A new template for clothing is a simple solution right?

Quote(Jeska Linden: John Hornpipe: any plans on an offline way of being able to see how an image would look on our AV's without spending 1000L just to get a shirt right?
Exposition Linden: yes, we are looking at various solutions to the "try before you buy" problem. I wish that it had easier solutiohns so that we could already have it in, but we do have folks working on (largely because it rocketed up the feature page)end quote.
It seems to me unless I am unaware that, All we need is simply a new set of avatar templates for the cpu.
Simply put something that more directly relates to the location from CPU to our clothing texture on our avies in (SL). New template = better fitting correct ?
My suggestion would be something that uses exsisting templates but has some locations points to better connect each side top front and back.
Is this too complicated or just not something that would work ?
As well as one flaw I see is the sleeve location.Just trying to get the front side matching the back side should be much easier.

For previewing clothes before they are made, I tended to prefer There's Previewer to getting it in correctly. SL's avatar template is already there. We'd just need an external viewer for it that took the clothing meshes into account.

You would think it would be relatively easy for LL to do this.

Try using Tattoo It's a freeware 3d paint program. Use it with the avatar models that can be downloaded from the download section of the website and you can preview your textures without having to log in to SL.

http://www.terabit.nildram.co.uk/tattoo/

Exposition appeared to have misinterpreted the question. John was asking about an offline viewer for clothing on avatars, which we already have. Poser, DAZ Studio, Blender, Maya, 3DS Max, Tattoo, Deep Paint, or any other 3D app that can import OBJ files or Poser files will work with the av models available on the downloads page of this site.

What Exposition was talking about was a try-before-you-buy vending system for shopping while inside SL. This would be a great feature for merchants and for customers, and it's something that lots of us want, but it has nothing whatsoever with the question John actually asked.


Have you seen Chip Midnight's HiRes Templates? They're exactly what youre asking for. Lots of color coded seamwork to show how the different sections fit together. Upload them as textures and apply them to an av to see how everything lines up.


The arm templates suck. LL really dropped the ball when they decided how to map their poly texturing. They should have extended the torso templates all the way to the shoulder, instead of incorporating the shoulder into the arms, so that clothing would behave like clothing, not like flesh, and of course they should have made 2 seperate arms. I've got no problem however with their decision to go with inner & outer arm instead of front & back as you're suggesting. In most cases, artwork on sleeves is done on the outer arm, not on the front. Seargent stripes, arm patches, tattoos, etc. Usually fall squarely on the outside of the arm, not on the front or the back. They had to break the arm in half somewhere, and it makes sense that they chose where they did.

Again though, Chip's templates should help you here. Just follow his color codes. He really did an outstanding job on them. We should all get together & send him the world's largest fruit basket or something.

hehe, thanks Chosen. I'd prefer liquor

Bah, I don't know. I've only been able to create Crappy Tee's(tm)

The "templates" aren't really templates at all. They are the actual UV map, that lets the program know how to interpret the image.

Briefly; U is the horizontal axis and V is the vertical axis on the map. Each point in the AV model has coordinates on the XYZ axes that give it its shape, and also coordinates on the UV axes that give it its texture. The area between the points is extrapolated from the color information at the points (where two lines cross on the map.) That's why the textures tend to stretch and behave oddly between the points.

If the maps (templates) are changed, none of the current clothing in the game would fit any more. The only possible way to change them without open rebellion would be to give us a choice of which mapping to use; old or new. And that would be a nightmare, in a lot of ways. So we're pretty much stuck with them, I'm afraid.

And yeah, don't get me started on these UV Maps. There is no reason that the front and the back shouldn't be the same size. Chosen is correct; the arm was cut in the wrong place. But there's no good reason to have split the arm in two places at all. It could easily have been unwrapped, and split on the bottom, where the seam in a RL shirt is. And having only one arm and one foot might save room on the maps, and might make it simple to make the two perfectly symmetrical - but perfect symmetry isn't at all realistic. Sigh.

On the good side, though, if you have a 3D program that can do it, you can re-map the model and paint on that, then "burn" those maps to the Linden maps. It works in LightWave, anyway. Doesn't solve the symmetry problem, and doesn't fix the arm/torso seam, but it fixes the sizing and the other seams.

(edited to fix typo.)

Great point Robin. I thought about that when I was writing that last post, actually. I agree with you that it could have (and MAYBE should have) been just one wrap, but I'm not convinced that the average person would have had any easier of a time understanding that than they have with the current setup. The distortion would have been a killer with only one piece. Think about how out of proportion a full world map is compared to a hemisphere map. The difference is huge. To unwrap it evenly so as to minimize the distortion, it would need to take a lot of room on the page. It would likely end up forcing all sections of the template to have to shrink a bit, which would mean less possible detail. I think splitting it in half was the right call.


I'd like to talk to you more about this at some point. I'm not sure it's really anything that can benefit the masses since anyone knowledgeable enough to do it has to be knowledgeable enough to compensate with the existing UV's when texturing in 2D anyhow, but it is interesting and fun. I've been fooling around with the av models in Maya a bit with mixed degrees of success. It would be interesting to see what you've done.

