Tutorial Suggestion

Without the many tutorials that are posted in the stickies I dont think I would have the patience to learn how to make myown clothing. Im so picky that I rarely go shopping in Second Life...ok real life to lol. Anyways, I got wrinkles down, got alpha channels down, getting there with seams....my question is. How about the highlights you see on clothes to make them look more realistic? Any tips in this area?


Keep up the good work on the tips and tricks!

~Stormy

I can explain a little bit about what I do for highlighting.

I have two sets of images I posted in the gallery section here. They are good examples of my process for applying highlights and reflectivity to an avatar texture. They show several types of highlights in a single texture. It is just one example amongst an infinite number of surface types that will reflect light. Clothing will not be any different in principle, but will probably be much simpler to produce since reflected light from clothing is likely to be more diffuse than a highly polished surface like carbon fiber resin. The more diffuse the reflected light is the less precise one needs to be in defining the light source(s) Reflected light is what will register as a highlight when light rays bounce off the texture’s surface and converge on the camera’s, or observers’s vantage point. SL can not accurately produce this type of effect dynamically upon the surface of the avatar for any given texture type, so this is why adding the illusion of this effect (from a carefully chosen vantage point) makes some textures look more realistic than their flatter counterparts.

Don’t forget that wherever there are highlights there will be shadows where less light is reflected back to the camera/observer. Wrinkles in clothing are a great example of this. There are already several tutorials floating around on creating wrinkles, all dealing with burn and dodge effects.

The most obvious highlight in my example below is the bright spot highlights from three primary light sources. There is also a secondary reflective highlight and a tertiary color highlight (which is baked into a single reflective environmental layer) to differentiate the light and colors coming from above and below. In the carbon fiber skin example I used a snapshot of a landscape with bright blue sky and brownish green grassy tones on the ground to add color highlights to the skin surface. This looks most natural for the (typical SL landscape) background that the avatar figure is standing in here. In the figures below I have 3 primary images separated out of the composite image. Two are complete skin layers (Figures 1&2), and one is meant to be used as an alpha channel (Figure 3). The reflected environment in Figure 1 was dodged into the texture in figure 2 using a combination of linear and color dodge (layer modes) in Photoshop. This brought out the color and the highlights from figure 1 while maintaining the underlying texture information in Figure 2. The primary highlights were dealt with by adding a third (levels) adjustment layer using the image seen in Figure 3. Each of the upper layers contributed to the effect of the ones below it, so the sequence for this skin’s highlighting effects was:



Layer 1 - The carbon fiber skin texture at normal layer mode and 100% opacity

Layer 2 - A levels adjustement layer applied using the spot highlight alpha channel at 15% opacity

Layer 3 - The environmental reflection skin texture linear dodged at 25% opacity

Layer 4 - The environmental reflection skin texture duplicated and color dodged at 75% opacity

The end result looks like the composite seen in Figure 4 and the final image posted here.

Thanks Namssor I look forward to it.

~Stormy

Long story short, the Dodge tool is your friend. Any place where the clothing rises up (eg. the tops of wrinkles) run the dodge tool over it.

If people write tutorials and post them, I'll sticky them (or i'll sticky a thread that points to the tutorials; i'd prefer to sticky a thread that contains a list of tutorials with brief descriptions).

If you think something should be stickied PM me. This applies to any of the forums not just this forum.

Hi Strife, there already *is* a thread with links to tutorials stickied in this forum. In fact, it links to all the other stickies. I add tutorials to the list when I see them, but i'm guessing you can edit my list too, so please add add more!! Anyone else can post to the thread with more links or send me a note to add something.

Just to add a bit to this, here's how I generally handle highlighting for fabrics. When I have my item finished without highlighting or shadowing I duplicate it to a couple of additional layers. One is my highlight layer. I use the levels tool (and often saturation as well) to get the look I want for the highlight areas but applied to the entire layer. I then add a layer mask to hide the entire highlight layer. Then I use a soft edged brush to reveal highlights where I want them. Depending on the type of fabric or if the item is supposed to have more than one fabric type I'll do more than one highlight layer with different looks. I do the same thing with shadowing - duplicate the unlit texture, darken it to how I want it to look as if the entire thing were in shadow, and then use a layer mask to reveal it in the areas were I want it. This is a nice non-destructive way to do highlights and shadows because you can fiddle around with the layer masks as much as you like without messing up your original unlit texture.

As for figuring out how light (specularity) and shadow should spread out on the texture, the best thing to do is look at photographs of things made from that particular kind of fabric. Shiny smooth fabrics will have more defined areas of specularity with sharp highlight edges. Rough/textured fabrics will have more diffuse specularity because the roughness of the fabric scatters light. Porous fabrics (like a sweater or loose weave) will appear slightly self-illuminated in areas of specularity because light scatters through the fabric. And so on.

Thanks everyone this has helped out alot.

~stormy