Help with alighning clothing on templates.

Ok. I 'm using chips templates in order to make a suit with a prim collar and skirt. Problem is when it comes to matching the arms to the shoulder they never line up properly. I've looked at the guides to help match them with the upper body but I still can't get it right so it matches the seams connecting them.

Is there a sample I could look at that could help me figure out how to match the top and bottom parts of the arms so they match up with the upper body? I can upload I hope what I've tried which might help anyone figure out what I'm doing wrong..

That's where the short colored alignment marks along the sides of the torso and around the top of the sleeve templates come in handy. Match the colored lines and the alignment is perfect. It's hard to figure out at first unless you have a much better mental picture than I did when I started, so the best thing to do is to make yourself a "template suit." Upload copies of the upper and lower body templates to SL as images, and make yourself a shirt and pants out of them. Wear them in SL and take LOADS of photos to study later. That way, you can see exactly where the alignment points are on the 3D body. It works like a charm.

Thanks Rolig. I've used your suggestion to upload the templates to view on my avatar but have noticed a few odd things. Regardless of how well I match the seams there's stretching occurring mostly at the sides of the upper body and arms. I'm guessing that this is due to the shape of my avatar? But my av is pretty well proportioned.

Is there a way to overcome this distortion or is it something that's just a limitation of sl?

Welcome to Second Life. Walk around and look at any avatar. You'll see the same distortion. It's especially obvious on large-chested women or wide-shouldered men, but we all have it to some degree. The Linden Gods created us without putting enough pixel density in those areas. All it takes is exhuberant use of the shape sliders or a bit of wild exercising and VOILA, distortion. Another doomed area is the crotch, which is always distorted. Try and find a bathing suit that is less revealing than a string bikini yet more fashionable than Bermuda shorts. Any style in between "bleeds" down the legs. <sigh>

The wisest thing to do is to avoid using detailed textures in those areas if you can, or to use textures that have a linear element in the direction of distortion so that the distortion seems more natural. Otherwise, go for the flat-chested look and don't twist and bend much.

Even being as flat chested as you can make the AV (not very flat) won't help us.

There are several places on the sides of the chest where, quite literally, the polygons that make us only have a single pixel on the texture map at 512x512 (all clothes and skins.)

So yeah, we're all distorted, and there's no way around it except to beg the Lindens to give us Avatar Choice - more than one Avatar to use, with one of them being a humanoid with much better mesh and mapping.

While they're at it, we need two arms, two eyes, and two feet.

Yeah. I kinda figured there wasn't much you could do.. I've seen this same distortion in the same area's with almost everything I've seen with a few exceptions. But I do have lightwave 9.0. Is it possibly to down load an avatar mesh, uv map it and adjust the uv map itself to correct the distortion and somehow apply that new uv map to your avatar?

Other then that the only thing that seems to help is distorting the texture so it's either less stretched or squashed. Which doesn't always work..

You can do what you like with an external modelling program. The result will look great until you bring it in world and apply it to the LL avatar. If there aren't enough pixels per polygon, you can't create detail there. It's small consolation, I know, but we're all in the same boat. Most people get so accustomed to the distortion that they aren't even conscious of it after a while.

Hi Luden! It's very possible, and a fair few of us do it.

To get the remap onto the Linden UV Maps, all you have to do is Burn the texture, using the Linden maps as the target.

In LW8, you did that by opening the Surface Editor, going to the Shaders tab, and choosing "Surface Baker".

Double click on that for the dialog, and choose Bake Entire Object, Bake to Image, Bake Color (disable the others.)

In the UV Map section, choose the Linden's maps. (Probably OBJ_UVTextureMap)

Then choose the resolution you want (I use 1024), and Image Type (I use LW_PShop24(.psd) (32 saves the wireframes in the alpha channel, which is pretty much useless.)

Click on the Image Base Name button, to open a Browser that lets you choose what to call the image, and where to save it. Leave the rest disabled; you don't need it.

Do that for all the bits you want to remap. I find it works best to have each one in its own layer, so you get a different image saved for each part; then I combine them the way I want them in PS.

When you've got it all set up (and saved, so you can do this again and again) just go to Layout, load the model, and tap F9. It'll render all the images, and also give you a render of the AV, which you can toss.

I don't know if all of that has changed in LW9, because I've mostly switched to modo, and I never upgraded. (Loving modo more every day, by the way! If anyone needs baking instructions in modo, let me know!)

Be warned, though, that 1 pixel is still only 1 pixel, and those polys are very prone to distortion. So the textures on them will be blurry, and will merrily distort when people have large chests. There really is no way around that, I'm afraid, except (as Rolig said) to be careful what you put there in the first place.

Hope this helps!