In my never-ending quest of looking for fashionable improvements (believe me, it can entertain me for ages
) I found out a cute thing about some fancy shoes: they have nice, realistic-sounding, heel-clicking sounds.
Sure, I know it’s a “novelty” item — it scares people off the first time you start nagging them with the clicking sounds, then they begin to make silly comments, so it’s also a great way to break some ice!
In any case, this was one of the many things that I imagined that it would be immensely popular, and that after a few months, every shoe I bought had heel sounds.
Alas, it didn’t happen. Only a few designers give that as an option! Why? I investigated…
Every girl who tried a flexiskirt once (how can you resist not buying them…?) knows about the problem: they look fantastic when standing up, but completely nasty when sitting down.
The image here shows what happens. Flexiskirts, unlike mesh-based skirts (also known as ugly Linden skirts) simply don’t follow your avatar’s skeleton, but gravity. There is nothing you can do about it: the skirt will always be “inside” the chair where you sit on.
Or is there a solution?…
I came by chance across this interesting item on SL Exchange: AvPainter - SL Clothes Design and Preview Tool by Pootle Trollop.
I don’t have Windows, so I haven’t tried it out, but the author claims it’s possible to upload a .tga file for your clothing and apply it visually to a polygon mesh representing your avatar (this mesh is freely available from Second Life’s website). This should be able to preview the way the clothes fit in a much better way; and for the cost of around US$10, it’s definitely not an expensive tool to have if you are seriously interested in doing perfect-fitting clothes and tired of doing it “the hard way”, that is, uploading to SL, spending L$10, watch if it works, tweak it, upload it again…
You can download a demo of AvPainter here.
Great work, Pootle ![]()




