Slightly (maybe not) advanced clothing texture question...

I've been dabbling in clothes and I think I'm turning out some fairly interesting pieces....its not really on the level of the better designers out there, largely because I have no graphic arts training and this is the first game I've actually done clothing in (vampire dentistry doesn't really prepare one for a career as a vampire tailor).

Over time now I've self discovered alot of tricks and I think I'm developing fairly nice clothes...in fact people are buying them so I must not be alone in that impression...but regardless there is a lingering question in my mind that I cannot seem to find an answer for and I'm forced to ask about it here at this point.

When I make a shirt in Photoshop CS2, I use the Pencil tool and Robin Sojourners templates (I have Chip Midnights but I haven't actually taken a stab at using them)....my lines in Photoshop look to be straight and I'm following the curves of the UV map and everything and I've even worked out eliminating alpha channel haloes and stuff so once I get my stuff into SL it looks fairly good.

BUT...the edges of my lines, the ones that are the edge of the fabric before skin...that look so straight and clean in Photoshop..when I bring them over into SL...are jaggy and rough on close examination. I've noticed that there are clothes out there that have this problem too...but I've looked at some pieces from the people who I consider to be incredibly gifted designers and they have nice clean straight lines and there isn't much jagginess at all in the translation from their fabric layers to the skin levels of the SL models.

What am I not seeing here? I've tried everything I can, going through and eraser edging my mask and even micro edging my alpha map with 100% black...and it still looks messy.

I'd like to solve this problem...its causing me no end of frustration and I'm uploading like 5 - 10 pieces a day and just dumping them because they look so bad (to me) due to this edging issue.

So in summary, my issue isn't a alpha channel halo..I've got that licked...my issue is the jagginess on my edges once I get the texture applied to a mesh in the game.

Any clues would be heavily appreciated here, like I said I'm not a classically educated graphics artist...just someone thats teaching themselves and enjoying it alot.

I'd like to clean up my edge lines some so the clothes I make are something I can be proud of.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Out of curiosity, have you tried going the other direction? Instead of using a sharper edged brush for things like your collar have you tried using a slightly softer brush? If your brush is too hard edged you'll get pixel jaggies. If it's too soft you'll get something that looks mushy. I usually do those lines with a default soft edged 3 or 5 pixel brush. You might be overcompensating.

I am using like a 4 - 6 pixel hard tip with the pencil tool cause I wasn't sure if I'd get bleeding using a soft edged brush or not.

Let me take a stab at it coming from that direction and see what happens.

Thank you for the advice Chip.

The pencil isn't anti-aliased at all so it will always end up looking bad. Always use a soft edged brush and adjust the amount of falloff and brush size. The pencil tool is just about worthless.

One approach I use to smooth edges out is to apply a layer effect to the edge of my solid to transparent transition. This can also be worked into the design as a shadow effect. Drop Shadow and Outer Glow (with a dark color & multiply) work well. If somthing doesn't look right I just reduce the opacity or adjust the settings on the layer effect.

Okay I did the following up with a soft edged brush at 5 pixels. It looks great in Photoshop...and most of it looks great in SL...but..the edge problems are still there and I even used layer effects as Namassor suggested.

Heres a jpg of the TGA texture:

http://members.cox.net/pr0/simpletank.jpg

It looks fairly clean there til you get down to the pixel level.

And heres how it looks in game:

http://members.cox.net/pr0/exampleedgemess.jpg

Theres some nice clean lines on most of it...so I think using the soft edged brush has helped...but I'm still unable to stop the edge distortion on the curves and slightly on the straps.

There has to be a way around this.

Try making your breasts smaller; you may just be seeing the large-breast distortion that many people suffer from.

One other suggestion I can make is create a vector-later for strapes, and try moving them all about until you find a good place for them to be. Using vactors gives nice anti-aliased lines, and I find it gives good results on the final skin. Once you have the final position worked out, you can rasterize the layer.

I tested it out on a couple of friends who aren't quite as lushly designed as my avatar is and was still seeing more or less the same problem.

I'm marginally aware of what vector layers are...but does that mean using the pen tool? I have like...massive trouble using that tool for some reason..it never seems to do what I want it to do.

EDIT: And my breasts aren't ridiculously oversized btw, I think they're set at 67...I just use alot of splay in my body design to round out the curves.

The sides of the breasts are bad that way and there's really not much of anything you can do about it. It's caused by stretch in the UVW mapping where certain polygons receive less pixels of the texture map than they need. The only workaround is to try to avoid putting anything that requires detail there and move your seam and strap up higher and in towards the front of the torso more. It's really not anything that you're doing wrong.

Ahh okay Chip I'll try that out. I was sure there was a magic bullet out there, but then again, come to think of it I don't see many tank designs out there with that liberal of a cut either.

Thanks everyone for your help.

Try making a skin out of the templates and wearing it. You can tell by looking at how sharp or fuzzy the grid is where the areas of bad stretch and smudge are, then try to avoid putting much detail there

I have a layer on my templates called "evil polys" that covers the evil polygons on the crotch in red; I can activate it to make it easier to avoid putting detail there. I need to add the evil bits of the neck and torso to it as well. (maybe orange for the torso polys, since they are more "distorted" than "put something here and you will cry at how made it becomes." And I know "polys" is technically the wrng term, but I don't care. )

As for teh pen tool... it's hard at first, but I've found it amazingly useful for so many things.