General tips for creating Avatar clothing

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The avatar clothing templates consist of 4 important elements:

  1. outlines indicating the general shape of the avatar
  2. color-coded seam lines
  3. minimum bleed area
  4. alpha channel

When creating a material or color for a clothing item, always make sure the material or color extends beyond the edge of the colored outlines. The "Minimum Bleed Area" is indicated on the template for this purpose.

Try to match material or color across seams. Connecting seams are indicated by corresponding colors, and you can use PhotoShop's "rubber stamp" tool to easily accomplish this.

If you want a stripe or seam to be visible (e.g. the seam down the side of a pair of pants), put the seams on only the "front" portion of the texture. Making a stripe or seam directly on top of the seam indication line may create undesirable effects.

When making buttons run down the center of a shirt, place the buttons on the center line to avoid distortion.

When creating a short-sleeve shirt, make the sleeves longer than you need, then adjust the sleeve length value in the Customize Avatar dialog to get the look you want.

If you want text on the front of a shirt, place the text well above the nipple line in the template to avoid distortion.

To maintain the integrity of a unique collar, follow these simple steps:

  1. In PhotoShop, pick the "lasso" tool
  2. Select the area of neck/chest that you expect to see the avatar's skin through
  3. While the selection is active, click on the "channels" tab and highlight the Alpha Channel
  4. Select the brush tool and paint the selected area BLACK (areas of black in the alpha channel are transparent, whereas areas of white are opaque)
  5. Save the texture as a .TGA file to upload to Second Life
  6. In the Avatar Customization dialog, set the neck height of the shirt to 100, and you should see the desired result

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