Raindrop Drinkwater

That's... hmm, how can I put it nicely? 😖 Of all the things, that's one I wasn't expecting. I must've gotten lucky because I'm pretty sure I've given the brown horse (and AO) a whirl with Raindrop. I switched back to my good old prim' horse after a short while because I was missing the sounds -- so I must've fallen in the "short periods of time" timeframe. I really liked how it was modelled. A shame it can only be effectively used by one gender!

There's also a brown horse in the male section -- and this one comes with an AO that allows you to ride either horse normally.

Slink Physique, and Slink Physique Male

Aside from a dead mouse. Well, its head, anyway.

Well, that's rather the point, innit? 🧛‍♂️ 😁

This forum is quite all right, actually! It seems much friendlier than the old forum I remember.

Oh! Duh. I thought it was Neverwinter Nights.

Good point. Looking at how I tend to unwrap human-shaped stuff, I avoid seams when I can but also use them to minimise distortions and prevent (unwanted) overlaps. Current piece I'm working on, I have a main front and back pieces with arms stitched on -- this, because I'm dealing with short sleeves, and that made it easier to avoid the arms/body seam without wasting space --, and the legs separate. But this means I have a seam on top and under each arm. With long sleeves, I'd separate them from the body... otherwise, that'd be a waste of space. However, I wouldn't have a top seam. So. hmm. I can see how tanned human-leather would be wasteful as well in terms of space. I remember remapping the SL avatar onto one map, back when I was doing system clothes, to match up the bottom and top layers, avoid "chest compression" etc... then rebaking the final texture onto the standard SL maps. I had the arms separate from the body, but I'm pretty sure I only had one seam lengthwise (at least for some of the length). The legs were separate as well, but the seam was at the crotch rather than at the waist. It worked well. I can't remember how I dealt with the fingers though.

Those boots rock!

No, we really don't need so many seams.The SL UV map seems approachable (as in, you see where stuff goes where when you first learn to texture clothes, skins, etc), but it's actually terrible. Too many seams, too much distortion, some overlapping areas that shouldn't overlap (the fingers in particular are quite messy), not enough space in fiddly areas... Basically, gaaaaah. And your analogy with tanning leather is pretty good, actually. That'd be a nice UV map.

Yep -- I wonder if a lot of Victorian/period clothes designers, especially hobbyists, found themselves in a similar situation to me: a bit unsure about learning how to rig, especially as Victorian outfits, my fav. time period, tend to be quite complex. Buying templates in this case isn't much of an option, because there's three templates or so that everyone's using. I stopped creating clothes for a while (a loooong while, actually, but the last couple of years was only because of computer issues). Sure, I'm back, but you won't see me doing super-complex Victorian gowns for a while (I'm more into dude or tomboy clothes anyway 😋). There's plenty of choice for casual/modern clothes, so I'm hoping other designers will start thinking of other time periods. I've spotted Mycenaean outfits recently, which is great. Hotdog is awesome for gothic/steampunk. In the end, I think it boils down to sales figures. Casual and sexy sell to a broad range of customers. Anything that's niche will have, by definition, a smaller market... so will tend to attract hobbyists with a keen interest in the subject, but maybe not as much time or resources as the big brand names out there. On the plus side, rigged mesh has matured by now, so hopefully we'll start getting a bit more choice.

I'm not sure if this is a bug, a feature, or a me-being-dumb issue (always a possibility!) 🤔 I've just updated an item that only fitted classic avatars to a Slink + Classic version. When editing the listing, I ticked "Clothing works with: Classic Avatars", but this disabled the "Custom Avatar Brand" box. So I unticked the Classic Avatars box, filled in the Custom Avatar Brand, and tried re-ticking the Classic Avatars box. Nope, still no go. Eventually I listed the classic avatar sizes along with Slink, in the Custom Avatar Brand box... Not efficient. I couldn't find anything in the Jira about this, so I first wanted to check if it was only me who had an issue there.

Looks like it's not rigged. When importing into SL, make sure to tick include skin weights (under the Upload options Tab): https://avastar.guru/helpd/upload-rigged-mesh/ If that doesn't fix it, you may need to import the Collada into Blender/Maya and rig it to the SL skeleton... but tha'ts beyond the scope of a post. If you want more info on the whole process (basically creating rigged mesh from scratch), have a look through the avastar tutorials.

I'm using the Animesh RC as my default viewer, and I've noticed it gives me a warning about the bind pose rotation. I export rigged mesh with Avastar version 2.4.1, but I don't have access to the daily releases unless I buy a year of support. Does 2.4.1 deal with the issue, or is there something else we can do?

🤣 I wish I'd thought of that!