T-Shirt Template

Yep. Crystal clear now. Thanks for the detailed response.

Just a message of thanks to Robin for both the template and the explanation.

I wanted to make a freebie to give out to the few people who corner me each day to say I am something other than repulsive. I awoke yesterday morning with a specific design in mind for a t-shirt and shortly after finding this thread it was done.

The template made that a snap, and simultaneously chipped away the first sliver of my reluctance to tackle SL clothes on my own.

(I have added your name, Robin, to the properties - "Template By:" - so that respect for the hard part goes where it's due. I have worked with Photoshop for ten years, but your technique here for creating believable fabric deformation was all news.)

On your Design Example layer in the template (the harp logo) you hid a couple of extra tricks; Outer Glow and Stroke. Should we follow suit and apply those to our replacement logos? Are the effective only on colored shirts?

Many thanks.

Great, Rick! I'm glad that's cleared up.

Cool, Ayton. Your shirt looks nice.

I just wanted people to see that it was possible to add Layer Styles to their designs, to add impact or to help focus attention. I don't think either one would have worked on your shirt, but sure, they can work on white shirts, too.

You don't have to use the Layer Styles I used, either. You can use any of them you want. And remember, Outer Glow doesn't have to be a glow. It can be any color, and use any of the Blending Modes. I often use dark Outer Glows set to Multiply.

The point is to have fun with it!

Just curious. Has anyone built a simple mannequin yet? So that this mannequin has all the UV coordinates adjusted, when you drop in a clothing texture, it appears like the mannequin is wearing it.

Yeah. You can download such a mannequin from the Lindens here.

It's for Poser, but there are (or were) .obj files in there, so you can open it in anything that can read the UV Maps on .obj files.

Hi Robin, I missed this part of your reply. Must have been so interested in the explanation of how you did the creases .

Anyway, I came to the conclusion that you did separate PC and MAC files as all your zip files.
In the T shirt zip file there are two directories. One is Robin(Sourjourner)Wood_T-Shirt and the other is _MACOSX which also contains a folder named as above. Thats the reason a queried why the two version. I do use both PC and MAC which is why I am curious.

Are there? How odd. I didn't put them there, and I don't see two directories on the Mac. I'll have to try looking at the file on a PC when I have a little time. No point in having more stuff in there than is needed!

I think this is a result of the Mac's resource fork management; the phantom file should be tiny and contain information about the PSD's icon etc., which Macs store separately, although it remains invisible to us.

For similar reasons, PC users think we're sending two pictures instead of one when we email them images, unless "PC friendly attachments" is checked. One actual image and one little resource fork.

I have used an excellent contextual menu plug-in called Grim Ripper to tear these resource forks off files for various reasons; I'd guess it would work well here, too.

Ah! I thought those files would show up as "._DS Store" or something like that, and be clearly recognized as garbage files.

I used to make .zip files using a PC and .sit files with a Mac for everything, just so I could remove those files for PC users. But I was in a hurry this time, and just used "Make Archive" from the Contextual menu and slapped it up there.

I apologize for my laziness, and I'll be putting a clean file up sometime soon. (I do have to boot the PC to do it, I'm afraid. I appreciate the link to the Grim Reaper, Ayton, and I love that icon of Death with the little Rez Edit hand puppet. But, for some reason, it's not working on my machine, even after a cold boot. Sigh.)

Sorry to hear that, Robin. Grim Ripper is still working fine for me under 10.4.3. I just ripped the fork off a targa to check. (Note that it will only show up in your contextual menu if there is a fork to be snipped. Most Photoshop files should be fair game, though.)

Oh well, I know there is a terrifying way to snip the resource fork off files by moving them with Terminal, but that is for commandos only!

Ooops! Sorry. It seems that I was trying to rip off a fork that wasn't there. I thought the folder itself had a fork, which is where the ._DS Store things came from. But it seems the only fork was on the Photoshop file.

So that's gone now, and it just remains to test it and make sure that the extra files don't show up on the PC.

Thanks again!

Now I look under the _MACOSX directory at the files I can tell by the size they are not actual Photoshop files etc. I should have looked harder.

I just had someone write privately to me, explaining that they are lost when it comes to the step about painting gray on the dinscontinuous edges of the Overlay layer. I don't answer questions in private IM, because if one person is stuck on a step, then it's probable that others are, as well. Answering here helps everyone, not just a single individual, so I'm going to answer it here.

First re-read post number 25 in this thread, where I answer this question in some depth, with illustrations.

Briefly, discontinuous edges are the places that meet on the avatar, but not on the map. (Remember, the "template" isn't a template at all; it's a UV Map, that tells SL what colors to place at each vertex point, where the polygons join, on the Avatar.)

