Texture always too large in appearance clothes

When I make clothes in appearances, the texture, e.g. the weave, is always way too large. Is this just how it is or can I fix this somehow.

Use a texture that's scaled for the UV map already. Different parts of the outfit require different textures, too, so you really have to go into Photoshop and lay fabric patterns down on the avatar template to make it look right. Here's what the upper body mapping looks like:



Your entire texture gets chopped up into those pieces and applied to the surface of the avatar just like a single piece of cut cloth.

The original templates are here:

http://secondlife.com/community/avatar.php

A better set are here:

http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/AVUVTemplates.html

More detail about exactly what you are doing might be useful.

If you are talking about taking a simple texture sample, like a burlap texture, for example, and making a shirt out of it using the appearance editor, and finding the texture is too big, then what you would need to do is use a paint program to make that image be repeated more times.

If your texture file looks like this:
#
and the texture is three times too big
use a paint program to make a file like this:
###
###
###
then export the image in your desired format at your desired resolution for use in SL.

Thanks both. I was looking more at what SuezanneC mentioned, e.g. throwing something together for a costume party. Not quite ready to get into the full-scale work yet.

Can I download textures to work on them?

In Second Life you may or not be supposed to download textures to your hard drive to fiddle with and then upload.

If you double click a texture in your inventory, or right click it and select open, then on the main menu do File and see the "Save Texture As..." option activated, you can save the texture to your hard drive and modify it in a paint program, so far as physically being able to. There might be license restrictions that mean you shouldn't do that even though you can physically do it, depending on the conditions under which you acquired the textures.

On the internet there are many sites that to have free textures available for personal or commercial use or both. Here's one such site, found by putting "Free textures" into Google:

http://www.cgtextures.com/

I work in paintshop but I am sure that photoshop has a comprable feature...I create the texture I want to use as the fabric and save it. Then (while that image is open) I use my pen tool to draw the initial layer. In the toolbar where I choose my outline color and fill colors, I have the option to choose 'pattern' 'gradient' or 'color' (solid color). I choose pattern, open that to choose the pattern, and the open image of my fabric will show up as one of the patterns. I have the option when choosing that as my outline and fill, of choosing the size. I just make adjustments there to the size of the fabric. Remember though that typically you will be wanting to work with seamless textures.

I have a new appreciation for people who make SL garments. I'll just buy things. This is more complicated than I want to go. The texture was full perm but how to change it is beyond me.