UVW maps cause "Stretching"

Hey - if anyone knows of a way to prevent the stretching that occurs when you create something in photoshop that has vertical lines - on the top layer. I am so frustrated - I spent an hour last night working on a top that looks ok (I want it better than ok), but the sides of the top get stretched....

I have 3D max - maybe there's a trick to it that I am missing? Chip or Robin - maybe you would know?

Sometimes, there will ALWAYS be a little stretching--it depends on how severe the bend of the mesh is.

If you get good at unwrapping objects and UV mapping them...then you can minimize the stretching effect.

Won't unwrapping and then creating a new UV map destroy material so that it won't work for SL? I have tried doing what you just described and what I get is not the SL avatar map.

As long as the texture information is in the right format...it should be fine, right?

Vertical lines are very difficult, and will never be nice and straight on more than one specific shape. You can spend a long time getting them perfect with a particular shape and then as soon as someone with a different shape wears the item they'll be all stretched and distorted again. There's no way around that.

Remapping the avatar can be extremely useful for doing things like projecting complex patterns that cross seams, but they must always be baked back out to SL's native UV mapping.

ok - so I trudged through 1,000s of tutorials and such on texture map projection and I found something that might work. I haven't tried it yet but it looks as though this might solve any weird stretching and mismatched tiling - at least in 3DS max. I will be trying this this weekend and I'll let you all know how it works.

http://www.3d-tutorial.com/rebuilding_textures_after_modifying_uvs-459.html

Feel free to give it a stab. It is very similar to the way Chip's tutorial on projection mapping a sculpty goes. I didn't see anything for Maya or Lightwave - but if anyone knows of a similar technique for those programs, all of us clothing gurus would love to know...

There's really no need to use the projection method of that tutorial to remap the SL avatar. That's only necessary if you change the actual polygonal structure of the avatar model, like buiding in additional mesh details. If you're just wanting UVs that are easier to work with on the existing mesh, just use Max's (or whatever package you're using) UV modifiers but set them to use a different UV channel. For example, let's say you want to wrap a complex textile pattern around the torso and have it extend past the waist seam. Just add a cyllindrical UV map modifier to the model set to use UV channel 2. Get it projecting the pattern the way you want it, then simply use render to texture to bake it back out. But you want to bake UV channel 1, not 2. That will convert your cyllindrical mapping to SL's mapping, and you'll end up with your textile pattern set up perfectly for SL's templates. You can then blend that baked texture into your PSD file.