The hair template...I don't understand it

Can anyone explain the hair template to me? I use Photoshop. As for my knowledge level, I can make about-average clothes and pretty good skins.

So far, I've stayed away from the hair because the template confuses me. Today I'm feeling brave.

I don't know if this will help lol, but i always draw lines on the templates, then upload them into SL so i can see exactly the textures should be going. Then once there i wear the templates.

As for knowing exactly how the hair templates work, i have no idea, i just use my lines

Aurelie,

So you drew a kind of "grid" on the template and then uploaded it to wear on your av?

That sounds do-able.

I'm no expert, but I have played with it a few times, and successfully made a number of custom hairstyles for myself.

I find the best thing is to turn on the UV Map as an overlay to get the basic contours. The front fringe is to the right and the 'back fringe' is to the left. It stretches or shrinks to fit your long or short hairstyle, and seems to be optimised for a shoulder length bob. I find that very long hairstyles seem to unduly stretch the textures towards the left of the image, so if your style is for long hair, it makes sense to actually use less defined detail the further towards the back you go.

Other than that, not sure what else there is to understand - just fit your own hairstyle over the default one in the template.

To be honest, the hardest part is not getting those evil white lines on the alpha mask. But I've usually used the default alpha, because, well it seems to work out pretty well for most of the styles I've done so far.

Hehe it might not be the best strategy, but even when i'm making clothes i just draw horizontal lines, so i can see where things on the side match up. With the hair its more difficult, i would try kris's approach lol. ))

The kind of grid method Aurelie described works well for all the templates, not just for hair. I would recommend taking it one step further though and make your grid multi colored so you can tell exactly which line is which. You'd be suprised how many uploads you can waist because you think you understand what's going on when you don't. Make each line a unique color and you can make yourself a pretty good map. From there it just takes a decent artistic sense to learn to compensate for distortion.

Ahh i never thought to color code them, spiffy idea