Questions from a newb

Hello everyone,
I'm pretty new to the SL thing.
I'm a illustrator by trade and I've been working on an online Flight Sim dev team for about 6 years now doing 2D textures, mostly for aircraft. Anyway, I'm no newb to texturing, at least the basics.
The first thing I did when I DL'd SL this week was get started into texturing. The head part is pretty straight forward. The problem comes in with the cloths.
I've looked around for an answer or solution to my problem, and maybe I missed something in the tutorials or FAQs but...I'll ask anyway.
What's up with the polygons on the chest area? Or is it the mapping? It's like a jagged push-pull. If this were a project I was working on with a 3D artist I'd send it back for remapping
So what is the trick to getting a clean straight line in the chest area? Here are some examples of the jagged lines I'd like to eliminate-

I realize some of it is caused by changing the shape and size of the figure in Appearance but in the SL Viewer,

I thought it was me so I bought a cheap tux to see how it looked and,

Aside from figuring out how far to angle the lines through each poly to make a non jagged line, is there a trick to this? Or do I need to start in with the 3D?

Also, does anyone know of a texture extractor for Mac OS?

The reason is because there's only one avatar mesh. Both male and female and every possible slider morph all use the same mesh with only some minimal tweaks to the UV mapping on some of the morph targets (which have never been released so we can't see exactly what the tweaks are). The jagged lines on the chest area are more of a problem on the male shapes than on female. The only way to avoid them is to create them in a 3d paint program or use projection mapping in a 3d app and bake it back out to SL's UVs. Mostly we just live with it and pray that some day LL will decide to redo the avatar (while keeping backward compatability with existing content somehow).

Great looking work BTW!

yeah good looking work.

from IBM/LL's press release from last october, new avatar design is one of the top items:

"Universal" Avatars: Exploring technology and standards for users of the 3D Internet to seamlessly travel between different virtual worlds. Users could maintain the same “avatar” name, appearance and other important attributes (digital assets, identity certificates, and more) for multiple worlds. The adoption of a universal “avatar” and associated services are a possible first step toward the creation of a truly interoperable 3D Internet.

I wouldnt expect anything soon--but i'm betting the next generation of avatars are going to be thousands of times more complex than the current action figures.

That really would depend on who jumps on board with that plan. SL's avatars are more advanced than most other online worlds and if the goal is to make it possible for avatars to travel between worlds including those that cater to much lower system specs we may be seeing things get much worse rather than better. Personally I think the whole initiative is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard and will likely drive small and hobbiest content creators out of the marketplace while large corporations take over the avatar assets market completely. Who else could attempt to protect their copyrights across dozens or hundreds of worlds (or have deep enough pockets not to care?).

Thank you guys for the fast answers! (I could have rhymed with replies but it sounded bad ) And also for the compliments. I'm still getting used to the templates and figuring out where improvements can be made.
I figured it had something to do with the model modification but I didn't know there was only ONE avatar to start with...although I noticed the UV maps are the same.
I'd think you would want to have at least male and female models, after all, we are pretty different To make it really nice I'd think 3 or 4 body types for both sexes would be pretty groovy. But, I guess for a free base set-up it's pretty cool.

The SL Previewer is pretty nice although I wish it would work off your Avatar 3D rather than the default.

I think I could work on the poly line skewing but it would be a lot of work and I'm sure it would vary depending on each avatar. It's probably not worth it.
I currently don't have an application that will paint directly on the model. Is there a good one for Mac that isn't ungodly expensive? I understand the newest Photoshop does but I've never tried it. But, I'd still want to extract my avatar to paint on rather than the default wouldn't I?

Again, does anyone know of a texture and 3D extractor for Mac?

You can download male and female versions of the avatar (with default shapes) in .obj format from the downloads section of the site. For a good reasonably priced 3d paint app you might want to have a look at Maxon's BodyPaint. There's currently no way to export avatar shapes from SL. If they ever release all the morph targets someone could write a previewer that incorporated the sliders, or you could set it up in a program like Max or Maya. I currently have a setup in Max where I can morph between male and female default shapes. I could mimic the shape sliders if I had the other targets. SL users (and artists) are just used to the imperfections for the most part.

If you study the clothing designs out there, you might notice that designers have learned to avoid putting detail on the problem areas.

I wish I could but there is so little to look at, that I've found at least, to look at without buying. To really see what's what I'd need the TGAs and I have no way of pulling them from SL.
Do you have any good suggestions where some good examples can be found?
Oh, that, and, what if you really want detail in a problem area

I don't suppose there is an easy way to preview your textures in SL without uploading first? Because of the extreme size of my avatar I've got more than the just a little distortion, and it's hard to predict what it will look like.
My most recent viewed in SL and in SL Previewer-



It doesn't really look bad, just not what I had expected :lol:

A handy trick is to make a skin out of the templates. Wear them on your avatar and take lots of screenshots. You can sketch your design on the screenshots and use the grid squares to plot your lines on the flat templates.

Ah, I do that with my airplane skins all the time. I feel stupid not to have thought of it here. The other sims I work on have an off-line function though. I guess I never though of doing it "live."
Thanks