Need help from the experts please!

Hi everyone,

I'm at my wits end on trying to do some things clothing wise, and want to see if there is some way to get around the problem. What I'm trying to do it put logos onto shirts, and names and numbers on the back of them for friend and myself. The problem I'm having is that everything is getting distorted so badly, that it's driving me up a wall.

I have Photoshop CS3, Blender, SLCP, AVPainter, and a fair bit of time on my hands to do the work hehe. I have seen so many people doing texture baking, and applying images and text to shirts and they come out perfectly with no distortion or degradation of the image. What is it that I'm missing here?? I know that the templates I have will stretch and that there are certain area's that get muffed up in translation.

Is there anything that I can do to make the texture look the way I really want it to? Like the logos looking fine, the words and numbers not going all over the place, and maybe even getting some straight lines working that will move with the avatar but not go from 1px wide to 10px wide in certain spots?

I've tried searching the forums, and tried every suggestion that I've come across on the subject, and am getting to the point of ripping out what remaining hair I have. If anyone can point me to either a thread that could give me the info I need, or a tutorial I would be eternally grateful. Maybe I'm too picky, but I really want to make stuff look the way that I've created it, and for the life of me it's not.

Thank you for your time, and any help that can be offered.

I am having similar problem often the texture change.
It isn't always because I changed the file size either.

There's really no trick to it. It's just a matter of getting to know the templates and how they wrap around the avatar, and where the trouble spots are. The best thing to do for starters is to take the templates and make them into a skin. Wear that skin on your av in SL and take copious screenshots. You can then use those as a reference for your painting. By roughing out your design on a layer over the screenshot you can see exactly where on the template grid the various bits need to be. Keep in mind that it will look the same only on an avatar with the same shape.

For putting logos and things on T-shirts your best bet is to keep the artwork above and between the nipples. On the male av that's the area that will deform the least. On the back keep important bits between the shoulder blades, and above the middle of the back.

Another option is to use Blender to project the artwork onto the avatar model using a planar UV map, then bake that out to SL's mapping. That will deform the design for you and should give reasonable results when bought into SL and worn. I'm not sure if that's possible to do in Blender (assign a texture with one UV mapping and bake it out to another) so maybe a Blender expert can chime in. The long and short of it is that it mainly comes down to trial and error and a lot of practice. It will get a lot easier as you figure out what works and what doesn't.

Yes it certainly is possible with Blender. You would just set an image texture layer of your logo on your material and then adjust the size and offset until it lines up the way you want. This would probably give you the best results.

If you want to try a less technically involved method I have another idea. Just use AVPainter and trace out the numbers that you want to have on the shirt. Then save the file and open it in PS. This will show you the distortion that the logo is undergoing and you can use it as a template to stretch the logo into place.

Text on the front of a shirt is not too bad, however on the back it can be a bitch and i try to avoid it. If necessary, try using the transform tools in photoshop to get them right. Once you get it right, make sure you save the psd file so you can use it as your own template, for future work.

As Chip said, make a skin, or a shirt, from your template and use as a reference. He's not the God of templates for nothing

I want to thank all of you for your replies. I'm going to give the Blender thing a try later. I'm just getting annoyed and lost with the UV maps on the avatar, because of that danged stretching area on the pecks. Everything lines up in my view, and lines up in my design but then the stretching happens.

The call for help was me being at my wits end, and was hoping that you all could give me a clue, and THANK YOU for the replies, I think I may be able to work something out with a better mindset.