Problems lining up a pattern

Hi All,

I'm having some major problems here....

I have Adobe Photoshop CS3 and use SLCP to view my clothes. I'm just trying to make basic clothes for men (such as t-shirts) and want to put a basic pattern on it...

I've put a start on the chest of the male, on a female, the item looks, okay. Not great but ok. When I "switch gender" the start TOTALLY changes and looks all squiggled etc...

Anyway suggestions of getting patterns onto clothes?

Thanks!
Amnesia

Hi Amnesia
You don't say wether you are using Chip Midnight's wonderful templates for clothes? They will make life easier, certainly, showing you where things join up etc.

I don't know of anyone who has totally conquered the distortion, but there are some programs which will allow you to paint the texture onto an avatar shape, which increases your chances of doing so. Even then, there are parts of an avatar which distort ( around the shoulders at the front is particularly difficult) and of course the amount of distortion is dependent on the size and shape of the avatar.

If you are just making clothes for yourself at present, you could upload the templates as textures and try them on your avatar, which will give you a feel for where the texture is stretched and where compressed. I expect some more experienced clothesmakers will be along to answer you in a minute!

There are a number of gridded textures which may help too...ping me in world and I will drop a couple on you.
bws
Cali

Thanks for the reply.
I'm actually using Robin Wood's templates...

I am also having difficulty getting transparent layers. I'm selecting the part that I want to be transparent and clicking "Select -> Save Selection As" and it saves it as "Alpha 1". I then save as 32bit Targa but doesn't work...

I'll keep browsing the internet

Thanks again!


Edit: The transparency doesn't seem to work in SLCP... but does when I do a "test" upload in second life... although the t-shirt does look a lot better in SL than it does in the previewer, can you recommend any other previewers that give accurate results?

Upgrade to Photoshop Extended, and you can work with the model, right inside Photoshop. CS4 actually came out recently, and it allows you to paint directly on the model in 3D, using all of Photoshop's tools.

That said, what's your definition of "accurate"? Keep in mind you'll never be able fully to replicate SL's in-world lighting conditions in any environment besides SL itself. Colors outside of SL will never be exact matches for in-world colors. Also, no single garment will ever look perfect on all avatar shapes. Things like stripes are especially problematic. Stripes that look straight on one avatar can look all kinds of messed up on another. As you get more practice, you'll develop an intuition for what is safe and what is not for the "average" range of shapes.

I'll try and get some screen shots up at a later date, but accurate means slightly accurate. Using SLCP is TOTALLY distorting it, i.e: looks smooth on a female, as soon as you change to male avatar, the star shape gets wrinkled and everything... the tips point different ways etc.

I'm going to stick to the previewer in SL, it seems more accurate

I would recommend AvPainter, it isn't free but it isn't a lot either, you can get it on Xstreet or in world. I use mine all the time and love it.