Question about shaper shirts

I've noticed that if you have a transparent area on a shirt and set the fit fairly loose, the mesh will not morph in the transparent areas when you wear something on the jacket layer.

How does this work? Is the amount of morph a function of transparency, or some function of RGB of the shirt texture on that part of the mesh?

Seems like if it can be done smoothly it might be useful for getting bowling/camp type shirts to hang right instead of being skin tight.

Thanks

Morph? Can you show a photo of what you mean?

Just wear a shirt and a jacket. Adjust the looseness of the fit of the shirt with the appearance sliders. As you adjust it, your avatar will look fatter/skinnier.

The change in size of the avatar mesh is a morph.

Fully transparent portions of a shirt are supposed to be places where the shirt doesn't exist, so they aren't effected by the looseness slider at all. It doesn't matter if you have a jacket over it or not.

I always thought it was silly that the shirt and not the jacket determined the looseness, since jackets tend to be looser than shirts, but maybe that's just me.

Yes, I know that. But what's your challenge? It's hard to tell from your description. That's why I wondered if you could post a photo.

I assume that you realize that virtually all of the effects of folding, wrinkling, etc .... in SL are done as shading effects when we create textures to import. Using the Appearance sliders to create the appearance of looseness is simply messing with the shape of the avatar. Even if you do that, you still need to do the bulk of the work of texturing in Photoshop (or PSP or GIMP ...) to make clothing that looks right.

Hi Rolig, unfortunately I'm not able to upload any pics at the moment. Here are links to a couple that kind of illustrate what I'm talking about.

http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/SecondLife/SLGraphics/Clothing/HawaiianShirts/Asian-Goldfish-Shirt-Image.jpg

This is one that Robin put together. I don't mean to take anything away from her work. I think Robin is a fabulous designer. This is just what popped up in google search.

Notice on the male figure how the shirt is skin tight, especially around the sleeve cuffs and the lower torso. You COULD puff it up by using the appearance sliders, but as is, they would just make the avatar look fat.

Then there's the RL pic of a hawaiian shirt: http://www.lavahut.com/kamehameha-white-hawaiian-wedding-aloha-shirts-pr-19682.html

Note how the sleeves are larger than the arms and that the fall of the fabric is rather straight going from the arm pit to the waist, but is mostly flat across the chest and belly.

Depending on how the shirt loosenes function works, you MIGHT be able to just puff up those areas where a hawaiian shirt is supposed to be loose, without giving the avatar a beer belly in the process.

A skin tight hawaiian/bowling/camp shirt will never really look quite right no matter how you fiddle with wrinkles and folds in PS because they are not naturally form fitting.

My original question goes more to understanding the interactions between the shirt layer texture and the shirt looseness function.

I know that transparent sections are unaffected and darkened in areas are affected. Is there a middle ground? Is it all or nothing?

Lets say I had 3 different shirt textures and my avatar is wearing a jacket so we can see the effect when the shirt is totally transparent.

A) Completely Transparent
B) 50% Transparent
C) 0% Transparent

leaving the shirt fit set to maximum looseness and trying on each of the 3 shirts...

We know that 'A' will have no effect.
We know that 'C' will have maximum effect.
Will 'B' be somewhere between the two, or the same as 'C'?

Does color come into play, or is it merely based on transparency?


Thanks for the input

As far as I can tell it's "all or nothing".

Anything that is 50% transparent, or even 1% transparent areas, will be puffed out to the same thickness as the 100% opaque areas. Only the 100% transparent areas will remain skin-tight.

SL handles "clothing looseness" really badly. Take a look up the pants legs of a pair of bell bottom pants, for example. Ugh... And the "looseness" settings for a shirt of jacket can cause some very bad distortions, because the mesh is so badly UV mapped.

I suspect that you're right, Argent. I rarely, if ever, have any reason to use the looseness slider, so I'd have to experiment to verify. And color should make no difference. Transparency has nothing to do with the RGB channels.

The sliders in Appearance are handy, but they are fairly crude tools. With luck and a good deal of skill you can sometimes create prim clothing that has a "loose" feel to it -- mostly in things like skirts that you can use flexi properties for -- but standard "paint-on-the-avatar" clothes really only look loose if you have a lot of artistic talent and can do a fine job of shading as you create a texture. This is where the real artists have an advantage.

If Chosen sees this thread, he may have other wise words to add. He has played with such things professionally a LOT longer than I have as an amateur in SL.

Just got home and did an experiment. I still can't upload pics, but here's a link to my flickr...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8821879@N02/3312309957/in/photostream/


Basically I did the A,B,C experiment. The green part is a jacket with the default texture and green tint. Beneath it is a shirt who's texture is just a 50% grey square. Using photoshop, I set the opacity to 0, 50% and 100%. I set the looseness slider to 100% for each case.

It pretty evident from this that you can control the amount of 'puff' by how opaque the undlerlying shirt texture is. Color didn't seem to have any impact, only opacity....

Wow, that's pretty interesting! I had no idea that opacity could play a part in the fit of a garment. Although, I'm guessing it would be pretty difficult to work out a formula for consistency... unless you spend a ton of L$ in uploads trying to figure it out. LOL

One thing comes to mind, though... even if you got the shirt/jacket layers worked out, what about any parts of the shirt that falls past the waistline? I don't think the pants layer puffs out that much at the waist, does it?