Reasons for Limitations of Clothing

[Jennifer Boyle]

Are there technical reasons for certain limitations of SL clothing? Such as:

Undershirts and shirts are too short to reach pants, so that if one wants no bare midriff and the appearance of a tucked-in shirt, one has to have an extra piece on the underpants layer for the shirt tail.  Is there some technical reason that shirts and undershirts couldn't have been allowed to be longer?  Now that we can have mutiples of each clothing layer this isn't as much of a problem, as I no lnger have to go without panties to have a tucked-in shirttail, but I still wonder why the desihn is the way it is.

Prim attachments cannot be covered by clothing.  It seems to me that it would be simple enogh for prims to have a flag indicating whether they were to be covered by clothing if worn, or not, that would be controlled by a checkbox in their properties that would tell the rendering engine if they were to be covered by clothing.  If they were and clothing covered the part of the avatar where they were, they would not be rendered.  Better, it could see them as part of the shape.

I thought my list was longer, but these are all I can think of now.

 

[Chelsea Malibu]

Being an amateur game builder that also works with other game engines, I can't see where this would be done easily. 

The length or coverage of a texture over the avatar mesh should be a no brainier and I concur however, attachments are unique to SL and covering these with the same texture would require the ability to modify the avatar mesh while also rendering the image over a single map.  This can already be done to some degree with your clothing layer as you can make some modification to your shape such as pant cuffs, baggy sleeves, etc.  However, the texture mapping is never clean the the lengths are always off which is why we have prim sleeves and prim cuffs.

SL is on version 2 of the avatar where it really should be version 3 or 4.  Perhaps they will put more focus into the avatar tools down the road.

Conclusion is that your texture mapping request for clothing layers is doable as far as I can see but the attachment thing would not be something that would not work well with the dynamic avatars we have.

 

[Ceera Murakami]

Unfortunately, the arbitrary decision for the position of the division between the upper body template and the lower body template was made with very little regard to how clothing would look on the avatar's body, or to where the limits of various clothing items might reach. The LL coder that designed those limits wasn't a fashion genius. He was a coder that just wanted the figure on the screen to be able to have a shirt and pants that were different colors.

What that means for practical purposes is that if you make pants that don't have the waistband smack on the top edge of the lower body template's usable area, you'll have a gap between the waistband of those pants and any t-shirt or undershirt, which only uses the upper body template in its definition.

Likewise, if you design a shirt and don't go all the way to the bottom of the upper body template's area that is mapped as the lower hem of the shirt, you also get a gap.

And there is zero overlap between the pants layer and the shirt layer. So if you want a shirt tail, you have to do that on the underpants layer.

The jacket is the only clothing item to use both the upper and lower body templates, and even that uses the area poorly, and can't extend the lower jacket beyond the limits envisioned by the LL coder that came up with the arbitrary limits in the first place.

The skirt is a part of the avatar body mesh that is only visible when you wear a system skirt. And for some completely unknown reason, the waistband of the skirt can NEVER touch the avatar's actual waist, but always has a gap!

None of the clothing layer items can react to prim attachments at all, because they only exist as texturing on the avatar body's mesh. 

[Anaiya Arnold]

I still cannot get my head around the failure to provide an option that lets us texture each arm individually.

[Paul Hexem]

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Jennifer Boyle wrote:

Are there technical reasons for certain limitations of SL clothing? Such as:

Undershirts and shirts are too short to reach pants, so that if one wants no bare midriff and the appearance of a tucked-in shirt, one has to have an extra piece on the underpants layer for the shirt tail.  Is there some technical reason that shirts and undershirts couldn't have been allowed to be longer? 

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Blame that on the person that made the clothes (pants). If the pants come all the way up, then the gap is so small, you pretty much can't see it.

[KlistiesSeMio Ewinaga]

Mom jeans aren't in style anymore. c:

[Marybeth Cooperstone]

"Now that we can have mutiples of each clothing layer this isn't as much of a problem..."

How does this work? When ever I put on one layer (e.g. underpants) whatever I had on comes off.

[Tristizia Demonista]

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Marybeth Cooperstone wrote:

"Now that we can have mutiples of each clothing layer this isn't as much of a problem..."

How does this work? When ever I put on one layer (e.g. underpants) whatever I had on comes off.

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Assuming you are on Viewer 2, you can wear multiple layers of clothing by right-click and "Add" them, "Wear" simply replaces the item currently in use on that spot.

If you use a V1 based Viewer, you simply can't ! (And no, multiattachement points are NOT the same) 

[Marybeth Cooperstone]

Thank you. I had not seen that feature, I am new to viewer 2, having just recently upgraded. It is a very usefull feature and I can see that I will use it frequently.

[Marybeth Cooperstone]

Chelsea,

As an amateur game builder do you know of any other gams similar to Second Life but with better, or at least different, avatar mesh designs?