Flamelily Serapis
Registered User
Join date: 26 Sep 2006
Posts: 7
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10-05-2006 15:53
I dont understand why, with all the brilliant features in SL and and the gorgeous skins and shapes you can get, hands look like badly drawn childrens pictures, and feet not much better? Can anyone advise me whether there is anything I can do about this, or whether it will one day be better? Is it a software limitation?
Many thanks...
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Chip Midnight
ate my baby!
Join date: 1 May 2003
Posts: 10,231
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10-05-2006 18:24
Hands aren't too difficult, though there's a ton of seam area to cover. The easiest way to match seams is to use a solid color on both sides of it. That's likely why people tend to simplify them. Feet are very difficult both due to their structure (they're actually flippers that come to a point at the end) and the way the texture is mapped to them. There are very good hands and feet out there though. 
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Namssor Daguerre
Imitates life
Join date: 18 Feb 2004
Posts: 1,423
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10-05-2006 22:13
It sure would be nice to have SL avatars that look like all those Poser figures, but working with a million polygons and fifty million pixels over the internet is like trying to push butter through a brick wall. We only have 3912 polygons and 786,432 pixels to work with on the SL avatar. The feet (or really the foot because there is only one) have 316 out of the total 3912 polygons available. The hands (or hand) have an even denser mapping of polygons (well over 700), but they are so small on the UV map that the number of pixels that map to each polygon is very few, maybe even as few as 1 or 2 in some cases. What that means for feet and hands is that they have a very small share of the 786,432 pixels per polygon. Chip also pointed out that the feet are basically flippers. All the detail on the best examples of SL avatar feet comes from pushing pixels around to create the illusion of toes at the end of the foot. The hands actually have individual digits, and quite a bit of detail can be applied to them considering what we have to work with. LL could optimize the UV map through adaptive UV tiling and squeeze more mileage out of the 512x512 textures, but the drawback would be a completely unrecognizeable texture map that wouldn't be very user friendly for someone with just a photo editor.
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Flamelily Serapis
Registered User
Join date: 26 Sep 2006
Posts: 7
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10-05-2006 22:23
Aha, so there are skins out there with decent hands, or are they usually done separately ? ie, if I have a good skin, can I buy or make nicer hands? how do manicures work? are they really a clothing or attachment?
But you have already helped with your answers, thank you!
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Namssor Daguerre
Imitates life
Join date: 18 Feb 2004
Posts: 1,423
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10-05-2006 22:51
From: Flamelily Serapis Aha, so there are skins out there with decent hands, or are they usually done separately ? ie, if I have a good skin, can I buy or make nicer hands? how do manicures work? are they really a clothing or attachment? I think most skin artists offer some sets of options for the hands and feet. They will probably use the glove and sock layers to do this because that will give the customer the option of tinting the nails. That's what I do for hands and feet with my skins (which do not use the default toenail/fingernail placement).
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