Proper settings for looprez clothing

Hi. Im having a hard time making my looprez skirts fit on my avatar. I cant get them level (or make them stay level if I do get them right.) I cant seem to get them to go to the right place on the avatar either. They go to the right hand and I cant get them on the body correctly. At some point you cant even edit that part of the buiding process. Any ideas? Ive read the tutorials on this and I cant find anything to tell me how to fix it. What they suggest isnt working.

You have several potential challenges, but the first one is actually very easy to solve. No matter how you made your prim skirt -- LoopRez or some other method -- it needs to be attached to your body at a stable attachment point. For a skirt, that usually means attaching it to either the pelvis or the stomach. So, stand on a posing stand (to immobize yourself while fitting) and find the new skirt in your inventory. Then right click on it, select "Attach to >" and then choose "Pelvis" or "Stomach" from the list that appears. Your skirt will immediately attach itself to the point you chose. It will probably be in an odd orientation, but that's easy to fix. Right click on the skirt and select "Edit," then use the positioning arrows and the rotation controls to move the skirt into its correct position at your waist. That's all there is to it.

That's the easy part. Almost any skirt needs fine adjusting, no matter who made it. Avatar bodies differ in shape and personal tastes differ, so that two women will disagree on exactly how the same skirt should hang. Proper fitting is an art.

Personally, I find that a prim skirt looks best on me if it tilts slightly forward at the waist. That way, it lies flatter on my stomach and is less likely to do something unsightly on my backside. The first adjustment I make, therefore, is to rotate the whole skirt forward by about 5 degrees and then use the positioning arrows to recenter it at my waist.

The next thing I look for is how evenly the tops of skirt panels line up. LoopRez arranges panels in an oval, but my body is not shaped that way. Neither is yours. As a result, the skirt goes in at places my body doesn't, and vice-versa. That makes the tops of panels sit at different heights, depending on where they intersect with my body. Some panels, in fact, may not be intersecting with my body at all. The solution is to click the "Edit Linked Parts" box in Edit and then move individual panels VERY carefully, usually with the horizontal arrows first, until their tops all look right. This can be slow, frustrating work until you have done it a few times and know how much you can move a panel safely. It also often means tweaking the same panel several times to get it to agree with its neighbors. This step may also be complicated if you have created your skirt with a waistband that also needs adjusting.

Next, I look at the hem. Adjustments at the waist may have moved some panels up or down a bit, making the hem irregular. If not, you may still have misgivings about how long you want the skirt to look, and whether it should be longer or shorter in the back. To adjust panel lengths, again select the "Edit Linked Parts" box and this time choose the "Stretch" option. Be VERY sure to UNcheck the box that says "Stretch Both Sides" because you only want to adjust the bottom of each panel, not the top. You can make the adjustments by eye (usually safe and fun, aesthetically) or you can adjust them to a common height from the ground with a ruler. (I sometimes make myself a one-prim ruler that I can move around as I work.) You can also choose to adjust all panels to the same length, watching a panel's Z measurement at the top of your screen as you adjust it. Whichever way you choose, the actual adjustment is made by grabbing the little blue "stretch" box at the bottom of the panel and tweaking it up or down.

Those are the most common alterations, and they are usually all you need to do. Sometimes it is necessary to adjust the flare of one or more panels, to make them lie flatter against your body or farther out. That can be a very tricky business, because it means rotating the panel in more than one plane and doing it VERY gently. It is not an exercise for the faint-hearted, but it's worth learning to do.

Except for that last part, all of this sounds much harder than it really is, especially until you have practiced a few times. In fact, though, it is a set of skills that any prim skirt owner ought to develop, because NOTHING ever fits perfectly and you very commonly decide that even the nicest skirt needs to be hemmed up or down. This really has nothing to do with LoopRez, per se. LoopRez is just a handy tool for saving some of the fiddly work in making the basic skirt. Whether you use LoopRez or not, you STILL have to do the fiddly work in fitting.

BTW, when you are finished, TAKE the skirt back into your inventory (being sure that you have named it well enough so you can find it later). The skirt will remember all of your adjustments and it will remember where you attached it last, so you won't need to do all of this again.

I usually caution people to make a backup copy of a skirt before making major alterations -- strange accidents DO happen -- and to consider keeping properly labelled copies of alterations that you may want to go back to (versions of a different length, or to fit a different avatar shape).

Good luck!

I somehow missed this thread until Rolig linked back to it in your Notecard thread. Everything Rolig said is great information. I would only add a few things. If you need to edit the rotation of individual flexi panels, I find it is much easier if you change the Ruler Mode to Local instead of World. Only other tip is to experiment with attachment points. Pelvis is what I find best, like Rolig said, for at waist or slightly below skirts, but you'd be amazed how well right or left peck works for belts and above waist skirts.