Clean Lines--Are they possible?

Okay, I am new at working with photoshop (CS3) and working with clothing templates. Right now, i am extremely frustrated! About ready to give up on the whole sordid mess. I would sincerely appreciate some good solid advice from you more experienced clothing designers or photoshop artists.

Yes, I have done all the photographs in UV suits (about 100 of them) and studied them carefully. Yes, I have uploaded my project (this one a peekaboo strapless bra) to AVPainter and viewed them carefully, as well as, viewing and studying all with Robin and Chip's templates. I have read multitudes and watched a ton of tutorials. I still can't get those nice clean lines or nice curvy shapes. I understand that the use of blur helps getting rid of some of the jaggedness. There must be something I am missing. *sighs tiredly*

Anyone willing to share any advice? Tools to use? Favorite techniques?

Thanks!
Morgaine

Are you're doing all your work on a 1024 x 1024 canvas and then reducing it to 512 x 512 for upload? That will clear up some of the jaggies.

Also, I hope you're using the pen tools to draw your curved lines instead of trying to do them freehand. Using pen tools and creating a path is SO much smoother than anything you can draw with shaky fingers.

Maybe some screenshots or samples to show exactly what you see as being wrong would help.

sometimes if I have a line that is slightly pixelated, just before I resize it from 1024 to 512, I run a tiny soften brush just on the edge of it. And yes, if you are trying to freehand it, there might be your problem. I love my pen tool

i have to agree, the pen tool is your friend. Create paths with the pen tool and the stroke or fill the path. The pen tool creates vector lines which are inherently smooth and any other way you create a line will be rasterized which means it will be pixelated.
Do a google search for photoshop pen tool and you will find plenty of tutorials.
Also as someone else suggested create your texture at a high resolution ie; 1024 x 1024 or higher. then reduce it to 512 x 512 when ready to upload.

♥Jeanie♥

*keeps chanting softly to herself*....layers are our friend...pen tool is our friend....layers are our friend...pen tool is our friend.

Create a layer for every step and name it appropriately.....
Channels I mostly use for alpha which you will usually need for anything uploaded to SL....
The pen creates paths....
So revised chant:
Layers, channels and paths, oh my!
Layers, channels and paths, oh my!

Jeanie

Are you using Avpainter to actually draw in the designs and details?
If you are I suggest you have separate darker texture opposite to fabric layer, then the layer
where you want certain details in, draw what you can in then for more 3d effects use
your art program to add those details in separately outside of AVpainter.
Save layers I know sometimes its pain, I am pretty bad at doing it myself in Avpainter.
Big problem with Avpainter if you've got computer like mine you upload too many layers then the program begins to freeze or crash.
Or I get lazy often I forget to save the layers separately or I don't upload dark layer under the fabric layer and I end up seeing the jagged lines around where I used eraser when correcting my work or deleting other textures in areas I don't want tiny bits of fabric floating around. So I get these mistakes I often miss when I merge or don't have another colored background to the fabric.
Also my Avpainter tends to want you to merge every layer or save every layer. Made few mistakes doing that but if you do that often you lose your transparent background.
I kept thinking some how I missed something because sometimes i have the transparent background yet in recent times I don't with Avpainter.
I think it has to do which file you are looking at and whether or not you saved the individual layers.
Use Avpainter for sort of a guide where you want things and for lay out purposes, but use preset shapes. fabric pattern creations in your art program when you got idea of what or where you want things in Avpainter.
Often I make fabric layers, upload in Avpainter, draw in details, erase areas, then save
go in art programs I have then add more details, embossed buttons, metallic trims,etc.
If you're erasing a whole lot like I do as part of editing where you want the fabric always put different colored background on.
Whenever possible in avpainter use check mirror option so you can work in same time in
multiple areas, only unselected when you need to work in only one specific area.
Save layers. Don't merge, if you got solid background in areas you don't want it on template use magic wand or some other equivelent tool that deletes certain colored unwanted parts of the template.

