AVPainter Question

Just learning clothing construction and having a hard time visualizing placements so I need a helpful crutch. I just bought photoshop so learning both PS and clothing construction and am a bit frustrated.

Does anyone know if you can customize the mannequin in the AV painter previewer so it shows the colored av maps by Chip Midnight or Robin Wood? If so, how can this be done? Or, barring that, is there another previewer that you can customize the mannequin with these maps and allows you to edit your creations in that viewer?

Thanks!

There should be an option in the program to show those templates... It's under AVPainter Controls and on the menu "appearance" then choose "Set Mannequin Appearance" from the dropdown and it will have CMFF as one of the options.

Also - I tend to save my clothing with the template still visible so that I can see where I need to move things. It helps.

Thanks! I think the CMFF was chosen and it gives the mesh/grid markings, but didn't see any of the matching color lines like found in Chip Midnight and Robin Wood's templates. I will check again when I get home.

I did upload a texture that I thought was layered with the colorized templates and my project, but sadly, when I did a save and opened it back up in PS I had a single layer. I just got PS a week or so ago so am not up on these sorts of things yet...but learning via trial, error, tutorials, and a whole lot of advice from others! Thanks again Sioxie.

I have also run into lot of problems when trying to change the background template on mannequin. I thought if I could use preset templates it might be helpful but I always seem to run into some issue with it.
Also it is really tricky to save individual layers in av paint you have to save every layer and even with Chip's template it takes practice to know where things go on 3d mannequin.
I am still struggling bit with it and Avpaint designers don't really have very many new user friendly guides or more detailed information about the program and the group they have for tips isn't open to general public and they aren't very responsive when I have asked them about group even though I got several friends to buy there program we sort of our own to figure it out.
Yet it is good way to get idea of where things to go.
I was given this tip by friend who I introduced to program to save certain tips different fabric or template layers like black backgrounds with texture layer in adobe then save it as psd and re-open it in avpainter helpful you select folder upload new texture.
This is helpful when erasing or working with different types of layers of textures but still have run into problems, it just take a lot of practice to get it right.
Often if you don't have certain background over the skin template when erasing I often would get these lines or dots I miss the dark background helps things show up better.
Just make sure you select the right areas and don't do what I did and accidentally delete the black background
Also make sure you save each layer separately in avpaint, even though when you close it will like it act like you missed something. it tends to automatically want to save files either as tga and merged.
Also recently I have run into problems with transparent images not showing up which is really major hassle after literally spending hours making something and getting stuck with non transparent tga file.

FD and others- the other night I noticed something cool- I was working with Gimp and AvPainter side by side- creating the garment in Gimp, then aligning my seams in AvPainter- I noticed when I saved the tga in Gimp, it automatically updated the display on AvPainter .

another great tip that helps with placement is to actually upload the templates (Chris or Robin's or whichever you use) into sl and wear them. I have a shirt and pants named "grid", and I put them on when I am having a little difficulty with placement. Works real well too, but don't do what I did and forget to change before you tp off somewhere. You get some strange looks lol

If you are working with a .psd within Photoshop, you can add the coloured template as the bottom layer. Then when you open the .psd within AVPainter you can turn the template layer on and off as required. Just ensure that you have the correct layer selected before making any mods.

One thing I find with AVPainter is that when you save the .psd it ends up far bigger in size than the original that was loaded. So what I do is create a copy .psd which I load into AVPainter. Then when it has been saved, I open both original and saved versions and copy any changed layers from the latter. A bit time consuming, but I like to cut down on the filesize.