Pant Mesh is corrupt?

Hello, thought I would post about this since it seems like an unsolvable problem to me.

I have been trying o make my first pair of pants lately and while I am fairly experienced at clothes making I am having a nightmare of a time with the pants mesh. It's very difficult to explain without a picture and of course attachments are borked again, but here goes:

If I take the pants texture all the way to the bottom of the template, I get pants that "hang" properly and can be belled out in the normal fashion, but the bottom edge is exceedingly "wavy." If these are real pants, the hem on the bottom would be wavering by about an inch and a half at least. Yet I have seen other pants (indeed I own some), that have a "straight across" cut on the bottom (no waviness).

I have experimented with placing the texture at different parts on the template.

For instance, if you put it ever so slightly higher than the edge of the template (even just one or two pixels), you no longer get the wavy effect, but you get a kind of "bunched" pant as if it had a drawstring around the ankle or was made especially for MC Hammer.

If you put the texture even one pixel *over* the edge of the template, you get even more waviness as the tiny bit of data that's on the edge will get stretched out into a "tongue" effect.

What's worse is that if you go into the preview, (the one time I was able to test it), none of the wavy effects are noticeable. Also a great deal of the time since 1.9.0 came out I have had problems with the pants mesh just not showing up at all for hours at a time on the regular grid.

I have sen other posts that suggests that LL is "playing around" with the clothes meshes lately, so does this mean that the pants mesh in 1.9.0 is just seriously screwed up?

If not what is the correct placement line for the bottom cuff of a pair of pants? I have tried out many many different arrangements and not a single one of them results in a flat, straight across cut on the bottom of the pants.

I problem with your pant hem going all funky on you isn't related to the texture at all, as far as I know. It's determined by the setting of the length slider in appearance. As you adjust the length the leg polygons automatically deform. There are some lengths that just tend to go all weird on you. Play around with that a bit and see if it clears it up for you. Sometimes just a change of 1 will make it return to semi-normality.

Hmmmm.
Thanks for posting Chip, haven't heard from you in a while, I thought you had left town or something.

I will certainly try your advice, the mesh does seem to act terribly odd even with minor adjustments. the thing that's driving me crazy though is even with the slider set to 100 for length I get a pair of pants that looks shorter than the Little Rebel jeans I normally wear also at length 100. *sigh*

I'm starting to think this is one of those things where we just say..

"It's good that SecondLife did that to my creation, it's real good! And tomorrow, tomorrow's going to be a real good day too!"

(lest we end up in the cornfield as a jack-in-the-box)

haha, I find myself saying that a lot!

Try different combinations of length and the other fit settings like cuff flair. Avatar detail settings might also be a factor. Go ahead and put the texture all the way to the bottom of the legs. You can use the bottom edge of the legs as a guide to run the fabric seam right along. Cheating the texture up a bit can help avoid the "my pants hem has gone insane" issue but it's probably not worth it unless you like pants that look too short (and they always look at least a little bit too short).

Dianne, remember that there's really no such thing as a "pants mesh." There's just the Avatar mesh, which gets deformed to make pants.

So, as Chip said, the only way to fix the pants hem is with the sliders. I've found that, as the leg polys move out to form the "bell" at the bottom of the pants, they also get longer. (In other words, they move out and down, both.)

There are a few "sweet spots" where the hem looks straight, and a few really bad places where it looks just awful. If you have a pair of "mod" pants that you like, you might want to see where the sliders are for them.

Otherwise, you'll just have to experiment, and see what looks best on your own Avatar. (Because, like most other things dealing with the Avatars, what looks great on one can look terrible on another, depending on how each person has arranged the sliders.)

And look on the bright side; at least we have two legs!

Hope this helps!