
   10. Wait until the world and your inventory has reloaded  (best by searching in the inventory window; watch the number of inventory items counting up)
   11. Rewear all body parts and clothes
5. If all that fails, try number 4 again, but wear different body parts and clothes at the end (some of the body parts or clothes you did wear before are damaged; find out which ones and delete these)

Usually that procedure fixes all kinds of appearance problems.

In general use our recommended viewer. Some viewers do not work well with OpenSim.

Beside that ensure that your network connection is good. Do not use a wireless Internet connection. You can check the network statistics using the Statistics Bar. Be sure that delay and packet loss are low.