Creating A Pinstriped Texture

Hiya's

I've been working on some clothing and was wondering if anyone could tell me how to create a pinstriped texture for pants ect

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Nat

Pinstripe fabric is basicly just dark cloth with fine vertical lines in it. But... Any pattern that has a close and regular texture to it will heavily show all the places in the clothing mesh that the polygons are not evenly distributed in. You may find in inadvisable as a fabric type to use in SL.

Before you spend much effort on this, you may want to take a simple pattern like a fine checkerboard, and just apply that to the pants template and jacket template as a plain fill. Wear a pair of pants and a jacket that are made from that test texture. See where it distorts, and where it does not. Then do something similar with simple vertical stripes, to learn where you have to angle the fabric pattern to get the stripes to line up properly.

Thank you for your advice Ceera

Nat

For realism, I taken a closeup photo of a pinstripped material. I used photoshop to cut and warp the photo texture into the templates. I've tried several densities to find which one looked best, and I was disastified with them all. The lines matched and the curves were fine. The resolution for clothes, even at 1024x1024, is just not enough for the desired effect. It looks more black and white or grayish instead of a pinstripped material, and the material looks too smooth from what it originally did.

In to the freebie box these go... lol

Well, the easiest thing would be to place 1 pixel wide lines down the fabric area and be done with it. However, a white line on black is pretty contrasty and really ends up looking like thrown on stripes instead of subtle pinstripes.

Like others have said it works well to warp the pinstripes to flow with the avie shape. A simple plan is to just warp the lines along the body contour. No matter how much you try, you won't be able to adjust for all avatar shapes in one design. But don't throw in the towel. As much as I like perfection, we all have to realize we live in an imperfect world and it's those imperfections that make things look so real. If you actually look at a pinstripe outfit on someone, not only will you see that the pinstripes never really run perfectly straight from top to bottom (bodies have contours), but you'll also see that pinstripes do get lost in the seams at points. So instead of making the pinstripes perfect, we should rather be doing our best to make them as 'believable' as possible to where someone looking at the item will perceive a well polished texture.

To pull it off, lay down a pattern of one pixel wide stripes on it's own layer and then warp it to follow close to the template's edges. Once you have your pinstripes how you want them, I like to make the pinstripes somewhat opaque so that they won't dominant the garment. This also helps them appear less than one pixel wide. Just use the opacity slider on the pinstripe layer and set it where you like it. You can always go back and change the opacity later.

Do the same for any area of clothing you want pinstriped, re-using your pinstripe layer if you can. Keep in mind that you need to vary the distance between pinstripes so they will appear similar on different parts of the body. On the upper body template, the bottom of the front is about 210 pixels across, whereas on the lower body template, the top of the pants front is 190 pixels across, so you need to adjust the spacing between the two layers so they'll be closer to matching. Of course, that's only if you intend to extend the pinstripes to the other area.

But also make sure to tighten the pinstripe spacing in on the arm sections, because those parts get stretched over the arms more than the upper body front or back, even on females. For men, you need to the tighten them even closer 'cause men have tree trunks for upper arms in SL Also, for men only, on the back of the upper body, you need to warp the pinstripes in toward the center for the upper back. Anything on the upper back gets distorted really wide on men as those mongo wide shoulders increase upper back 'real estate'. (however, men's shoulders don't affect the front that much!!)

I hope that helps. Good luck!

Thanks Blaze, that was really helpful and I didnt even ask the question.

I had some flowered prints I wanted to use but didnt want them smeared on the shoulders and was wondering if smushing them would counteract the stretch, sounds like it should. Wonder if that would work for the chest area on women as well, I so tire of solid tops lol.

You can probably compress a texture to make it look perfect on a specific body shape, but making it look right on all shapes is not possible.

On males, if they make the chest too muscular, the back distorts badly, becoming trapezoidal. On females, the range of breast sizes makes any adjustments to chest patterns meaningless. The best you can do is to adjust for a neutral "Ruth" body shape, and hope they don't adjust themselves too far from 'average'.

And the front and back triangular areas on skirts are always doomed to streach and distort as you move!

LeAnna, yes, exactly, just compress it--but remember that you lose detail by compressing, so when it's stretched back out it won't look near as crisp as a section that doesn't have such distortion.

So, the key to those areas is to use things that can survive distortion and still look good. Straight lines or letters won't look good at all. Irregular shapes with minimal defined patterns, like some lace will look just fine stretched.

Your flowers fall in the 'irregular' category and should look fine re-stretched. They will stretch different amounts on different avie shapes, but we'll all still see a flower. It won't be perfect, but it will be believable.

The pros and cons of 'one size fits all' clothing!!

I tried to make the business style pinstripped skirt. These are usually down to the knees. If the model stands up straight, it would pass despite the loss of roughness in the material noted above. However, it fails as soon as the model moves or twists her legs. The front area between the knees streches badly.

We need a fix for this, so materials strech more realistically.

Of course, I almost forget. *looks naive* My proposal for SVG textures would surely help in this areas where the material streches. SVG uses vectors instead of rasterization. The rastered textures are limited by its resolution uploaded. Strech a rasterized image and it appears blocky. SVG images scale. You can strech and bend SVG images and they keep their crispness. Read my blog for more ideas about this, like finely detialed logos and designs.

that better solution is to dump jpg2000 entirely and move to Tga on the asset server. Drop the size limit to 512 x 512.