Stretching of details

I did a search and couldn’t find anything on this. However, I am sure I am not the first to experience the problem.

I recently make a short blue jean skirt from some photos I found off the web. (Sorry real artists, I am not good enough to draw and paint realistic looking seams) The skirt has a series of buttons going down the front from top to bottom.

When I put it on my Avatar the bottoms button are stretched horizontally. The bottom button is the worst and the next two upward are stretched less and less.

Is this something I have to life with? How can I get the button to all stay the same?

Jenny

Jennifer, first of all since you're relatively new, welcome to SL

Okay, so now you've discovered skirts really suck to texture. Try this. Turn on on the UV map on the skirt template, upload it to SL, and apply it to a skirt and you'll see why. It's really a very bizarre mesh. Notice how the triangles that are all the same size on the flat template become all different sizes as they wrap around the skirt? That's why your buttons are all different sizes. Each botton is going to stretch in accordance with how the triangle(s) it's sitting on stretches.

Alright, so what to do about it? Well, first do one more upload. This time, make sure the working layer that has your jean skirt picture on it and the UV map layer are both turned on. Set the opacity for whichever one is on top to about 70% or so, so that you can see the UV lines crisscrossing the denim. Apply that to the av skirt in SL. Now you can see exactly how the various parts of the skirt are deforming in relation to the UV's. Go back to Photoshop and shrink the parts that are too big and grow the parts that are too small. In other words, distort the image in exactly the opposite way that it's going to distort when it's in 3D. That way when you apply it to the skirt, the sizes will "meet in the middle" and everything will look right. It may take you a few tries to get the sizes right, but you'll get it.

As you get used to this process it will get easier. This kind of thing needs to be done for every piece of clothing, skin, and tattoo in SL. It's hardest on the skirt since the mesh is so crazy, but it has to be done to a degree for everything. The good news is that once you learn how to do it on the skirt, everythihg else will seem easier.

Good luck, and welcome to the world of texturing for 3D.

Thank you Chosen, for your detailed answer to my question and thank you for the nice welcome. There really are some wonderfully helpful people in SL, both, in-game and here. I used Chip Midnight’s templates. I will look and see if his lines are the same as the UV layer.

I guess I will have clone over the existing buttons and redo them? I have already flattened the layers.

Jenny

Jenny,

You're most welcome for the help.

If you're using Chips templates, great. They're much more detailed than the standard UV map, which is pretty coarse. Just upload a copy with the lines showing. You may also want to pull the UV map out of the Linden template and lay it over Chip's template. I've found that to be very useful for helping keep track of which triangle is which. You end up with thick UV lines from the map with thin subdivision lines from Chip's inbetween.

Oh, and in case you didn't know, be sure to resize the image to 512x512 before upload since the 1024x1024 size of Chip's templates is meant purely as a way to see greater detail while you're working. Using 1024's on clothing is a major contributor to lag. Always resize to 512 prior to upload.

As for already having flatened the image, here's your next lesson. Never flatten. It's a completely unnecessary step, and all it does is cause you to be unable to easily edit later. When you go to output your TGA, Photoshop will prompt you that the TGA will be a copy. Just let it do its thing. You'll end up outputting the TGA, which is an inherently flat format, and your layered original will remain intact. Save that as a PSD and keep it in case you ever need to make changes to it later. It can also serve as a starting point for other images in the future. Let's say you want to make a matching jacket for the skirt one day, for example. You've got the fabric, the buttons, the seams, all right there. A little cutting, pasting, clone stamping, and pattern making, and you've got a jacket (or whatever else you want to make out of it).

Chosen just mentioned this in another thread and it made me gag since I can not for the life of me make clone stamping work for me. I understand the premise of it but the actual application grrrrrr. I think the problem is I have no idea how to control this tool even after reading a tutorial or 3. If I try to pick a small area to clone, invariably I wind up with half the garment! And why when I clone, can I not then apply that clone anywhere on my template? It only goes on some undefined areas. So any help would be greatly appreciated as I'm often told how helpful this tool is. Thanks in advance!!!