It's the discontinuous edges that create "seams" in clothing. If you leave the Overlay layer the way it is after you use the Lighting step, there will be very obvious seams. Evening the tone makes the seams match, so they aren't obvious at all.

In an Overlay layer, anything that is darker than 50% gray is blended with the underlying layer using Multiply, while anything that's lighter is blended using Screen. Pixels that are 50% gray aren't blended with the underlying layer at all, so they are, in effect, invisible.

So painting with 50% gray on the Overlay layer is exactly like masking it, but without making the file any larger.

Hope this helps!

Thanks alot for this template Robin. My first T came out awesome, exactly like the one I have IRL. Super easy to follow.

You are very welcome; I'm glad it's working well for you.

Whenever I copy a graphic from a file over to the front of the shirt in the template, it adds a white outline around the graphic I'm transferring. I've tried everything I can think of to get rid of this, but nothing seems to be working! HELP!

Have you tried turning off the outer glow effect for the front design layer? (though I admit I've not had this problem.)

Hi Henry! As Zack said, in the example, I have both an outer glow and a stroke, just to show people what can be done. If you are oopying the Layer Style from the example, that might be your problem.

But I don't see how you could be doing that without knowing that you were. So I'm more inclined to think the white halo has to do with the selection around the object you are using for a design in the first place.

If you copy something from an image with a white background, these halos are very, very common. It comes from the anti-aliasing around the image, where there are pixels that are partially from the colored image, and partially from the white background.

Photoshop has a built-in tool that might help. If you go to the Layer menu, and look at the very bottom, there's a Matting choice. From there, if you choose Defringe.. you'll get a dialog that lets you choose how many pixels "deep" you want to go with the effect.

Photoshop will replace the color in the pixels at the edge with adjacent "pure" color. This can work, but in my opinion it also makes the edges look less crisp, since it tends to blur the colors, and blur them out into the transparent area a bit.

You can also use "Remove White Matte", from the same Matting menu, which specifically targets the white pixels for removal, but I've never had much luck with that one.

There are a few even more esoteric methods you can use, such as changing the Advanced Layer Blending so white pixels aren't blended with the lower layers. But those get very technical, and I'm not sure that you want to go there. (If you do, let me know. )

The method I usually use is somewhat different. I Command/ctrl click on the thumbnail image to select the layer transparency, and Invert the selection (Select > Inverse).Then I Expand the selection, so it's 1 pixel inside the image (Select > Modify > Expand: 1 Pixel).

Then, if the halo is very obvious, I just tap the Delete key to remove the outer edge of the selection, which eliminates the problem.

If it's not that bad, and I want to keep the edges, I go to Edit > Fill, and choose Clear for the Blending Mode, and about 50% for the Opacity, which has the effect of half-erasing the edges, instead of fully erasing them.

If the object is a solid color, of course, I choose the color using the Eyedropper, and then hold down the Shift key (to preserve Transparency) and Fill with that color. (Option/alt + Delete to Fill with the Foreground color.)

Any of these methods will work; which one you want really depends on what your base image looks like. My advice is to pick one and try it. (You might want to start with Defringe, because it's the easiest.) If that doesn't give you satisfactory results, Undo, and pick another!

Hope this helps!

Hey, This is great. Glad I wandered upon it!

I'm sorry if I'm asking what's already been asked, but I have a problem with images on shirts.
I have put an illustration on a shirt, and it looks fine (clean and sharp) in the upper body preview when about to download, but when i then download it and use the tga to make a shirt and wear it, the image on it looks blurred and pixelated.
What am I doing wrong?

sometimes it just takes its sweeeeeeeeeeeet time to fully download clothing

Nowadays (since about 1.7) I usually have to put on and take off my clothing items two or three times before they'll load fully. Same with skins sometimes. Meh, I'm used to it now though.

Umm... I'm not sure. It could be anything from your graphics card, to SL Weirdness, to zooming in too close, to uploading at the wrong resolution, to a full cache, to a host of other things.

Can I ask what resolution you are using for the image when you upload?

And if you could give us screen shots of the blurring, that would be most helpful, as well.

Also, if you could have someone else look at the shirts, and tell you if it's blurry on their machine, that would be great. These things often do differ from machine to machine.

The taking off and putting on again works for me pretty well - usually only once. Give that a couple of goes and see what it does - there's something screwy about how SL is loading all kinds of textures since 1.7 or so, and that's particularly true of clothes.

There might be other things, but if that trick doesn't sort them we've got the likliest eliminated.

Yes, I've taken into account the slow rate of rezzing, that is not the case here.

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b140/mai74/shirt.jpg

A comparison of what the preview looks like and the actual shirt. It doesn't look much better from more distance or in daylight. The bows and print look fine in photoshop and the preview, but not on the actual shirt ingame. The tga was 1024x1024, on Chip's template.