clothes stretching

I was working on a patterned shirt (chainmail in this case) and everything looks great except for the stretching effect I get on the breast (mine smaller them majority so worried about average watermellon sized breast in SL) and upper arms/ lower shoulder area. Is it worth the effort to try shrinking the pattern in those areas to counter the issue or had I might aswell accept fact never gonna be able deal with wide range of breast in SL and move on?

for testing you can always move your breast slider up, maybe design it for larger than average would be best. there is buoyancy too, though personally I don't knw how that effects breast shape

Yeah, you can preview what your shirt will look like on very different sized avatars, as Dekka says, by modelling it yourself in Appearence and moving the sliders around. The bottom line, though, is that something made for a pipsqueak isn't going to stretch well to fit on a giant. You can either design for someone in the mid-range of sizes or, if you really worry about it, create your design in two or three different versions. Unfortunately, some parts of the avatar body (shoulder blades, crotch, female breasts, ...) are problematic and you just have to learn not to put design elements there that can't stand distortion.

You will never get a "one texture fits all avatar sizes" clothing item with a tight, repetitive pattern like chain mail. The actual surface area of an SL avatar steaches too much for that to be possible.

And if you try a longer hauberk, or chain mail coat, you're *really* going to scream at what a skirt does to the narrow triangle in front and in back! Appalling!

At best, you can make a "Men's version", and a "Small chested", "Moderate chest" and "Large chest" female version. Probably a lot more effort than it is worth, especially as it will be almost impossible to reverse-engineer the distortions for each size back to a flat 2D texture.

If you *do* try to make a chainmail skirt, use flexi prims and forget about the "Avatar Skirt Layer" for any part other than the hips.

Grab a copy of my 'designer toolkit' to see exactly what playing with the sliders can do to each of those little parallelograms and triangles in the UV mesh. It's a freebie.

http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=811584

You CANNOT make a tight design like chainmail work with every av. As others have said: your choice really is between designing for one or more particular type(s) of av, designing for the median, or making a variety of designs for small, medium or large avs - and even then, there's a huge difference between 'large with body thickness', 'large with muscle', and 'large with body fat'.

Choose your market and go for it.