There are certain areas on the Avatar that will be "jagged" no matter what you do. I'm not sure if it is SecondLife and the way it displays the graphics or the compression that the files go through when you bring them in but I have found that if you avoid making any lines that cross over the upper chest to underarm area - that is key! Another area is the shoulders, that one is horrible to keep pixelation or pixel tearing from happening. If your design requires that you cross these areas stay as close to the main poly grid lines as possible. Often I will use the SL previewer and create a comp version of my pattern in just grey or black against white to see what exactly is going on.

I also create my clothing textures at 1024x1024 and it does seem to help but there are certain things that are unavoidable. Also the shape of the avatar will make a difference in jagged lines - the more robust (bigger chest or body parts) the more likely it is that there will be pixel stretch and jagged edges.

Thank you everyone! This information is quite helpful. I have purposefully stopped working on this project due to the frustration level and taken a step back for the moment. I will try the 1024 X 1024 suggestion (do I upload at 1024 and let SL downsize it to 512?). Also, have been reviewing a number of the pen tutorials on the web, which helps some once you get the hang of it...<---slow learner....not up to par with it yet. AVPainter is nice to view, but the control factor for me sucks. I have mainly been using my layer set to like 50% transparency to view the grid lines and use a small brush to mark things then edit in Photoshop. OMG, yes the AVPainter mirror image is great. I thought PS had a mirror image option as well. Followed some of the other advice given as well.

Thank you one an all for helping me on this. You do not know how deeply it is appreciated.
Morgaine

No. Use your graphics application to downsize and let it's anti-aliasing smooth things out for you. Also, remember to save a COPY of that downsized file to upload, but you also want to keep the larger one for any future reworks, with all layers and details intact.

No, downsize it yourself, Morgaine, but be sure to save the 1024 x 1024 file on your hard drive first so that you always have the higher resolution file to go back to if you need to do further work. It's true that SL will adjust image sizes for you on upload but ....

(1) 1024 x 1024 is already an acceptable (although usually unwise) image size, so SL probably will leave an image with those dimensions untouched.

(2) SL's adjustments are somewhat unpredictable -- or they seem so to me, anyway. If you try to upload an image with dimensions that are not "powers of 2," SL will usually downsize to the next smaller acceptable dimension. So if you upload a file that's 550 x 275 pixels, SL will probably downsize it to 512 x 256. But not always. I accidentally resized an image to 502 x 256 one time -- OK, I'm a sloppy typist -- and SL surprised me by re-sizing it as a 512 x 256 image. Go figure.

The bottom line is that it's safer if you do the dimensioning yourself.

The bad part is, it's quite possible to apply a 1024 x 1024 clothing texture to an article of clothing, but it's a waste of bandwidth. The applications have to deal with the larger incoming file size every time they re-bake the avatar's current appearance, which at the very least is every time they change any article of clothing... and the final baked texture for the avatar is only going to be 512 x 512, so any extra detail from the larger file size is just lost, as the app has to downscale the larger texture _for every rebake_!

So PLEASE, make sure the clothing textures you use are actually 512 x 512 before you import them to a clothing item!

Everything you see on a computer screen is a set of small squares. You're probably looking at your own work more critically than you look at other peoples', so you're seeing those small squares in a way you wouldn't normally see them.

A curve is always something like this:

*
**
****
******
*****
***
*

Jagged edges. We try to trick the eye by having half-foreground/half-background squares in among the curved edge, like this:


+
*+
**+
****+
******
*****+
***+
*+
+


It helps, but the edge is still somewhat jagged when you study it critically. (That half-shade trick is what your friend was suggesting when she said to blur the edges.)

Just do your best, but accept that some level of jaggedness will always be there. And it will help if you go hunt up some of the best SL artists' work - Chip Midnight, Chosen Few, Robin Sojourner Wood - and look critically at their work. Study it for jaggedness, see if you can figure out what they're doing to reduce it.

If your work is even half as good as theirs, you're doing GREAT!

(And to give yourself perspective, go hunting for really bad noob work. Remember that at one stage, you were as bad as those noobs. Use that to see how far you've come. Use Chip, Chosen, Robin, et al, to see where you can realistically aspire to.)