Just One Arm

I'm sure I already know the answer to this, but I also know there are incredibally talented and knowledgable people here who may know a "work around".

Is there ANY way to create a texture to appear on just one arm? I use PS7 and would love to be able to do this for tattoos.

Thanks in advance

Even as not an expert the answer's can't be done. You can fake it with prims, but not from the UV map.

It can be done by using 2 layers for the item of clothing, say, one arm on the undershirt and one on the shirt.

It's so counterintuitive to think we only have one arm in SL, but we do.There's not much that can be done about it without involving prims.

...

Scratch my above comment, I wasn't thinking straight. The two layer thing was suggested by someone in a previous thread but, now I think about it, the alpha's gonna be the same on both arms so that's totally not gonna work.

AJ, If you make TWO garments, one a shirt and the other an undershirt, it shuld work. You would just wear both items.

Jen

'tis what I thought to start with. Then I realised that it won't work - since there's no way to make one arm transparent on the shirt so you can see the undershirt. Unless there's some setting for sleeve length bias or something I don't know about.

someday, i pray, they'll squeeze another arm into the Upper template, somehow, someday...

we have 2 legs in SL, i mean c'mon LL, a little asymmetry ain't so bad.

Ouch! You're right.

The only problem I see with adding in a second arm at this point would be the breaking of all upper clothing, upper tatoos, and the upper UV of the skins. We'd all be half-naked barbie dolls once again until the textile market changed.

The only forseeable solution would be to announce the change months in advance, open the preview grid and then release the new UV Maps to those that would develop new "two armed clothing"

Given the detailed nature of what would have to happen, I say it'll come out when Havok 2 does....being that's been promised since early 2002....I'll say it's not bloody likely any time soon.

Chances are 2 armed maps won't come until we get a new avatar, although AFAIK it would be totally possible to have new UV maps without breaking current textures using the current avatar.

It's a little bit of a shame, mostly because I can't do the entire Premiership (Fulham, Bolton and Blackburn have different sleeves). And yes, mildly annoying, but understandable to be honest, saves render time etc.

Hi AJ... How?

Even if all they did was put another sleeve on the map upper body, that would cause all the other pieces on the map to change, and that would break all the current textures.

Even if they made it so tiny that nothing else moved, it would still cause all current clothing to have whatever was in that portion of the map (probably blank, or a copyright notice,) on that sleeve. So clothing would still be broken.

The only way I can think of that would allow it would be to give us a choice of maps, in much the same way that we now have a choice of Default or Planar mapping for prims. (Although, IMHO, the Planar mapping only works on boxes. For anything else, it's useless since it has more distortions than the default UV map. Maybe, someday, they'll allow us to choose an axis for the planar projection, and make it useful for things like spheres and cones, but that day isn't today.)

Hi Robin!

There's certainly no room on the current map for another arm, I was thinking a flag in the (under)shirt/jacket and a different UV map would be the easiest to do. Another option would be to use a non-square texture for it and the client could pick up the ratio and change which mapping is being used accordingly.

I'm with you on the projection style planar mapping though. I've been wanting that for a while and got quite excited when I saw the announcement about the new mapping. Was a little disappointing to find it wasn't what I thought.

I think that might have been me having a brain fart. It sounded like a great idea at the time! Until LL changes a few things we're stuck with just one arm.

I think the only way we're ever going to get new UV mapping on the avatar is if LL makes them carry two sets of UV's and gives us a checkbox for which set a given texture should use. Maybe in 2.0? If they ever just change the UV's without giving us a legacy mode there'll be mass hysteria.

Thing is, we need two arms for the skin as badly as for anything else. So even if there was a flag, it wouldn't help matters in a lot of cases. And if there was something that automatically made shirts/undershirts/jackets look at a different map, that would break all of those garments that are already in the world.

Also, since all UV Maps are actually square (values go from 0 to 1 on the U and V axis, just like they do for all the rest of the Vertex maps I'm aware of,) making a non-square map would just introduce distortions, and not really change anything, anyway.

If you're talking about people being able to choose one of two maps, then that goes back to the whole "unless we can choose a map" thing.

I'm afraid, barring that, we are really stuck with the one we have. (Especially since selling clothing here is Big Business, and there are people who make their RL living doing it.)

I'm all for being able to choose maps, though. I'll even volunteer my services to order the UVs on the new one!

And there was me thinking LL had found some way around that. I guess the only option that'd work without breaking anything is giving us a checkbox then. From my understanding it wouldn't be hard to impliment, is there actually a petition for it yet?

That's the only way they could do it without breaking all the existing content (which I seriously doubt they'd be dumb enough to do). The avatar would need to carry two different UV mappings and we'd then select which UV a texture should use.