Stair-Stepping Edges

Hi, I'm creating some clothing and one thing I've noticed is while creating a curved edge with the suggested 512 by 512 texture, it has a harsh stair-stepping affect of the texture. I have seen this on other designer clothing items, but I was wondering if there is anyway to reduce this affect. Is it possible to use a larger texture map say 1024 x 1024 on these clothing items that have a curved edge? Just to be a bit more clear the problem I'm currently having is on a shirt with a curved front neckline. When you look at it, even from some distance you can see the individual pixels as the curve drops from the shoulder across the chest. It kind of looks like stairs, when viewed close-up. Thanks, Angela

First, make sure you have anti-aliasing turned on in Photoshop when making your texture. Also, if you're using the selection tools (lasso, marquee, etc) to make your curves, you're pretty much aways going to have jagged results to some degree. The selection tools, by their nature, work one pixel at a time. Instead, use the vector tools (pen) to draw paths, and then use the paths to form your selections. Paths are resolution-independent, and don't care about pixels, so the results are always much cleaner. When using a path for a selection, you'll get nice smooth anti-aliasing along your curves and diagonals, pretty much every time.

Second, how are your SL graphics settings? Can you turn on anisotropic filtering without too much of a performance hit? Are your detail settings turned all the way up? Can you turn on a decent level of anti-aliasing for SL in your graphics card preferences without SL running like molasses? If the answer to any of those questions is no, then you're going to have to live with some degree of jagginess, always. If you can't run SL with good graphics settings on your present machine, you're going to need a better one, at least a better graphics card.

To answer your question about 1024, it is yes and no. Yes, you can work at 1024 (or any size you want) when making the texture, but you should always resize it to 512 before you upload. SL always bakes all avatar textures to 512 anyway, so uploading a larger size gains you nothing except a longer wait to retrieve the file from the asset server every time you "wear" the texture. Also, Photoshop will do a better job of the size reduction than SL will, so that's one more reason to downsize before uploading.

You cannot use a higher-resolution image for clothing. They will just be re-sized. You can work with a higher-resolution image and re-size it before uploading. Same result: 512x512.

The way to get smoother edges is partial transparency. Manual or automatic anti-aliasing using transparent as the background. How you accomplish that depends on your drawing program and technique. There may be help in the stickies at the top of this forum.

I would caution against using transparent backgrounds. They're often the first step toward ending up with a white halo around your image, which is the last thing you want. You want your background to have the same colors in it as your foreground, so that those semi-transparent anti-aliased pixels you're talking about will be the same color as everything else. You don't want them to lighten against white, which is what happens when the background is transparent. For more on this, see the Transparency Guide at the top of the forum.

Shouldna used the term 'background'. What I meant is your edges should fade to transparent. The layer underneath should match your garment color at the edges.

I generally don't use the 'background' layer.