A few texture questions about a skirt I'am trying to make.

I somewhat get the feeling that I'm doing something thats waay over my head.. but I'm determined and ready to try!!

I'm trying to make a skirt from a drawn picture, which makes it an odd shape, there is a front view and a side view, under the skirt is semi trandparent silk ruffles...
Now what I'm doing is cutting the picture of the skirt out, (masking tool) off the character its drawn on, and createing a new picture with it as the second layer (I'm useing adobe photoshop CS2) now I think I get the idea about transparencies via alpha channel, but I'm curious about if it will work, as it's a 2d picture of just the front and back, not the side's (will this effect it's look in the end? or will it just even out once put on a 3d circular skirt like object?)
Also, for the visable ruffles underneath it (the skirt is open in the front) should I make this another layer, and skirt all together to layer it? Or can I simply leave it on the main skirt? (how do I make it somewhat transparent instead of fully?)
AND last but not least... seeing as the front of the skirt looks completely diffrent from the back, should I somehow join the skirt side by side, like lay them out and connect them via photoshop, the upload on SL? Or how should I go about this?

((For a better idea of what I mean here is a picture of the skirt in question, that I'am trying to build.))





Thankyou for anyone and there help in this matter!

Nara Tairov~

Nara are you making a skirt with the skirt layer on the avatar mesh or a prim skirt? This affects how you will build it. Additionally do you have the original artists permission to use their artwork to create your skirt? Just be sure you get that permission before proceeding.

Also, invest the money in a program called AVPainter, it's on SLX. It will help you get the 3D preview of your skirt without having to upload.


I'd make the outter skirt using the skirt template, and set it to full round, if you know what I mean. I'd make the ruffles out of a separate prim, and slide it up underneath the other skirt. You could use a cone or even a cube. Make it phantom if you're not going to make it flexi.

I can't wait to see the finished outfit. It looks very, very interesting!

Please let me know how it works out for you!

It's an interesting design concept ... fun to make. I agree with Danielle. I'd make the inner skirt as a separate object, probably on a cone. One advantage of doing that is that the skirt and the underskirt will have different attachment points, so they'll move independently. If you make them as layers on the same design, they'll move together.

I think you're creating work for yourself, though. I wouldn't bother trying to cut and paste from the original -- even if I had the designer's permission to do that. It's less work to just redraw the skirt in Photoshop yourself. If you DON'T have the designer's permission, then that's really the only route to go. In redrawing it, you'll add enough of your own flair to it that it will be *your* skirt.

As for the "partially transparent" question .... read through the Alpha sticky at the top of this forum and especially Robin Wood's new tutorial on alpha channels (posted a few days ago). Partially transparent is just as easy as completely transparent once you understand how alphas work.

As I said in your other post on this subject, if it were me, I wouldn't use actual clothing at all for this. I'd use a sculpty to make the shape of the outer skirt. Then I'd use a collection of flexible cut cylinders to make the frilly part underneath.

If you don't feel confident making sculpties, then there are lots of other options. My second choice would be to build the outer part out of cut and tapered cylinders. A single sculpty would be simpler, of course, but a series of carefully placed, cut & tapered cylinders as building blocks would do very nicely to form that shape.


If you're just dying to use an actual clothing skirt, you could certainly texture one to appear to be cut like that outer skirt, no problem. However, there would be several other issues besides the cut of the cloth (the alpha channel shape) to worry about.

First, you wouldn't be able to get the skirt to flare out far enough to replicate the physical form of what's in the picture. Relative to the horizontal waistline, avatar skirts only flare to about 70 degrees, as measured from the edge of the waist to the tip of the skirt, at the length you need. The skirt in the picture, however, has a flare of less than 60 degrees, more than 10 degrees slighter, moving the tips of the skirt considerably further out from the body. The whole character of the skirt seems to depend on that particular angle. You could use the steeper angle if you want, but in my opinion it would ruin, or at least dramatically alter, the visual impact of the design.

Second, you wouldn't be able to texture the inside of the skirt differently from the outside. Notice on the one in the picture, the gold trim is different on the inside from outside. For example, in the rear view, the trim on the outside of the skirt extends all the way to the corners of the semicircular hole in the back. But in the front view, the trim on the inside stops a good distance from those corners in both directions.

To solve those problems, you could use half sphere in place of a real skirt, and texture it to appear to have the proper cut. That would allow for any flare angle you want, and it would allow you to texture the inside and the outside separately. However, that method would have some problems of its own.

First, be prepared for some transparency sorting issues. Since the frilly part in the middle is semi-transparent, it's going to fight with the alpha'ed outer skirt as the camera moves. Also, the inside and outside surfaces of the sphere itself may fight with each other a bit too, as the curvature of the sphere creates some apparent overlap. SL has gotten better at sorting curved surfaces transparency like this over the last few years, but it's still far from perfect.

Second, there will be a visible gap between the inside and outside surfaces since a sphere can only hollow to 95%. There will be a 5% thickness you can't get rid of, which will noticeably offset the inside from the outside.

To solve the thickness problem, you could use two spheres instead of one. Make the first one invisible on the outside, and the second one invisible on the inside. If the two are the same size, the appearance will be that of single spherical surface with no detectable thickness to it. There's no way to solve sorting glitch though. That's just the reality of computer graphics. Overlapping transparent surfaces is always problematic.

As I said, there are dozens of ways to make a skirt like that. I just hit on a few of them. My strongest recommendation is to sculpt the thing.

Very interesting and in depth, I have never used a sculptie to make anything, and I'm a bit unsure as how to do it that way (although I have made some of the basic shape useing the normal prims ... here is a screenshot http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/9161/snapshot024ke6.jpg )

I see what the problems would be, maybe you could direct me to a tutorial that helps me with sculpties.. and also, once I get that accomplished, do I put the skirt on the sculptie as a texture?

There's a sculpty sticky over on the Building Tips forum (/8/8d/196863/1.html). That's probably not a bad place to start.

It sounds like an interesting solution to this design problem. I wonder, though ... do sculpty clothes create a big lag problem for everyone around you? Just curious, if anybody knows. Chosen, maybe? Have you actually done something like this?

I'm not sure what you mean by "put the skirt on the sculpty". What you're doing is making a 3D model, which happens to be a sculpty, in the shape of the skirt. Once you've got the shape, then you'd paint it (texture it) in white and gold so it looks like the fabric in the picture.


A single sculpty has the same amount of polygons in it as a single torus. So, if you were to put hundreds of them on at once, then you'd cause the same amount of lag as someone wearing hoochie hair with hundreds of toruses in it. That can be significant, definitely.

But just one solitary sculpted garment? Nah, you won't notice any problem with that at all.

The only issue with it will be the fact that it could take a little longer to rez than something made out of regular prims might. Textures tend to take longer to load than prim parameters themselves, and since the shape description of a sculpty is stored as a texture (the sculpt map), sometimes sculpties can take a few seconds longer to appear correctly than regular prims. Until the sculpt map as been loaded in the viewer, the sculpty will appear as just a sphere.

If someone has a really slow connection, or if their network settings in their preferences are too low, it as much as a minute or so before the sculpty shape loads. I'm not usually real concerned with that, but if you are then the only answer is don't use sculpties. You certainly don't have to after all. Me, I'd rather use what looks best, and let the people with crappy Internet deal with their own problems themselves. Most people don't have much trouble seeing things properly in a reasonable amount of time.