Floating Skirts

I have been trying to make skirts for my avi, I use the UV grid, I think it is called, as a guide to cut excess material off the sides of the skirt. I am still however having a problem with the skirt floating on the avi and when you look at her from above you can see right down her skirt! Is this makinig sense? I tried moving the skirt lower on the avi's hips resulting in the butt crack problem! Please give some pointers here as I have searched the forums for this specific problem and have not found anything. This leads me to believe I am the only one having this problem and everyone else has figured out the solution . . . mind sharing?

Thanks!
Picola

In the appearance mode, I am adjusting the poofyiness to zero and the bustle to zero as well.

Thanks!
Picola

It seems that unless you put your texture all the way up on the template you get that space at the top of the skirt. Unlike other pieces of clothing, skirts do not "conform" to our bodies. They have their own minds lol. I'm not sure if there is a workaround for that but I'll be waiting to see.

Another quick skirt issue I've noticed lately on either side of my skirt at the hemline there looks like a thread hanging. It happens on all skirts that are not full length and it doesn't matter if my skirt is the same exact length as the texture on the template. Anyone else with this problem? It may be an ongoing problem that I'm just noticing with my new computer lol. I've had a lot of those.

only way I know of to fix that skirt problem is by making a prim belt (or something of the sort) to block the little seam you can see down.

Hope that made some sense...

The gap is due to the skirt template not fitting the body correctly. Supposedly they are working on a new skirt template but I have not heard when the estimated date for this to be released is.

I really hate the way the SL skirt templates fit. And its a shame cuz i love dresses and skirts but they just don't look right because of that space at the waistline and the appearance of larger hips than you av actually has. So for now i kinda avoid making them.

I too love skirts and dresses. They are more feminine and I like feminine clothes. Something I learned to help the “flared hips and big butt look”, is to have a second body. I have two bodies in my “body Parts” folder. One is my normal figure. The second is my “Thin body. With it, I zeroed the butt slider and have less flare in my hips.

When I want to were a dress or skirt, I merely switch bodies. (Now, if I could only do that in RL.)

An idea on the low riding skirt not fitting properly would be to make the very top of the skirt transparent? I don’t know if that will work or not? I have never tried it. However, if you make the very top transparent to the spot where the skirt should fit on the hips, it just might fit better. Has anyone tried this before?

Jen

I second that approach

I think I tried that and ended up with a *larger* gap *lower* down... lol!

When I really want to wear a skirt or dress, I find myself gravitating more to the prim designs. There are a lot of designers who do wonderful work there.

If you make your own clothes, you should be able to add a script to automatically change your physique to narrow your hips and to flatten your butt. It would work just like shoes. When you put the skirt on, it loads body-thin1.7 and when you take it off... Hmmm, trying to think how to make it work for anyone. For me it would body-normal1.7, but I guess for anyone else you would need to store what their current body type was before they put the garment on and then load that when they take the skirt off.

???

You lost me here. Clothing cannot be scripted. Are you talking about making a skirt out of prims? If you are, I wasn't aware that attachments can be scripted to change body part parameters. Did I miss something? Can anyone verify this?

Awww... I was just thinking off the top of my head while I am work. And thinking about shoes too. That would be too easy. What about attaching a small prim shapped buckle or just an invisible prim and have it load clothing? Or can scripts not affect clothing at all?

I'm thinking not. All the prim shoes I've seen have a foot shape you have to manually put on in addition to the shoe attachment.

Ah, I thought maybe you knew something the rest of us didn't. You kept using "1.7" in your descriptions, so I though you might be talking about some kind of new feature with the update or something that I missed. No, clothing cannot be affected by scripts, and neither can avatar slider settings. Avatars can be animated by scripted objects, but they can't be modified by them.

You did get me thinking though. I just thought of a possible solution for tight prim skirts, which would be to surround the skirt with an invisiprim. This would allow you to build the skirt any shape you want while hiding any part of the body that might protrude through it. Anyone ever tried this? I'll experiment with it as soon as I get some time.

No, I had to retweak some of my body sliders with 1.7 and I didn't know if the current changes were permanent. Thus, I wanted to keep them separate from my original body settings. Didn't some older prim shoes change feet slider settings... Ah, I just answered saw the answer to that question. There was a body style change setting packaged with the shoes that had just feet settings.

I've been working on some skirt and dress designs, and I've chatted about this with established dress designers.

With the current skirt, it just doesn't fit closely to the waist and hips, no matter what you do to the sliders on the skirt. If you drop the waistline at all, you get a gap that you'll have to cover with some sort of prim. If you have high side-slits, or a skirt that uses alpha chanel transparency to have holes or slits of any kind in the design, a close look will show the skirt 'floats' above the hips and thighs, no matter what you do.

Changing your body shape under the skirt only helps if you retain the default top edge of the skirt, and have no slits or holes that reveal the gap between the skirt and your Avatar's hips.

I suspect they were more worried about 'poke-through' than about an exact fit, when the base avatar figures and the skirt layer were designed.

An improved version is supposed to be in the works - one that will allow for higher waisted designs or hip-huggers, and which should fit better. But when that will be released, the Linden's aren't saying. It will take a server/client revision change in how SL treats Avatar structure to fix the skirt problems, so I wouldn't anticipate a rapid solution.

Just allowing the sliders to reduce the poof a bit more than they currently do would help a lot.

I can't see why that would be very difficult at all. If I want it tight enough on my butt that I stick through at times let that be my problem, a skirt sticking 6-8" out from my butt is a far worse one.

EDIT:

I tested my theory out by editing the client side file avatar_lad.xml in my second life directory, it sets the extents for the morph sliders. Just by changing the bustle slider to use -1 to 1 instead of 0 to 1 I was able to easily bring the back of a skirt right up close to my buns.

I'm sure some of the other settings would probably make for better fit on the sides as well.

This isn't difficult, not a perfect solution but a simple XML file change in the next update could help a ton here.

^^^ See above edit.....