Sides Of Shirt Lining Up...

For example - tanks, halters, even tees or any shirt. When using a "premade" template the fabric or pattern the sides of the shirt don't line up. Sometimes tho it looks fine.

I've alway noticed on clothes other people wear, things are not lined up and the shoulder straps are off but no one seems to really mind. Maybe its just me being picky. Even some well known designer clothes I own are distorted and not exact.

Is there a way to line up the texture so it looks like it just wraps around? Seams do hide it to some extent if they're darker and more prominent but I've seen perfect sides of shirts too.

Thanks for any input and hope it wasn't confusing. Thanks

Take a good look at the templates that Chip Midnight and Robin Sojourner have done, where the edges are clearly marked for what pixels on one edge map to what ones on the other edge. In most cases, taking a "flat" patterened fabric and just flowing it across both sides of the clothing template isn't sufficent to line the seams up. You need to make small tweaks to the pattern to get it to match right.

Also, get a copy of Johan Durant's free SL Clothing Previewer from the sticky thread at the top of this forum. If you get in the habit of working iteratively between Photoshop and the SLCP viewer, you can see where design elements fail to line up and can make the tiny tweaks that are necessary to straighten them out.

There are other, more sophisticated ways to do the same thing. Photoshop CS4, for example, allows you to do much of your drawing in 3D so you can see directly how a design looks on the avatar body. For those of us who don't have the money to invest in such things, though, SLCP is a great alternative.

another great tool is Avpainter, it isn't free but it is really nice

Often people don't mind a little mismatch at the shoulders because it is almost impossible to line something up perfectly there, but under the arm? If you are serious about making/selling clothing, you need to make sure things line up. Because it can be done, and without a lot of difficulty, anything less is (IMO) sloppy and not well done. I'm sorry that you paid L's for templates that don't even line up.

There's no magic recipe for matching seams (at least I havent found it). So you should get the SLCP that Rollig mentioned and be prepared for hours of cross referencing your designs, always checking if the seams match.

When I am working on a difficult template I have my avatar wear the CMFF templates as a skin. That way I can see exactly how the lines wrap.