Well, today I got all excited because I decided to start making clothing for my avatar. I fired up Coreldraw, loaded in the template from SL, and drew a kickin logo. Saved it and uploaded to SL, and dropped in my avatar, and...
...the awesome texture I made looked like CRAP! Designs distorted, shapes turned ugly, and generally it was an ugly mess. Can we get some help here for making textures?
One thing I'd like to see would be an avatar viewer for outside SL, that we could use for practice purposes. We could load textures onto the av outside of the game, avoiding the upload fee and in general, the time involved in all that work. Just a simple one would be nice where we could toggle on just 1 basic shirt (with full-length sleeves), basic full length pants, and just barely enough so we could preview how things would look before uploading our textures.
After discussing this idea though, the biggest drawback would be that it would probably take time. Time that could be better spent working on bug-squashing and code improvements. So I came up with a better idea: Can Linden Lab's art department tweak the UV-maps on the models a bit? This solution could be worked out in a day, and it would be fairly simple to do: They generate a lined texture and apply it to the model, and then move the UV-points around so that the lines don't distort much in both the horizontal and vertical axes. This way, it's much easier for us to make custom textures for our avatars, and would boost the number of personalized clothes available ingame.
Right now it's extremely difficult to create detailed textures because the current system isn't very supportive of it. If we could have one of the two fixes above, I'd be greatly appreciative of it, and I'm sure many others would be as well.
Thanks for your tim in reading this, and if you have any comments, please fire away!
p.s. It seems that the pants aren't quite as distortion prone as the upper body, and the areas that are most unpredictable are the shoulder-blade regions and the pectoral/breast area on the front.
[EDIT: I just noticed that this post is in the wrong forum, because when I originally logged into the forums I didn't see a large list of forums, instead there were only 5 or so. Sorry for the mispost]