Question about clothing layers

I would like to know if theres a tip or trick about matching the upper and lower jacket layers. I have tried and tried to make a shirt but i always see a seam between the two layers. Thanks.

That can be tricky. It's very hard to avoid having a line there. Many people avoid using textures with a pattern that will have an obvious break unless the match is perfect, opting instead for a simple texture -- especially if it is dark-colored. Other people will design a belt that covers the match line or at least distracts from it. You can try going back and forth between your graphics program and a 3D viewer like the SLCP viewer (unless you have CS4, which has easy 3D viewing built in), making small tweaks each time to improve the match. Or you can curse a lot. Cursing helps.

I'm at the cursing point at the moment haha
Thank you very much for your answer!

Another example of the terrible UV mapping that the standard avatar has. The length of the waistband on the upper body template and that of the same line on the lower body template are NOT to the same scale! I'm not even that certain there is a "perfect factor" that you can enlarge or reduce the pattern by, or that the same factor applies to the front of the body as well as to the back. The best bet is use high-rez guide templates, like Chip Midnight's or Robin Sojourner's, and do a LOT of tweaking by hand.

The best advice? Keep the texture as much as posible a solid color at the junction, or, better yet, design the clothes so there is *supposed* to be a sharp break in coloration there, like making the edge of the pants or the edge of a belt in the texture be right on that seam.

The other solution is to paint over the seam in one of the programs that allow you to paint directly on the model, which will let you match things.

For instance, I found out yesterday that you can paint on the model in Blender, which is free. So all of us can have this capability, regardless of budget or platform.

(Lynda.com now has a long Blender tutorial, and I'm taking it. I skipped ahead to the part about painting on the model, though, )

I vaguely recall someone mentioning a shading error around the waist. But I could be wrong.

If it's a texture thing, then this sounds like a good test for what I've been working on. Once I get things torn down and back up, I'll do up an v1 MCH file just for the waist to match jacket seams.

The waist bug affects clothing layers that don't share multiple body part textures (undershirt, underpants, shirt, pants) spanning the waist on the avatar. Skins/tattoos and jackets are not affected by this bug.

LL could probably fix this easily by letting the clothing items I listed above function as a jacket or as a skin does. It might also inspire new designs and clothing options (imagine a shirt with access to the "Head" texture slot). It's not generalized texture layers, but it would be a step in the right direction. Could , would, will, and should are very different from one another. Here's to hoping someone cares enough to pick "will".

Grab the filter Multi CH and install it for your host. Usually in some filter sub-directory with other *.8bf files.



Then head to the repository and grab SL_jacketwaist01 at the bottom.



It can be a bit tricky, but should give you a damn good running start.

And that's about all I have time for right now.

Nice to read that it is a bug in fact ? the seems for the upper and lower do not match ...there is (skin) gap between them... even if i paint over the seems in Photoshop ...as should be
The latest i did some black, very bad indeed but for earlier work it was fine !? strange...
I must tell that i uploaded in PNG but forgot to size the template down to 512x512, so how come that with a texture on the clothes it looks fine ( no gap even by looking very close )
and for a solid color (black) you see clearly the gap . Or had SL a bad day ? i did !
greetz, Bina

Some mysteries in SL are clearly not meant to be understood.

Unless things have changed, it's my understanding that regardless of what size you upload, the maximum effective size of a texture applied directly to the avatar body is 512 x 512. Forgetting to downsize your clothing texture to 512 x 512 before you uploaded it should not have made a difference. My guess is that something else is different.

My guess is black on tan just shows the gap in coverage more clearly.

It's also true that 512x512 is the upper limit for avatar textures.

The OP's issue appears to NOT be related to the waist seam bug because the jacket was used. This indicates a seam blending problem, instead. Painting directly on the avatar in 3D helps, but is not perfect. Pixel stretch can still cause one side of the seam to appear more sharply focused than the other. Since the lower body side of the waist seam is of slightly less resolution than the upper body side this type of resolution error can become visible. Let us also not forget the side seams on both the upper and lower body layers. There is significant pixel stretch there. Painting any sort of detail through the side areas requires very precise and granular texturing to better match texture painted more into the front and back area of both upper and lower body parts. Since there is a limit to the amount of detail that can be obtained in an avatar texture by the actual dimensions of the textures (512x512) and by the amount of distortion in certain areas of those textures, the less distorted and higher resolution areas in the textures must be throttled back through blurring to blend better with the lower resolution areas. This can be done by hand effectively, but requires many steps of refinement. It can also be done with a custom alpha channel used to blur only critical areas of the avatar texture. I have one such alpha channel released to the general public for the neck and head seams, but unfortunately the waist seam alpha channels are not ready for public consumption yet. That project has been on my back burner for quite a while due to other things. Perhaps a look at the head alpha will illustrate the concept better even though it will not directly solve any blending issues at the waist. People are welcome to download it here:

http://www.secondskinlabs.com/Downloads/downloads4.html

Assuming we're capable of learning how to think like a Martian.

Thank you all for the explanation, the template ( i downloaded and will look into it later).. first i have to solve some other problems as well...like my viewer in 3D by 'upload image' in SL ...since i have the latest version of 30.06.09 ( came suddenly in Dutch) i do get a mess when i
look at the image in 3D.... like some fabric on parts who have none or under the armpits etc..

Also the upper male and lower male part are just the opposite when you click on the name... (in Dutch version) but i guess this is something for another forum why this happens
Anyway... now i lost my last control before uploading the final texture !

I do use the SL Clothes Previewer-version-1.22 and by looking at the upper and lower bodypart everything looks fine .. i do not see the seem gap...but this is a TGA file and I upload a PNG file.

So for now I have no control on what i'm doing .... so what i see is NOT what i get !
and i feel frustrated ...

Hope to solve some of these problems ...

Greetz, Bina

I find it virtually impossible to match the luminosity of the torso and the legs in the lower back area. The waist will look fine when the light is directly on it or conversely in shadow but a sharp contrast will become immediately visible along the seam when the av turns 180 degrees and the lighting changes.

I don't know if this is a bug or if it's due to the oblique angle of the polygons in this area or maybe I'm just crap but I have never been able to get it right and I notice it to some degree or other on any other skins and clothing I inspect.

There is a bug in the clothing layers - I posted a Jira on it some time ago. Something like this seems to be completely and utterly trivial to fix and yet, there it is, still awaiting action. it's like LL just conveniently ignore it after people stop ranting about it. >

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-9530

The seams between pants, shirt, underpants, undershirt do not match. The alphas on the shirt and undershirt are shoddily done and don't actually come right down to the seam at the waist. the fact that skins and jackets aren't affected is what boggles my mind so much that it hasn't been fixed in all this time!!!