Quick question

Hello,

Ive begun the tedious, and long journey towards becoming a clothes designer, etc. I have read all the tutorials for clothes making and design, and they were very helpful for someone who hasnt had a whole lot of experience using Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, GIMP etc. Thank you to all of the wonderful artists that supplied those tutorials for us "newbs" Anyway one problem i am having is getting my seams on the sides to line up correctly. Another problem i have is during the basic steps of creating a shirt for example, after i create my design i am suppose to merge all (flatten) layers however when i try to do that the option is gray and not selectable. Im not sure if my instructions are missing a step? Meanwhile i continue to experiment with the program Paintshop Pro (i know.. i know... Photoshop seems to be the norm, but i cant afford the high price atm!) . If anyone could help me I would really appreciate it, practice makes better hehe, but tips are always helpful!

Thanks!

Hello, Aleri Welcome to SL and to the design forum! Lining up seams is very challenging. Here are some tips that can help you get the hang of it. First off, use one of the better template sets by myself or Robin Sojourner. You can find links to them in the sticky thread of links at the top of this forum. They include a grid system for helping you match details across seams. The grid lines are contiguous across the seams so getting a fold to hit the right spot on both sides of a seam is just a matter of counting grid lines. If your detail hits the side seam of the torso front at the tenth grid line up from the waist seam, it will hit that same grid line on the back of the torso as well. You can usually get pretty close on a first try with a bit of practice. Fron there you can nudge the details around until they match using the liquify filter, the smudge tool, or other methods.



I don't use PSP but in Photoshop layer merge options will often be grayed out if one of the visible layers is currently selected. Perhaps it's the same in PSP?

Hope that helps

Never flatten. There's simply no need for it. It's destructive to your archival workflow, and it yields absolutely zero benefits. Keep your layered work preserved, always. Produce your image using as many layers as you need, save your work (as a layered PSD), and then export to TGA for upload to SL.

I know, there are a few tutorials out there that tell you to flatten your work before you save to TGA, but once again, trust me, it's not something you should be doing. I've been a texture artist for a long time, and with all due respect to the authors of those particular tutorials, I've never been able to understand why they thought flattening was a good idea. It isn't. I'll explain.

First, since TGA is an inherently flat format, the exported TGA will be exactly the same whether the source document was flattened or not, making the flattening step a waste of time at best. Second the only thing the flattening actually does accomplish is to make it MUCH harder to go back and make changes to the source document later if you need to.

Imagine, for example, putting text on a T-shirt, and then discovering a typo after you've finished and uploaded it to SL. If you didn't keep your layers, you'll have to re-create the entire shirt over again from scratch. If you did preserve your layered document though, then all you have to do is edit the one text layer, and then re-export the TGA, a 5-second task at most.

For a more extreme example, it's not uncommon that the PSD files for complex textures (like high quality skins) contain literally hundreds of layers. That kind of thing takes dozens of hours to produce. Could you imagine having to do all that over again every time you want to make a minor change?

That would obviously be redicuolous, but that's what you'd have to do if you'd flattened the file. So again, never do that. Keep your layered PSD intact at all times, and save to TGA whenever you're finished. That way it's easy to go back and make any changes you need at any time.

By the way, depending on what version of the software you're using, when you export a layered image to TGA, it may prompt you that the TGA will be saved as a copy. This is perfectly normal, nothing to be concerned about. The prompt can look like a warning, which is easy to misinterpret as something being wrong, but all it really is is just just a confirmation that your layered work will not be overwritten by the TGA export. Some versions of PSP and Photoshop give you that confirmation upon saving; some don't. It's no big deal either way.

there is a very nice template that shows how seams will line up. search the forums, maybe that will help you

Hi and Welcome Aleri!

I don't use PSP, because I'm on a Mac, but plenty of people here do. I don't think that there is any one program that's "standard", and you certainly shouldn't feel that your work is somehow less worthy if you're using one app, and not another.

All of which being said, I flatten a copy of the file before resizing to 512, because it's going to wind up flat anyway, and it takes significantly less time to do it that way on my machine.

As Chosen said, always keep a layered file.

I used to flatten, shrink, save as .tga, and then go back a couple of steps to the unflattened file and save again. But I was tired one night, and forgot to backtrack, and lost the layered file. So I don't do it that way any more.

Now I duplicate the file, then flatten, shrink, etc. I'm not sure how this would be done in PSP, but there must be some way. If you want to flatten before shrinking, to save time, then I strongly suggest that you flatten a copy.

(I'm not sure what tutorial you're following; so if this confuses you, you should know that most of us work at 1024 px. by 1024 px or larger, then shrink the image to 512 px by 512 px before uploading. Larger textures take much longer to rez inworld, and don't really give you much more detail. In fact, there is some indication that clothing textures are capped at 512 by the program, and your graphics program has better algorithms for size reduction than SL, so it's best to shrink it before uploading.)