Aya Mactavish

Thanks for the recommendation! I've got linux, but I will see if I can find a software like that, that I can use. Thanks for all the help!

To both of you, thanks for your responses so far! (I can't figure out how to respond to two at once, but I want to keep it clean and stick to one comment lol) To Sassy Romano, yes, I was noticing this with different UV maps and it makes sense to me, but for the most part, the Meli Imako UV maps seem to be very well-made and use up all the space they can. To Drake1 Nightfire, I was beginning to wonder this, too. Maybe I'm expecting the impossible from it and need to change my methods entirely. I was watching some PS tutorials (because I kept coming across these instead of the GIMP ones I would search for) and I noticed people like to make use of "Patterns" and they seem to produce great results when used with simpler fabric textures. Would you recommend this? I've tinkered with it and it does seem like it could work well, but I can't figure out how to resize the pattern in GIMP. In PS, the person was able to change the size from within the same toolbox. Is GIMP missing this feature entirely or am I just supposed to use the Map>Tiling/Small Tiles tool? Or better yet, how do you prefer to make your patterns (like a polka-dot, for example)?

I have been stumped in my understanding of this. I was learning seemingly so fast, but my textures never look so good once applied to the mesh dress I'm working with. They turn out unclear or blurry, and it becomes most apparent when working with polka-dot textures or textures with small details in them, like butterflies, flowers, etc. To begin, I use GIMP and, for practice in texturing, I usually use Meli Imako full permission designs, as well as their shadowmaps and UV maps/clothing textures for reference and editing, which are all 1024x1024 saved from Firestorm Viewer inventory as .PNG to my computer. (I just want to leave no detail out, in case I'm overlooking something) I then add my own layers, whether they be from 1024x1024 textures I buy from the marketplace, or much higher resolution textures I find from open-source sites on the internet. In the case of polka-dot designs, I will use the Scaling Tool in GIMP to scale down the layer so that the polka-dots are smaller. And it seems that, no matter how high of resolution the texture was before, the polka-dots become super chunky and less round. So then I try to sharpen the layer using steps found in the manual (decomposing the layer, changing to HSV, adjusting the values layer, and then composing, etc), but this never seems to make the polka-dot texture look any better. If anything, it has helped to adjust the color more, which is nice, but doesn't solve my problem and the polka-dots still look blurred and not perfectly round. Exporting as .png, to see how it looks on the mesh model, I notice that the overall quality is just bad, and not just with sophisticated polka-dot textures..Everything is blurry, the polka-dots aren't crisp and I'm disappointed. Yet, I can apply the original 1024x1024 polka-dot texture (from the full perm pack) directly to the face of the dress, and it looks magnificent, especially when I increase the repeats. I'm just stumped...am I losing the quality because I scaled the polka-dot layer down so that the dots were smaller and more numerous? (I will sometimes Small Tile it too, instead of scaling) Am I just bad at sharpening layers? I tinkered with it endlessly and no mix of numbers seemed to make any satisfactory difference. How are people making good quality mesh clothing textures using full-perm kits that start you out with 1024x1024? I've read that quality can be lost because of SL uploading as .jpeg, but I have seen creators make great quality textures, using these same mesh full permission kits. I have tried exporting as .tga and .png, but with no differences to the quality I noticed, and have also tried changing the compression slider (png) from 0-9. What am I missing?

Good news I hope! I had reported the issue to the Firestorm Support Team and apparently this was happening do to the wearing of the new LOGO Hybrid Mesh Head or the Lolas Prim or Mesh boobs. The problem has been recently fixed in the latest release of the SL viewer and is going to be fixed in the next release of Firestorm. As for Exodus, their releases are also very spread apart and for Nirans, I have no idea. The problem was reproduced by wearing either of those items while editing 'anything' inworld, 'anywhere' you were. I hope this helps your situation and, if not, a solution is discovered soon!

Wow, I have to say that I'm not glad others are suffering this problem, but am certainly glad that I'm not alone in my frustration. For the past 4 days, I've been listening to people tell me it's my video drivers (tried 5 different versions), or my chipset (updated and rolled back), or because I installed Steam games, or this..that....until I reinstalled Windows TWICE just to end up suffering the same problem; one that never made sense to me and almost convinced me that my power supply or video card was dying. I crash whenever I attempt to Move or select prims with Edit Linked, if they are very large prims, any size meshes and any size sculpts. Sculpts, especially, have been the killer for me. And on FOUR different viewers: SL, Firestorm, Exodus and Nirans, with Firestorm crashing the soonest and Nirans crashing the least (but still enough to greatly reduce the time I have bothered spending in SL, because a great deal of it is spent building.) The bit that confuses me is that all the viewers worked fine up until "one day" around a week ago and I hadn't updated any of my viewers or made any crucial changes to my computer. Not replying with this to request support, but just wanted you to know that I'm facing this too and that you're not alone. A part of me is also just enthusiastically relieved that maybe nothing is wrong with my computer, after all. But by chance, because I do wonder, does this mean we can use older versions like Phoenix to avoid this problem, just temporarily? Update: Phoenix crashed just the same within only 5 seconds of moving a single prim. Update: SINGULARITY WORKS FLAWLESSLY! But I've only been testing it for a short period of time..So if this helps you even temporarily, give it a shot!