Texture Is Not Showing as Made

I placed a texture, a shaded satin, on a template and made a shirt quickly. Uploaded it and created a shirt. The shirt looks nothing like the fabric on the template. Anyone know why? I have enclosed pictures of the avatar wearing the shirt, and the template in jpg format.

Ummmm... it looks exactly like it does on the "Template."

The "Template" is really a UV Map, that tells Second Life what color to put under which vertex point on the model. The colors between vertex points are extrapolated. You can wear a snapshot, or the Ground texture, or anything else, and it's all interpreted exactly the same way.

Think of it as a really stretchy piece of spandex, that's being pinned to your Avatar at the points where the lines meet on the "UV Map" layer of the "template."

Whatever is painted on the spandex is put on your model exactly like that. There's no real texture, no wrinkles, only very basic lighting; all of that has to be "faked" by the way the image is painted on the spandex.

So, when what you have is essentially a piece of tan with large areas of darker tan running diagonally across it, it might read to your mind as "satin", but what SL sees is where to put light tan, and where to put the darker tan, and it puts it there.

You see the result.

To fix it, you need to put the light tan where you want light tan on the Avatar, and dark shadows where you want dark shadows.

Yeah, it's a lot harder, but it's the only way.

I will try that, and I guess basically the darker areas need to be thinner to preven those wide stripes. I will try that Robin.

Cal, I highly recommend uploading the templates by themselves and making a skin out of them. Wear the skin on your avatar and take a lot of screenshots to use as reference. Study what part of the template ends up on what part of the avatar. Study how the various polygons represented on the template correspond to the polygons on the avatar model... which ones stretch a lot? which ones compress? Which ones are in areas that would likely be in shadow or highlights? These are all things you have to take into account when creating your clothing textures. It's not as hard as it sounds, but it does take a while to get familiar with the UV mapping on the avatars and how to work around the quirks.

In case it isn't bleedingly obvious, Chip knows well of what he speaks and his splendidly usable templates, generously lent to SL's clothiers can be found courtesy of SLBoutique.com.

That makes sense now