Honey...does this skirt make my butt look fat?
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Rachel Darling
Registered User
Join date: 3 Jun 2006
Posts: 95
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09-26-2006 19:01
OK...can someone please tell me (and the rest of the clothing design world, if there is a solution or workaround) how to make a skirt that doesn't make my perky little bum look like a big fat sack of lumpy potatoes? I look great in jeans and nekkid, even if I do say so myself...but let me put on a skirt and I can't even stand to look in the mirror. Is it something funky with the clothing template, or the way Linden has the skirt layer shaped? Why wouldn't a skirt be flat (almost hipless), and then stretch over my countours the same way a shirt stretches over my upper-curves? Would love to get an explanation on this phenomenon. I know folks say "just adjust the size of your bum when you're wearing a skirt," but my body shape is, alas, NoMod. (That's the trouble with using plastic surgeons, isn't it?) Thanks!
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Govindira Galatea
Just ghosting...
Join date: 6 Mar 2004
Posts: 416
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09-26-2006 20:09
Many of us go into our shapes and modify our shapes to reduce butt and saddlebags (isn't SL terminology reeking of lousy word choices?!), then save the modified shape as a new shape. I tend to include "skirt butt" in my shape names when I create them.
Alternatively, many prim skirts use pants in combination with a prim skirt and achieve a very nice natural derriere without resorting to shape changing.
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From: Caron Warner Lieber, woolgatherer "A person who talks fast often says things she hasn't thought of yet." From: Amosis Leontopolis Thomas "The Creator has a Master Plan: Peace and Happiness through all the Land."
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MenuBar Memorial
WaterMoon Artist
Join date: 20 Nov 2005
Posts: 214
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No but your butt makes that skirt look like a UPS truck hauling 2 giant watermelons
09-26-2006 22:10
...why didn't somebody stop me before I hit that submit button???
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Rachel Darling
Registered User
Join date: 3 Jun 2006
Posts: 95
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09-26-2006 22:51
From: Govindira Galatea Many of us go into our shapes and modify our shapes to reduce butt and saddlebags (isn't SL terminology reeking of lousy word choices?!), then save the modified shape as a new shape. I tend to include "skirt butt" in my shape names when I create them. Alternatively, many prim skirts use pants in combination with a prim skirt and achieve a very nice natural derriere without resorting to shape changing. Thanks...still would really like to know why it is that skirts look so bad, and pants look ok... 
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Govindira Galatea
Just ghosting...
Join date: 6 Mar 2004
Posts: 416
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09-27-2006 00:39
If you look very carefully at the skirt and the way it works, particularly at the derriere, you may observe some of the following things. The skirt is spaced out from the avatar's derriere. In many respects, a skirt is a special kind of pants, an additional avatar skin/clothing hovering above the avatar's skin/pants. The LL engineers have simply spaced the skirt out from us by about an inch and told it not to conform to our rear cleavage. This avoids a considerable computational problem.
How to tell the difference between a skirt that is not in contact with our cheeks and one that is? If you (the SL client program and your computer) can tell the difference computationally, then you have partially to lay down the skirt's pattern onto the avatar's derriere. And compute where the skirt and derriere part ways. Else, your undies would have to be the same pattern as the skirt. (Which is what "glitch pants" are for flex prim skirts).
To me, the big problem with the skirt is not the derriere, but instead the horrendous distortion of the middle panel in front and the almost as bad distortion of the middle panel in back. If you are doing anything other than standing--walking, dancing, sitting, etc.--the panels distort beyond recognition any lovely pattern put on them. I think this is one good reason why so many designers have embraced flexi prim skirts.
_____________________
From: Caron Warner Lieber, woolgatherer "A person who talks fast often says things she hasn't thought of yet." From: Amosis Leontopolis Thomas "The Creator has a Master Plan: Peace and Happiness through all the Land."
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Eloise Pasteur
Curious Individual
Join date: 14 Jul 2004
Posts: 1,952
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09-27-2006 00:57
Well Govindra is quite right in all her details... there are a couple of other things. Skirts can be made "poofy" and have various amounts of bustle as well.
The way the skirt mesh works it tries (and usually fails although not usually badly) to meet your waist, then flares for the poof or bustle. Of course bustles are *meant* to make your bum look big. Poof, for some reason, seems to make the bum look bigger than be an even spread, I'm not sure how much that is real and how much it's psychological. If your skirts are modable, you can try tweaking those numbers too.
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Jana Fleming
SL Resident
Join date: 25 Oct 2004
Posts: 319
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09-27-2006 04:01
Unfortunately tweaking doesn't really do much good. I set all my skirts at 0 bustle and 0 poof. If your butt size is more than maybe a 20, it looks huge in a skirt. I can't tell you why but I can tell you it's a feature that designers have begged LL to correct for as long as I've been playing. So yes, I too have a skirt body. The longer the skirt the worse the poof. You'll notice you can get away with a micro-mini skirt because the skirt does not have to curve back in to meet the legs. Just make sure you have nice panties cause you can see up the skirt lol.
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Robin Sojourner
Registered User
Join date: 16 Sep 2004
Posts: 1,080
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09-27-2006 15:04
The real difference between pants and skirt is that pants are "painted on," and the skirt is a separate mesh. Being a separate mesh has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that it can take the shape of a skirt.  The main disadvantage is that, like all meshes that are in close contact with each other, the skirt and the avatar body are inclined to interpenetrate. You can see this on the Male avatar, where the back of the skirt interpenetrates the back of the body. For whatever reason, they made sure that wouldn't happen on the female avatar by leaving a gap between the body and the skirt. (I'm guessing that it's because they assumed that males would be using the "skirt" to make various kinds of coat tails, while women would be making actual skirts, with tops or bodices, and so would need to have the lines between the two parts sharp, not blurred.) They may have overcompensated a little.  But yeah, it seems that the body sliders also give their values to the Skirt, and the mesh has been poofed out in the rear farther than some of us might like, as the values increase. There is really nothing that can be done about it, except to make a "skirt body" that has lower-than-desired values in those areas, to compensate. But hey, our rears never poke out of our skirts in the back! Hope this explains a bit!
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Robin (Sojourner) Wood www.robinwood.com"Second Life ... is an Internet-based virtual world ... and a libertarian anarchy..." Wikipedia
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Cindy Claveau
Gignowanasanafonicon
Join date: 16 May 2005
Posts: 2,008
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09-28-2006 09:31
Many, if not most, of us use a "skirt shape" we switch to when we wear skirts. Mine uses a Butt Size of 0. If you're using 20, you're going to have tons of junk in your trunk 
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