Skins and Seams: That "Sewn" Look

Morning folks. I'm just getting into skinning because of my recent desire to be artistic in SL. I was working on a puma skin for an avatar costume, but when I upload the darned thing most of it's got seams. Up close they don't show up for some reason, but the farther away you get the worse they appear. I've got a picture of it here. Oddly though, the area at the high thigh/crotch area is without seams. I've circled both situations in the picture (seams in red, no-seam area in green).

I used Chip's fantastic template, the generic mannequin model available off of the SL site, and Tattoo and the GIMP for editing the texture. The strangest thing is though, in Tattoo it looks fine. I was wondering if painting past the seam guides on the template would eliminate the problem and thought I should ask someone with experience before I waste another L$30.

I believe you should always paint past the seam guides, what's probably happening is the pixels from the other side are bleeding across when the texture's antialiased at low resolution.

Makes sense. My need for clean, precise lines has yet again come back to bite me in the ass it "seams".

*groan*

All that stuff they taught you in kindergarten about coloring in the lines, WRONG! As AJ said, make sure your coloring extends outside the bleed area.

Kindergarten didn't teach me much, except how to win fights. ^.^;

After much editing and resaving, and thanks to the preview function for uploading single files (wish I had've known about it before I batch uploaded those three skin segments earlier, but then I didn't know it'd look bad), I've finally made my head look like it's not some weird Frankenstein's monster reject. Now to do the rest of the body.... Later.
<falls asleep at his keyboard and squishes the cat stretched out in front of his monitor>

Addendum:
Because I'm a stubborn dumb ass, I stayed up to finish breaking all the "stay inside the lines" rules I could. There's still a seam issue on the lower part of my skin along the outsides of the legs for some reason, but it's hardly noticable (it disappears when you're close enough to see my avatar clearly, and it's pretty hard to pick out unless you're looking for it at extreme distances). Again, thanks for the help. Now to figure out how a texture wraps around a semi-sphere...

Hi Feynt,

Namssor Daguerre posted an excellent way to preview skins on you AV without uploading, and it has saved me much frustration, to say nothing of lindens <grin>

You can see it at the end of this thread:

/109/b0/21673/2.html

Cheers, Fairge

When you zoom out from an avatar, SL reduces the quality of the textures so you start to see them half rezzed instead of fully rezzed. That causes the color of the bleed area to become visible at the seams. You can eliminate most of that by making the background of your texture the most common seam color of your skin. If you're using my templates, make sure your color extends to the outside edge of the colored seam matching guide. That corresponds pretty well with the bleed area.

Originally I had painted the area under the seam matching guides, right up to the edge. I use the GIMP's magic wand with the seam guide, then grow the selection about 5 pixels which seems to expand the selection area to the outside of the lines. But that didn't seem to be working, so I just went over all of the edges again with the paint brush and painted the appropreate colours. The problem in some cases though is that the texture's edge is flush with the edge of the canvas, I think that might be contributing to my seam issues. I'd say "why can't SL stretch textures to fit?" but that would probably end up doing more harm than good in the end.

As for that texture thingy, that's interesting to know. I've been using the upload previewer, but it doesn't quite give me the ability to zoom as far as I need to for that seam issue to appear. The funny thing is, I've done this kind of thing in other games (Furcadia for instance, my programming haven of the past), so you'd think I'd have thought of this too. Never the less, useful to know. And to echo that thread, thanks Namssor.

It's due to the progressive loading of textures rather than stretching, and you're right. There are some areas you really can't do anything about. For example on the head template the sides of the adams apple are only 1-2 pixels away from the top of the head seam. Unless those two seams have the same color, there will always be a visible seam there when you zoom out.

Don't suppose LL could fudge the texture loader a bit to give some more room? >D
Maybe in another engine, who knows.

I shouldn't think it'd be too difficult. I expect it's more the effect it'd have on the money sink that's holding more advanced previews back.