New Clothing templates ???

Question why not just make some new clothing templates that make since ? I spend countless time adjusting clothes because they don't look right when i get them in sl not only time but 10l everytime too ...All these updates now lets get some templates that work and make since ...upper body is the worst ( to me ) placement of panties on the lower body is so off i just stay away from making them ... Big question is why in the word is the (upper body) back higher than the front on the template why not make them the same ???/

The UV mapping of the avatar definitely leaves a bit to be desired, but considering the range of shapes (both male and female) that the single avatar mesh has to be able to morph to while still looking reasonably good I'd say LL did a pretty good job. At this point there are thousands of items that would go down the toilet if LL redid the avatar mapping. Every piece of clothing and every skin ever made up until now would be useless. The only way for them to do it would be to have the avatar mesh hold two different sets of UV coordinates which I'm pretty sure the SL engine doesn't currently support.

Part of the challenge (and fun, depending on your point of view) of making clothing and skins is learning how to work around the quirks of the templates.

If you haven't already, you might want to try using my custom templates instead of the LL supplied templates. They make life quite a bit easier. I highly recommend uploading the templates to SL and making a skin out of them. Wear your template skin and take lots of screenshots. Use those for reference so you can see exactly what parts of the grid end up on the avatar.

You can find my templates here: /109/72/40762/1.html

Chip's templates are awesome! They have saved me so much work. Also, before you upload something you can do a preview in that window that shows the texture you are going to upload. You can click the drop down and choose, female/male upper body, lower body, face, etc. It helps a lot even though it isn't the greatest of 3d previews.

Chip's templates are great and have been a huge help but i do think that SL could do with some template updating, not necessarily new UV mapping but i would really like to see clearer placement for toes and fingernails. Avatar feet are awful but could be improved by having better foot templates with a clearer idea of placement to draw details on. The lips too never seem to load looking how they do when you match them to the template. Also it would be wonderful to have a whole body template alternative as an addition to what we have now so that a torso could be painted without worrying about joins and it would widen the possibilities with regard clothing.

i also feel that charging us to load textures is wrong when you consider the costs of land tier (which is far too expensive) and how much money we must be making the company in game.
Second Life is a wonderful program but the sheer cost of uploading and owning land keep prices high and stifle creativity. The sky would be the limit if we could actually afford to build half the things that imagination and creavity encourage us to.

My two pennies.

part of the job, you just will have to do with it

Hi Nikki!

It sounds to me like you might not be clear on exactly what the "templates" are.

They aren't simply handy guides for coloring.

They are, essentially, screen shots of the UV Mapping used for the model.

Just like all the points for the models in Second Life have positions on the X, Y, and Z axes, they have positions on the U (horizontal) and V (vertical) axes that tell the program how to color the pixels. Each point gets the color that is on the corresponding point in that "template." (The areas between the points are interpolated.)

So redesigning the "templates" would break all the clothing in Second Life.

That's why we're stuck with the ones we have.

Hope this helps!