Upper and lower body skin seam problem.

Hello, I'm doing a skin job of a furry character, and I mean, furry skin, not just a single color. I want to end the seam problem with upper and lower body. I have Paint Shop pro 7 wich lets me work with photoshop files and Poser 6 wich I use when I animate. anyway I can get my textures into Poser 6 at least? What's the best method to go seamless? Thanks

EDITK. I managed to get the skin into poser. Should I just trial and error from here or is there an easy way out?

Unfortunately, short of buying a good 3d paint app, there's no easy way out. Barring that, your best bet is to use one of the alternate template sets that have grids for matching details across seams. Careful counting of grid lines can get you within a couple of pixels. From there it's a matter of jumping back and forth between your paint program and your previewer, nudging details until you get a match. Take it one detail at a time. An alternative when you get to that stage is to use Tattoo (a shareware 3d paint app) to do seam touchup. It's very clunky but it's good enough to touch up individual pixels (as far as I know), though some people have trouble getting it to run well.

The ideal way is to invest in a program like Deep Paint 3d or Bodypaint. They're expensive but both are excellent programs, but you can get very close to perfection with just PS and a previewer if you're patient.

Wear a great big belt around your waist.

If you're doing skin, and you don't mind editing the head, upper, and lower body *.tga color files in the character folder, you can use the SL client as a previewer. No need to use a 3rd party app with the clunky mannequin. No need to pay L$10 each time you want to make an alteration. No muss, no fuss. It's free and as fast. Just remember to save the default files some place safe, so you can restore them later.

Unfortunately, as Chip has pointed out, there is no fast way to align all your textures to the avatar seems. You're going to have to adjust, prewiew, wash, rinse, and repeat until you have what you like.

I used Deep Paint 3D for a while and shelved it for the method I mentioned above. The main reason for this decision was the inability to try the skin on multiple shapes before uploading it. Another reason is that Photoshop's painting tools are WAY better than DP3D's. Paint Shop Pro's painting tools are even better that DP3D's.

Hanumi--

Chosen Few posted a while back regarding preview options available outside of SL:

/109/93/94911/1.html#post945884


And Namssor posted in the same thread a previous post outlining a step-by-step approach for using the SL Client swap-out-file preview method:

/109/93/94911/1.html#post946021

Both the above are referenced in the following thread:

/109/93/94911/1.html

Thanks all. While the fur textures didnt reach a perfect status, they are much better than before. More simple textures look basically seamless now. I'm using PSP7 and previewing with poser6.

Hi,
I also have seam problems although I am not doing skins...just simple tops and pants, etc. When you say you can preview without uploading, how would one go about doing that? Thank you! And I still haven't downloaded my free version of Poser 5, but once I do I can put the texture there and try it on a shape?
Thanks for your time!
Fox

There are 4 ways you can preview avatar textures without paying L$10:

1. Use the preview grid when it is available. This limits you to about 500 uploads (or whenever you run out of L$), and you wait while the textures upload. It's also not available at all times just like the main grid.

2. Use a 3rd party previewer like Tattoo, Poser, Deep Paint 3D, etc. You work with a clunky avatar mannequin with only a single shape and pose (without a lot of fuss), but you can work entirely outside of the SL environment.

3. Use the preview dialogue inside the "Upload Image" menu option of the client. This is just as clunky as a 3rd party previewer, but a faster preview.

4. Use my method described in my previous post. You need to locate and replace these files on your hard drive:

head_color.tga (512x512), lowerbody_color.tga (512x512), and upperbody_color.tga (512x512)

Those files are found in the SL client directory (C:\Program Files\SecondLife\character) on your PC. The Mac OS will have a different directory structure, but the files will be the same.

I use custom action sets in Photoshop with method #4 to automatically overwrite the head, upper body, and lower body TGA files. I also have ALL the original files in that directory backed up when I need to restore the defaults. The only drawbacks to this method are that you are restricted to skin tight textures (although there are easy workarounds for this), and the image baking is slightly different (no lossy compression prior to baking with other J2C textures) from a true texture upload.