I tend to agree with you, Chosen. If you've ever tried to wrap your brain around the hair template, that's a good example of how it would probably have ended up being much more confusing for the average user.




I do this in max to a degree as well. My 3d paint plugin can only work on a single texture at a time, so I combined the mapping into a 512x1536 sheet. I can paint on all three sections at once and then simply split the texture into three sections before uploading to SL. That allows me to do things like paint across the waist seam. I'll also sometimes do things like cyllinder map an arm or leg and then bake it to SL's mapping and then blend it into what I'm working on in Photoshop. It can be a big timesaver.

A cylindrical mapping unwrap has very little distortion. It's easy to see where the shoulder is, because there's a bulge there, and it doesn't take any more room on the page than the two side by side. It's the same number of polys, after all.

I've been experimenting with this some, and did a quicky map just to see. (Didn't take time to really tweak it, since I'm planning to do a much better one when BodyPaint arrives Any Day Now.) So the one I did was mostly to see if the texture would "bake" properly onto the SL UVs.

It wound up looking like this. (I didn't bother with the hand, since it's not used for a shirt.)



The real advantage of it, of course, comes when doing things like patterned fabrics. With these UVs, I can just use a Pattern layer, and I don't have to worry about seams or anything.

The plaid flannel shirt I did with this map still has some distortions in the fabric on the sleeves, but it's a lot less. I'll post a pic here when we can get back in world, so I can shoot some.




I'd love to talk about it. IM me in world.

Here are the pics, as promised.

The first two were done last December, using the Linden UVs. As you can see, I wasn't quite able to match the plaids on the back of the sleeve, and there is massive distortion on the sides, especially in the front.



This shirt was done last week, using the quickie UV in the previous post, as an experiment. As you can see, there aren't any seams in the sleeve, although there is still some distortion, and the front side looks a lot better.



Neither one is salable yet, but it took over an hour to match the plaid across the seams in the first shirt. It took less than 2 minutes to make the texture in the second shirt, and burn it to the Linden UVs. So I know which one I'm going to use.

Anyway, it gives you an idea of what is possible. (The collar, yoke, shadows, etc. are exactly the same because I didn't altar those layers at all; just changed the Hue and Saturation in Photoshop. I told you it was a fast and dirty experiment. )

Great work Robin

Thanks, Chip!

On the other hand if LL made another better mapped avatar available as well as the present one there would be no tears and a natural evolution in the game with perhaps a diminished need for the (lag causing), prim hair/dress/etc phenomenon as well. The relatively simple Poser 2 style avatar we have is getting a little long in the tooth.

I thought Posie looked familiar

Just to tack on my .015 to what the pros have said here, Chip's template has proven itself to me (the work of a true genius, I say). Last night I tried my hand at my first design-more-complicated-than-a-tshirt. It was a "V" cut blouse with a cross-lace pattern over the bodice and up the sleeves. I picked it just to see if I could actually do it.

After taking my time (and THIS in creaky, crappy old Paintshop Pro 5) to match up the "X" of the cross laces across the body seams, I logged in. I pulled the texture off my HD but changed "View as" from "Image" to preview it on a 3D body example. Much to my shock and delight, the cross-laces matched exactly. At that point I went ahead and uploaded.

Morals of the story: (1) Chip's templates rock. (2) You already can preview the design --sorta -- without paying the $10L upload. (3) The avatar mapping leaves much to be desired, and the preview tool only lets you look at one body part at a time (I did a skirt next, and I could barely see it because it was half out of the frame). Much improvement can yet be done.

Cindy

As per post by Chip Midnight, I got the program Tattoo, and the SL avatar models. Being new to graphics program interfaces, maybe some things that should be obvious to me aren't. I figured out how to get my model and my texture into Tattoo, but how do I apply the texture TO the model? Tattoo has no user documentation with it and the help button is not helpful.

Tattoo took me a billion years to use and seems to have a memory leak (at least for me) so I don't use it much, but lemme fire it up.

Load Model:
File-> Load Model
Locate the file on your hard drive.
Files supported are: .B3D .X .3DS .LWO and .OBJ
The Linden models by default are named: SL_Female.obj and SL_Male.obj

Loading Textures:
Someone else will probably come along and explain a different (read: better) way, but here's how I manage.
The textures you want to use will need to be saved as PNG files with specific names in the same folder as the default Linden models.

For example, in C:\Avatar_Mannequin\SL Avatar you will have:
MATERIAL_HEAD.PNG
MATERIAL_LOWERBODY.PNG
MATERIAL_UPPERBODY.PNG
SL_Female.obj
SL_Male.obj
There will also be a few other files you will not directly need.

To change the textures displayed on the models save them over the appropriate PNG above. To refresh a change done to the models while in Tattoo hold down CTRL and tap INS or Edit->Reload Altered Textures.

Amber, thank you very much for your reply to my question. Your method worked fine for me and I'm very grateful because I probably would never have thought of it on my own. Thanks again.