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Added alternative template layout (Body_template2.png) with the arms rotated 90deg so using a raw rectangular texture (ie, not a clothing-specific one) would look better.
And a visual example of the "flat texture" skirt template.
I think something like this would be wonderful, just one texture for upper and lower body.. and having the edges of the polygons be straight (or more so than now) in the image! Not having to shift things around and scale them on one side of the arm versus the other side, to get it aligned.
I think it would be best if the similar elements were close together, like Body_template.png rather than Body_template2. But I might flip one set of arms horizontally so they face the same way, so the user can just draw straight down if they want to have something identical on both, instead of having to copy/paste and flip horizontally. Basically I think things should be straight as possible in the image, where similar body parts (front/back; left arm/right arm; left foot/right foot) are concerned. I imagine less empty white space may be an improvement, though it may lead to things having to be drawn in odd scales by the skin creator. I do not know all the issues or reasons involved. I don't remember how skirts work now, but using a full texture space seems like it can be a good idea. However, also including the option to use a "body 2.0" leg mapping for skirts would probably have its uses. "option to use a "body 2.0" leg mapping for skirts would probably have its uses."
^ Yes, for making a 'dress' with the skirt part and top part matching, I can see how that would be very useful. Would be good for jackets too, so the jacket doesn't have to be split behind at the legs, instead using a skirt-like lower (technically, a 'dress' would be the same draw-path as a long jacket closed at the front, then). Now I think on it, this is probably why dresses use a non-rectangular-texture to start with and is likely reason enough to ignore my skirt suggestion. As long as skirts can be made to fit more snugly - I wouldn't want to make a jacket from a shirt and a skirt right now - it would look quite odd! You would want multiple skirt layers too - at least one more - so you can wear a jacket over a skirt. Aprons also come to mind. Re: white space, alignment, etc. Yes, these mock ups are VERY crude just to help get the point across visually. Feedback on better arrangements is encouraged! While we are at it, we should add a highly configurable and expressive tail.
Yes, Strife, I can go with that. While I am not into the Furrie scene, I think more than enough players are, such that support for the common Furrie-like body shapes within the bounds of the standard human avatar mesh should be supported. Reptilians too would like this too of course.
Will update the sample mesh 2 shortly to match ;-D A greyscale skin layer for 'furriness' - white=bald to black=bushy - which causes the clientside renderer to blur the edges of the avatar skin layer where visible might be a cheap way to get real fur - good for a human with short fuzzy head/facial-hair too. Created and linked to VWR-4076 - Avatar 2.0 - tail (and ears)
personally i would prefer to keep the possibility for high resolutionpicturs open. Currently 1024 is supported for either upper or lowerbody. This new idea would limit the resolution 50% of what was possible before.
Also i would REALLY like to see a less shoulders. There are a few parts on skins (like chin and shoulders) that are stretched too much comparted to other parts. When making clothes or skins, the amount of stretching on the avatar in SL makes them seem very blurry In that case then, go for a 2048x2048 max texture for this clothing layer - I was intending for the actual resolution to slightly increase over what is presently possible (because the arms are not taking up space below the shirt and so the legs and torso are a little bigger relative to what they would otherwise be). You are effectively getting the extra arms and feet (and now tail
 , plus a slight bump (visually I would estimate about 20%) fir a doubling of texture size (because you are replacing 2 textures with one of 4 times the size). That is another reason I left the head mesh out of the merge - I think the opportunity to go for VERY high detail there might be good.
BTW: I know you can UPLOAD 1024x1024 skin/clothing textures, but for me they seem to end up baked down to 512x512, maybe that is just my system's graphics detail settings?? But that is why I used 1024 as the size max, possibly in error. Hmmm. Shoulders and one or two other places are a stretch issue - hopefully a higher-resolution mesh combined with better texture-> mesh design would fix this - this is one of the issues that should be addressed as part of this, so thanx for bringing it up. Updated mesh size in proposal to 2048x2048 (max upload resolution) and a caveat regarding using lower resolutions if the client-end needs to.
This is a long overdue change I'd love to see. Unfortunately, given how saturated SL is now, and how many years the old templates have been in place, I can't see it being implemented any time soon.
That said, your templates are great, and pretty spot on to how I wish they were. The only thing I'd change is the texture mapping on the feet, because, as things stand, no one can do a decent texture mapping around the foot area. Even if the templates weren't combined into a single file, as you have them, I'd still wish for some changes to the existing template mappings. Firstly, the upper and lower layers/skirts are reversed. Why is the front of the body on the left in the upper layer, and on the right on the lower layer? As already mentioned, I'd love the feet to be easier to work with. Also, as some of us know, having a single arm means that anything shown correctly on one arm is mirrored on the other, making text look a bit silly. This would all mean altering the avatar texture mapping and/or the avatar mesh, too. And that's something that's just not gonna happen really. Think how much existing content it would break if they did it wrong. The way I always envisioned it though was you would have two radio buttons in the appearance editor, for both avatar mesh and template. One for the new templates, and one for the old, legacy templates. Depending on which you chose would depend on which mapping was used. This could also allow for backward compatability if the new template layouts were mapped onto the existing meshes. Yes, I would expect the renderer/mapper for old skin/clothing to remain for a very very long time.
A program that can accurately stretch/scale old skins/cloths to fit the new template might be nice too, but ONLY if it was VERY good! Copy-pasting my comment from another issue, since I cant see it handled by the proposals above:
I've been trying my hand on making some swimsuit textures, and I've noticed designing between the legs area is almost impossible because the texture map has practically zero resolution there! Same goes for the sides of the breasts, any detail there, like a line, bang, breasts stretch it into an ugly pixelated horror. A related issue seems to be that when an avatar bends, spreads legs or such, instead of soft natural curves, what we see is lack of mesh vertices and awful stretch artifacts on thighs? Whatever is done to the avatars technically, the fix should acknowledge that many people in SL really pay rather close attention to those regions, and that they should look way more decent (this can hardly be anything else than a straightforward engineering issue, 3d games manage those regions pretty well). |
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New Feature
Open
Low
Avatar 2.0 - new body texture.
Keep all the old Avatar skins, clothings, etc. with the brightness/contrast fiddled during bake to simulate the pre-WL lighting model, with new textures un-tweaked and running for WL lighting.
Then old clothes/skins don't look so off-whack (I doubt it can be made perfect, but even close would be nice) and new clothing/skins are made from scratch and tested under WL anyway so will match the WL lighting model from the outset.
And designers can re-sell all their clothes/skins as "Windlight Improved" until eventually most of the old skins/clothes are gone (might take years). Though customers (and designers) are not obliged to upgrade immediately and all-at-once which is likely the most important thing.