Shadows of Clothing

Hey guys

I have decided to do some clothing, and well, I tried to work with photoshop to work some out, which look great. The only thing i want to know is the lightning cover :: the shadows. I took a look to some shirts i bought recently with shadows... and took the normal, plain white shirt to check on which shadows are casted within game, and which ones I have to draw, but It doesn't make any sense to me. I then checked the shirt that came with the template, and there i scratched again my head on.

Is there a way to cast easy shadows on the shirt... I cannot make sense on the UV lines of the template which ones would actually be good for shadows...

Without a 3d app that can bake shadows for you there's no real easy way. It just takes a lot of practice and experimentation to figure out where to put them. One thing that can help a lot is to take the templates and make a skin out of them. Wear that skin and take a lot of screenshots of it on your avatar. Then you can see what parts of the grid are where and use it to plot out where the shadows should be.

Chip is it possible to take the clothing file and put it on a poser figure (assuming you have poser) and check it that way? If so does anyone know how?

Well, my name's not Chip, but is it okay if I answer anyway?

I wouldn't recommend using any of the standard Poser figures for this. The UV's are completely different. However, you can use the SL avatar mannequin files in Poser. Just go to the downloads section of this site, grab the files, and follow the included instructons to import them into Poser. Now you'll have the default male and female avatars inside Poser, and you can use them to test clothing/skins (and also of course to create animations).

Note that the mannequins have no slider settings applied, so they won't be an exact match for YOUR avatar. They're just default. They're good for things like testing seam alignment, but they're not necessarily all that great for baking shadows. You can use them to get the general idea of how shadows fall on the model, but baking done directly on these default mannequins isn't always flattering on avatars that have been custom-shaped.

I find much it more beneficial to paint shadows in Photoshop than to try to let Poser do it for me. Poser's rendering ability is a little wanting anyway. I wouldn't use a Poser rendering as anything more than a reference. Not everyone agrees with me though, so by all means play around and see how you feel about it.

Anyway, to learn how to apply your textures to the mannequins in Poser (and in DAZ Studio), see this thread, instructions kindly provided by Robin Sojourner.

Thanks allot of awnsering