Clothesmaking: Impossible (rant)

Unless, from what I can tell, you're a phenominal artist.

I've been trying since I got here to make clothes. I've read the tutorials, I've followed the advice, and I got squat. My fabrics look like clumps of paint. Seams won't line up. Shading won't work, I dunno the first thing about highlights, right? No such thing as a straight edge.

I have a wacom. It's great for my normal 2D art. I *know* Photoshop, I've taken courses in it and have How to books.

But I'm not a phenominal artist. Nothing but nothing on earth is more frustrating than knowing that with a freehand and a good eye you can whip out some stuff that people appreciate, and that gives you a sense of satisfaction. And then, apply your artistic skill to making a tuxedo jacket for Second Life. Failure every time. Tee shirts, jeans, dresses, leathers...nada. Zip. Zilch.

What am I missing? What do Robin, Blaze, Munchflower, and countless others know that I don't? How do they make a seamless dress? Do you use the jacket layer? Newp..that leaves a waist seam. Do you go in and fill the gap with white on your layer mask? Newp..that leaves a white ring.

How do you get a neat straight line? Well...use the polygonal lasso tool and follow that will the blur tool. Newp again. It ends up looking like a finger smudge.

What do I do, and how do I do it? I just want clothes that look nice, and I'm denied that. Layers upon layers about layers of worthless crap. Why can't it just be easy?

Thanks for letting me rant. I'm just very very frustrated.

I, personally have a horrible horrible time processing 2D to 3D. This keeps all my lines from, er lining up correctly in most cases. I think the SL model itself really needs a revamp, but that it would be too difficult a transition at this point.

Give it three minutes to an hour and at least the people you mentioned will likely show up with all the good answers. Good luck!

(Ps. I think vector, or smart objects as Robin handles it is the answer to "straight lines". The seamlessness issue might be related to the white ring around items with transparency. Robin suggests the free Solidify filter from Flaming Pear for this.)

I'm like a tiny Robin parrot.

Expect your first 500 or so attempts to look like crap. You have to get those out of the way; no getting around it.

If you aren't already doing so, use the templates by Chip Midnight or Robin Wood. Wear the templates on your avatar and observe where things meet and where things get distorted.

If you have Poser, use it for checking seams. If not, use the pre-upload preview window in SL.

Get familiar with paths, if you aren't already. They're great for making lines and selections.

Make Photoshop actions for repetetive tasks (such as flipping what you've painted on one side of the template over to the other side).

Make something very simple, like a tank top, and don't try anything more complex until you've got that perfected.

Have fun. Don't beat yourself up. Good luck.

Edited to add: Add a low-opacity (say 10%-20%) duplicate of the template layer above all your other layers. Depending on which template you're using, you might want to set the blending mode to Multiply. Toggle it on and off while you paint. Turn it on before you preview your image in Poser or SL, so it will show up superimposed over the garment. If something's wacky you can pinpoint the "coordinate" on the template's grid. Then it comes down to counting little squares until you find the same trouble spot on the 2D image.

Sorry, long-winded.

keep it simple and keep it clean
ie:
a 1 pixel dot in (name your editing software here) is 1x1 (lets say) green square

once its passed tru open gl as a real pixel yea its 1x1 square
but its 1x1 square with a green dot and a background color outline, which is technically the accurate repersentation on a pixel (a dot not a perfect square)

soo lets say you have a black and white lace ... with a 1 or so pixel difference in the details

you end up with 2 dots that wont connect and a blob making up the difference

...

Hi Syra,

I tried to PM you, but I guess you have those turned off.

Anyhow I have some in game information that will help you a lot. I myself, like Simone Stern and many other designers use GIMP instead of photoshop.

There is a person named Dreams Lightcloud who teaches a basics and an intermediate class on the gimp, so you might want to contact her.

Also remember, that many designers use photo sourcing - ie taking pictures of clothing from the web, or scanning them to hard drive - many of those have their seams, textures, straight lines and the like already intact.

not everyone who creates clothes is an artist. not everyone who makes clothes for SL is a graphics artist and knows photoshop like the back pf their hand.

everyone and anyone can make clothing in SL. I would be happy to help if you have an interest in trying out gimp - but i am sure that the tools are pretty similar with other aps

just do not give up! I feel your frustration, and many who started making clothes in SL have felt the same way. you can contact me anytime here or in SL.

Hi Syra, I'd love to see your stuff in world or maybe a photo here. It's hard to know what you're doing wrong, and my guess is there's just something simple in your process that needs tweaking.

I use Chip's templates which are great for matching seams. Also, on seams, I let the 'fabric' extend past the seams some to avoid any gaps in the edges, etc. Many other designers clip their clothing there--not sure how they do that well, but there are many ways to accomplish your goals.

For straight lines I use the polygon tool, although I've recently taken Robin's method of drawing a path and converting it to a selection. It's important to have 'anti-aliasing' on for those lines so you don't get jaggies. And, it's as equally important that you use anti-aliasing in any straight lines in the alpha channel. Don't blur those straight edges unless you want a blurred edge. (oh, and btw, a straight line on the template won't always show up as straight on the SL body!!! The body curves and the UVs are usually different shaped on the avie then they are on the template! you have to work with that)


Jacket layer/shirt layer???? Good question. People do all different things--do what you like and what seems to make sense to you. Some designers use one layer for a complete tux. Others use the shirt AND skirt layer. I use two layers for most of mine and have one that uses all three layers for versatility. But the point here is, you don't have to follow any 'rules' on how other people did it. Just do what makes sense to you.

