The Cost of building custom clothes

It's costing me a fortune in $L to upload, test, and delete clothing I have designed with Photoshop... is there an easier/cheaper way to do this?

some stuff just needs to be done that way..

but it's cheaper than it used to be.. now, whe you go to upload something, you can preview it as clothing before accepting it as an upload. in that case, you wouldn't be charged for something you choose not to upload.

granted the preview window isn't quite as effective as actually uploading and checking it out in-world, but it helps a lot!

if you need help with this, either ask away here or find someone who knows what's what in-world and ask them. if you ever see me in-world, i'm always glad to help.

hope this has helped.

Well, maybe you can help with my biggest problem; getting the edges to line up when making "thin" or "border" items.

e.g. panties, swimsuit tops, side pockets, etc.

The lines are close, but are off. Where on the pattern do I need to have the matching ends be on the same X coord. so they line up correctly?

ON the blue-red line? Inside of it? Outside of it? past it into the bleed areas? If so how far?

For example, my wife is turning her favorite swimsuit into an item. It has 2 strings on each side. We are trying to make those strings line up on each side but they are always WAY.

Any help is appreciated. (a default mock pre-filled templated would be best )

Well, I just partially answered my own question. I Figured out that if you have specific elements that have to line up across the outside of the body (hips, chest, arms, etc) they need to be on the same Y coordinate at the outside edge of the blue and red lines. Any detals in the bleed area are discarded. If the graphic is inside the blue-red line and not on it, it will be missing from the final product.

Between the legs however, is another matter.

Trying to line things up between the legs is going to be very difficult; my model was all over the place.

Actually, lining features up across seams is easiest on the legs and the skirt template. It's a royal pain in the behind on the upper body and arms. The front and back of the legs on the lower body template are exactly the same size, meaning as long as the feature crosses the seam at the same vertical point they'll match up on the avatar.

The upper body is much more difficult because the front and back portions of the template are not the same size. I recommend making a custom template with lines across the seams every quarter to half inch that match up. It may take you dozens of uploads and tweaks until you get them all matching up, but from that point on you have a much better visual reference for matching across seams in the future.

The most difficult seam of all to match is the waist. The distribution of the texture across the horizontal width of the seam doesn't match. The waist seam for the upper body is more compressed towards the center while on the lower body it's stretched out in the center and compressed towards the sides. And since you can't test it with the previewer the only way is through experience and a lot of trial and error.

Make sure you use the UV Map and not just the overlay template, it makes lining things up 100 times easier.

That's not to say it's not difficult in certain areas (see Chip's message). I am reminded of a sweater with bands of color on the sleeves. As Chip mentions, I had to create my own template and match the edges of the UV map so the colors wrapped perfectly.

You can see how I set up my templates to use the UV Map in my tutorial (see my sig).

HTH,
Nicola

It's kind of a right of passage for us clothiers. Back in my day (waves cane around) we didnt have the previewer. Oh yea and we walked to school barefoot in the snow five miles.

You'll get the hang of it. Lots of great people here sharing what they learned the hard way.

I was really hoping someone was going to offer up for gift or sale a Super Template that would help.

I ownder if the Lindens would give me a mesh that matches the default male and female meshes, in some kind of normalized coordinates that made sense? Then it would be easy to write a littl eplug-in ofr PSP or PS whcih allowed you to view and move stuff interactively rather that upload-preview-barf cycle that we go through now.

There is one set in the downloads and in world you can find the old black templates.

I downloaded the upper body template and the sample t-shirt in it has horrible white seams on the back of the shoulders. Crappy.