Skin Question

I tried making my first skin last night and today and it didn't come out quite as bad as I thought it would. Here's a pic ...
http://www.paintupthesky.com/Anna_001.bmp
However when you look here
http://www.paintupthesky.com/Anna_002.bmp
you see all these lines around her fingers and arm...can someone please tell me why these are showing up and possibly how to prevent it? I haven't even read any tutorials on it, I just looked at various skins and decided to try, so I don't know if I may be missing a step or something?

Hi Sae

You've pretty much discovered "seams". The Avatar mesh uses a specific file(UV Mapping) to determine where the image is spread across the model. It's pretty easy to bleed a design into the other seams, thus you get different kinds of "lines" all over the edges of the avatar.

http://secondlife.com/community/templates.php

That link contains the different template files that you can view(in Photoshop, etc), to see where these edges are and how to better blend them in with other edges to create a seamlessness.

Also check out:

/109/72/40762/1.html

For more information and templates from Chip Midnight!

After some practice, you'll surely get the hang of it and these lines won't crop up on you so much. Hope that helps! ^^

To add to the above... there's something to remember about the way skins and all textures are applied on 3d models. Which is, when the game paints your model using your texture as reference, it doesn't read individual razor-sharp pixels from your texture in order to find what colour to paint model with... but rather small, blended patches of colours that can be as large as 2-3 pixels across. Which means if you paint your skin following the template and leave say, black background in all spots where the template 'ends' ... this black colour will also be taken into account when painting areas of your model near the template 'seams'. Which leads to these very noticeably darker lines you can see on your screenshot.

Simplest way to deal with it is to paint your textures with a few pixels of extra 'border' of the same colour you use for painting, around the template edges... rather than try to match template precisely ^^;