07-01-2006 08:37
Made a pair of woman's flats as socks. Looks great in the front and side but the texture distortion is really bad around the back near the achilles. As far as I can tell, the polygons and texture coordinates tends to have a lot of twists in their mapping here (which logically makes sense in most geometrically complex contoured areas with texture maps)

So I made a path in photoshop to cut out the upper edge of the flat in the alpha channel. Often using 3 anchor points to on each polygon (2 on the edge, 1 in the middle) to control the edge precisely over each polygon. Finally was able to make a relatively straight line after mapped onto the foot. But still far from desirable for a crisp clean edge.

I reviewed the work in DAZ Studio using 1k x 1k textures, imported to SL as a 512x512. The edges of the lines changed slightly (more crooked) after the graphics cards got done with it. 1k x 1k upload seems more unpredicable and worse for this issue.

Are there any tricks? Looked at other designer's flats made as socks and saw similar problems. My flat is also black leather so unfortunitely high contrast against the skin tone too.

Here is a pic for reference, the alpha edge is along the edge of the black/skin tone.

http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j5/sleeplessinseattle1964/muimuinerocopy.jpg

Thanks in advance for any possible advice and solution