Male templates?

I was told that the templates to make clothes are based on a female shape.. I was wondering if this is true and why isn't there one for males? I was making some tattoos for the shoulder and it look great on a female shape but not so much on a male shape...

any tips on how I make them look good on male shapes?

thx

Not sure if it's true or not but, rest assured, the first few attempts at clothing and/or tatts will be a learning curve.
Possibly, the best way of seeing how the templates work on different bodies, is to upload both upper and lower templates into SL and create a shirt & pants out of them... check out how the template lines up with the avatars shape. Don't forget to save a few snapshots, wearing your template, to your harddrive, for future reference.

Oh, and don't forget to read the stickys

Not to worry. The male and female templates are different. Just take a look at the two of them. What you have heard has to do with avatars. The protoavatar was female, which is why you can get "ruthed" every once in a while and look female when SL screws up. As for templates and making tatoos, the best way to make them look good on either a male or female avatar is to practice.

Don't worry about it. The male avatar shape is simply a morph of the female one. The templates are the same for both.

The reason for this has to do with simplification. There would be little point in having two completely separate models, as that would be an unnecessary complication. It's more sensible to have a single model that can become either gender. And since geometrically speaking, it's pretty easy to turn a female into a male, it makes sense that the base model would be female. Just flatten the breasts, shrink the hips, enlarge the groin area, square a few things off, and it's a dude. Trying to go the other way around, though, turning a male into a female, is potentially more difficult. Since the male geometry is less complicated, there's no guarantee that everything you need will be there when you try to morph the male into a female.

This is the same way it works in biology, too, by the way. All fetuses start out as physically female. (This is why men have nipples.) At a certain point in development, if a fetus is genetically male, it will receive a dose of hormones, which serves to metamorphose the body's physical shape into that of a male. Otherwise, the body shape remains female.

In any case, there are no tips I can think of specifically for making a tattoo or anything else look good on a male or female in particular. Even within the same gender, any particular item can look great on one body shape, and then look terribly distorted on another that is thinner or fatter or taller or shorter or otherwise differently proportioned. As Butch said, the best thing to do is to wear the templates on several different body shapes. That way you can see exactly where all the lines fall, and you can make appropriate decisions about how to shape your tattoos and garments.

hey thank you so much for the reply.. I don't mind trial and error while make clothes and/or tattoos, only thing is that I am running out of $L to keep uploading for the trial and error.. I downloaded the previewer thing where you can see what it would look like before you upload it, however, about 90% of the time it looks better in SL then the previewer so it doesn't help me much..

anyway

Thank you

You can preview textures for head, upper, and lower body for L$0 on the main grid with this hack:

/109/9a/233734/1.html

I have noticed the center of back for items made for females does look different on the male back.
Whatever design you put there will be stretched differently.

If you're not keen on spending $ on uploads, try using the alditi (or whatever it's called these days) viewer. Upload and test your textures. When they're looking good, log into one of the regular clients and use your final textures.

is that the test server?

Yes. There is a recent blog post about how to log in there. ctrl g at the login screen, select aditi from the dropdown. Agni is the main grid. note that most sims are not up and running there. Log in to Ahern.

one thing I have found useful when doing these is to upload chosens templates and put them on as a skin, then to apply the tat layers as undershirt or something as it lets you see almost immediately where abouts you need to line it up with. it's far from perfect, but for me at least it makes it a whole lot easier to get close to where I want things