Female Avatar Changed?

I noticed today that clothes i made that used to fit exactly how i wanted no longer fit right at all in some places. Have there been any changes to the female avatars at all? I'd like to know for sure before i go back and remake everything.

this is happening to me in um....very personal areas of my avatar. who's been messing with my crotch???

The only recent changes to the avatar that affected texture positioning occurred with the release of version 0.9 on June 18. With that release, textures mapped to the avatar morph when using shape altering sliders. This change reduced a lot of texture warping and stretching, especially around the chest. Most other areas of the body have very subtle mapping changes, and certain areas, such as around the eyes and across texture borders, were intentionally locked down to prevent problems such as you describe.

That said, it's important to note that a texture you paint for one avatar may now fit somewhat differently on another avatar with very different proportions. If the changes you are noticing happened around June 18, then I suspect the mapping change is the reason, though without seeing an example or two of the areas you are having problems with it's hard to diagnose. The crotch is an area that would have been affected by the mapping changes.

If you've only noticed something strange in the last release or two, than there may be some other cause in which case we would definitely like to know in more detail where the problem areas are and what is happening to the textures in those areas.

-Xenon

the change occured either the day of, or after the big power outtages. hardly a week ago :\

here is a screen shot of the effected area. basically, any size line, be it 1 pixel up to whatever, between the legs, stretches out waaaaaaaay too far.

Xenon, it's definitely nothing from the June 18 update. those changes were all nice and good and made things look better.

as for the time.....i was away on vacation from July 25 to August 2 and i noticed the problem when i came back. i make a lot of clothes and i hadn't noticed anything wrong with textures in that area before i left. my problem's pretty much identical to Kenzi's..anything on my avatar's crotch get's smeared down the legs what would be about 3 inches if i was real size.

Same here, i have an av that wears a thong and now it droops down the legs in the crotch area

i did a little peeping at the "how to run an event" event and of the female avatars there every single one with a texture with some detail in it and not just smooth color on their lower body had the same "smearing" where we're talking about. i'm guessing they *all* did but on some the texture wouldn't show it cause there's nothing to visibly smear.

Kenzi and i messed around with it some and adjusting your hip sliders doesn't fix it. it can however make it a lot worse.

we don't want to have to spam the forums with hundreds of crotch pictures to prove our point so please give in to our demands and fix this. all the underwear and swimsuits we've made are broken and unwearable and pretty much unsellable now. and we're afraid to make more since who knows if we can get around the problem or how they would look once things get back to normal so there goes a big chunk of our livelihood.

is there any way it could be a video card thing since some people seem to be oblivious to it and other people see it everywhere? i have a geforce and she has an ATI card of some kind so i doubt it.

I think one, or both, of these changes in v1.0.3 is probably responsible. Most likely the fix for the "gaps" on the nVidia cards blends or stretches textures in the areas that were having gap trouble. Since one of these areas was the hips, it's a likely cause.

And while the fix was specifically for certain nVidia cards, I seriously doubt that the client checks your card type to determine whether to use the fix or the previous method for rendering, which is why it now shows up on most/all cards instead of just the ones that had the gap problem.

i'm still having this problem as of today. for what it's worth i'm using the latest nvidia drivers i can find (44.03) and have been for weeks.

It looks like the texture stretching shown in Kensington's uploaded pic. is indeed caused by morphed UV maps on a couple customization sliders, specifically the "pants fit -loose" slider and the "pants crotch -low and loose" slider. I made some further adjustments to the mapping on those morphs which should greatly reduce texture stretching in the affected area, but the changes won't be visible until the next major patch.

In the mean time, here's a possible work around to try; Go to the pants sliders in customize appearance and move the pants fit slider to tight and the crotch slider to high and tight. For skimpy bikinis, thongs, and dental floss style pants these adjustments should reduce texture stretching in the problem area.

-Xenon

well, that's great, but the problem isn't with pants, it's with underpants. those only have two sliders to change. my mistake for uploading the screenshot of pants, should have been smarter than that.

like Kenzington said...underwear is the big problem. Xenon..none of those fixes you mentioned work for underwear cause they only have a length and waist slider and neither does anything for this. here are some real live underwear screenshots so you can see what's going on. sorry about the spam but i don't know if you can do more than 1 image in a post..

i forgot to mention..some of these underpants were made by me and some by other people. .every single one of them worked fine a couple weeks ago. they do the same thing on other body shapes i try...whole other avatars get the same effect.

i'm going to start asking people to show me their underwear and taking screenshots of that to post here cause there is no way Kenzi me and Hikaru are the only one's with messed up avatars. and it can't be our videocards cause we use cards by different companies and have the same problem..

if you're reading this please go check your avatar's crotch and if it's messed up like this please post here. a big chunk of our ability to make a living in the game is gone if our underwear and swimsuits don't fit right anymore.

seriously people are we going to have to start dropping crates with crotch pictures on them everywhere to get some attention?

another messed up underwear pic..

and another..

and one more for luck..

ok.....involved is past tense. does this mean the problem is fixed even tho it's not specifically addressed? i can't update yet so i haven't seen but all the confusion between "pants" and "underpants" makes me wonder. i have lots of fun screenshots of people with messed up undies if you need more proof of a problem.

Man, these pics aren't really work friendly, are they?

depends where you work i guess. and what are you doing reading this when you should be working? get back to work! what do you think we pay you for?? hehe....just kidding..get back here.

Hehe, the quote regarding underwear and gnomes was a joke about an episode of South Park.

Thx, Dami...now i'm horny...sigh.

underpants are not fixed in the current update. everyone i know who had problems before has the same problems still..


well get unhorny please..those are pictures of a video game character.

We're still looking at other reasons for the texture stretching in that area, so no fixes yet in the patch just released. I was able to create a thong texture that didn't stretch, but the area covered was quite a bit... skimpier than some of the pictures uploaded here.

The stretching is noticable for several reasons: the area is along a texture border, there is not much texture space devoted to that area, and the mesh around the inner thigh/crotch gets pulled and twisted when the leg moves. The fixes in the works will probably make the problem less noticable, but I doubt the stretching will go away completely. Altering your textures slightly may actually be the best solution in the end.

And now for my contribution to the gallery o' crotch...

-Xenon

Even skimpier...

Gosh, I hope this does improve. I was really embarrassed to see what happened to people who bought some of my old swimsuits this past weekend. They once looked good, it's disappointing to see these effects crop up.