Have you done Robin's t-shirt tutorial yet? You should get a really nice product if you follow the steps. My methods are different than Robin's--she's much more of a photoshop artist than me . There are many ways accomplish the look you want--you just have to play with it.

I hope some of that helped. Contact me in-world anytime and maybe I can give you some pointers, etc.

I have found this tip from Namssor Daguerre extremely useful in helping me see in a few seconds whether two seams line up, whether a good-looking wrinkle in PS looks like a finger smudge in SL, etc. It doesn't work with skirts, but it works with other tops and bottoms. Now, every time I draw something that I'm unsure of, I run the related action set, switch to SL, go into Appearance, and observe the results. It takes only seconds. And it's great for experimentation.

I'm still a big time n00b at making clothes, but what i have found in getting things to look somewhat right, is to use daz3d to preview what your working on. Its a free app which gives a basic representation of whats happening in the transition from 2d-3d.

There are other apps as well which can do this such as BodyPaint3d, 4dpaint, Deep Paint 3d etc. These apps let you paint straight onto the 3dmodel. Of those deep paint is one which i have looked at and found useful as it allows you to import and export the things you do as psd's.

I've only made two "sets" of clothing, and with some hard work they both came out surprisingly well. (At least, it surprised me they weren't complete junk ^.-) One of the tops I made I even decided to sell.

I've tried photosourcing, and those things just come out terrible. So what I do now is take a cloth texture, make it so I can tile it as much as I need to to get the grain size I want, desauturate (if necessary), and use it as a layer in Gimp. I draw the outline of the piece of clothing, which I do let bleed to the outside of the template (Chip's, of course), and also draw any seams I want to show up in the finished product all in Inkscape. I'm more practiced in it's vectors than in Gimp's. After that, I export the outline, and put that as another layer in the same image, and do the same with the seams.

After all that, I select the alpha of the outline layer in Gimp (and possibly invert the selection, I always forget), and then create a new layer which will be my colour layer. Using the bucket tool, I fill the selected layer with a colour/shade. Usually I just make it white, black, or gray, and colourize it inside Second Line. Anyways, I put the fabric/cloth texture layer over this, and set it to the grain extract mode. I put my seams above both, and make their opacity lower, to wherever it needs to be to look more natural.

Now it's time for shadow and highlights. I highly recommend looking at real photos and what other people have done in-game to see where shadows and highlights look the best. Put the shadow(s) on its own layer, as well as highlights. I use the airbrush with white for highlights, and black for shadows, of course. ^.^ Once I'm done I make sure they both on top of all the layers, and lower their opacity quite a bit. The key, it seems, to good textures/clothing, is making each part it's own layer, and bringing the opacity down on things like seams and shadows. I make the template and outline layers invisible, and export as a targa.

When my brain is working, I check out how the clothing looks on the avatar in the preview.

Now that was probably way more info than you wanted, but as someone else new to clothing, I was hoping this all could help. I can also tell you how to make folds, but they seem fairly uneeded most of the time and I'm tired of typing for now. X-D

I'd say, don't give up. It's not impossible to figure out how to at the very least, make passable, non-completely ugly clothing.

EDIT: Oh yes, and I save the selected alpha of the outline layer as a path. This is so I can easily erase all the excess (the unnecassary stuff outside of the outline) from fabric, shadow, and highlight layers when I'm done. Just a quick ctrl-k and it's cleaned up.

I find it hard to believe that you are producing "crap" based on the skills you described. I use photo shop inside and outside of SL and while there was certainly a learning curve when I first started I didn't find myself with the same problems you are describing...are you being way too hard on yourself (as most artists tend to be)? Perhaps, your designs are not crap at all? I dont know.

On the other hand, perhaps you are missing some small tricks that would make a huge difference. I dont usually subscribe to threads, but I will to this one. Please post a few examples and what you produced and what you think sucks about each one and I feel confident we can help.

It certainly sounds like you have the desire and drive, so hang in there.

Hi y'all.

Below is a finished product of a tee-shirt, one that I did through trial and error. This to me, is crap. This is a plain white tee with a chess logo on it. If you look around the collar area it's jagged, and skin is sjowing through the shoulders.

The second one is also a shirt I made, and yes it does say Boobs, lol. The problem with this one is that the seams dun match at the sides, though I don't think I captured that well.

And thanks for alla support.

At least for skin showing through: If you let the texture/colour bleed outside of the template a bit, it'll fix that. As for seams matching up, I'd say be sure to use Chip Midnight's template, and zoom in really close to try to get them to match up exactly in the same place.

I'm not sure what makes an edged jagged though. I haven't had that happen before.

I hope you've decided to keep trying. ^.^

Edit: Also, I'd say those are very nice other than the things you mentioned wrong with them. I especially like the chess one!

Edit 2! Apparently, it's likely that the collar is jagged because it is being blended at the edges of two regions, the neck and torso. I think just making the collar lower will fix it up. (Now I see why I haven't had that problem. I've only made shirts that have a lower neckline.)

I'm not sure this applies to you, but the default setting of a new shirt has the collar lower than 100, so any new shirt where you use an alpha channel to define the collar needs to have it set back to 100, on both the front AND back. So make sure that isn't your problem.

Otherwise, you just need to nail that edge--and make sure you've used anti-aliasing on both the actual edge AND the alpha channel.