Seams on skins

Hi there,
first post here, basically I am new to skin making, i've made two skins so far, fairly simple ones for my own use (a simple male human skin and a lizardy green male skin). I've noticed that on the first skin I made there seemed to be no real seams, this is because i didn't actually use a texture, it's just shading on a solid "skin tone" colour fill. On my 2nd skin I noticed some seams around the front and sides of the waistline (around the lower back/top of the butt area the seams can't be percieved), some barely noticeable seams on the head, and then some more noticeable seams down the arms and neck. The seams aren't present in photoshop as the texturing I have used I made completely 100% repeatable, set to 256x256 and then placed across the skin levels (which are all 512x512).
I'm now making my third skin and the seams are so very much more noticeable across the whole skin; the waist, neck, head, arms, shoulders; and basically it is making the skin unusable (ok not unusable but well...it doesn't look as nice as it should heh).
Is there anyway to get rid of or hide the seams? the head ones should theoretically be hidden by hair, but the rest?
(don't say clothes, it's not funny nor clever )


*edit* no ideas? anyone?

cheers for the help, or lack there of lol

This is why skins with complex textures are so much harder to make. The answer is yes, it's perfectly possible make it [almost] seamless. For me, I use a 3d program (blender) to bake the basic skin texture onto the AV, then pull that out and place it into AVPainter, use AVPainter to tweak even further, then pull it out again and use it as an adjustment layer in photoshop. Nothing, however, is perfect. You will find there are changes in resolutions that can be difficult to deal with... esepecially between the upper and lower halves of the belly steam.

I hope that helps.
~Brandi

Simply tiling a texture across the whole template won't eliminate visible seams. It will cause them. The reason is because the avatar doesn't use the whole texture, the seams aren't aligned to the edges of the templates, and there isn't a 1 to 1 size ratio between the separate parts of the template. The grid pattern on the template is designed to help you eliminate visible seams by showing you exactly what parts of the template connect to other parts and their relative scale. Pay attention to what part of your pattern intersects each grid point along a seam. That same part of your pattern needs to hit that same grid point on the other side of the seam. You'll need to warp the pattern to accomplish that using Photoshop's Liquify filter or similar tools. As Brandi suggests, using a tool that allows you to paint directly on the avatar mesh can be a huge help in touching up difficult seams areas.

ah thanks both of you very much for your help