Ideas for organizing variations

[mmm]

I make clothing images for Second Life. When I make a shirt (for example), I usually make several variations--men's, women's, v-neck, tank top, etc. If there's text or an image on the shirt, I usually have to change the position for the different style (lower for v-neck and tank top, higher for others) to compensate for the way SL renders.

Currently I have a handful of PDN files for the men/women/tanktop/etc styles, and use layers to mix shirt/collar colors and text/image/patterns.

This works okay, but some of the PDNs are 15MB in size (the layers are 1024x1024), and take a while to redraw when I Ctrl+Tab between open images. And, it's taking longer and longer to flatten the image when I finally save it out as a PNG, even though there are usually only 3-5 layers visible. My largest file has 80+ layers.

Is anyone else doing something like this? If so, what are some suggestions for better organizing it? E.g., should I just save each version in a separate PDN file, and have a "i-love-sl-mens.pdn", "i-love-sl-womens.pdn", "i-love-sl-tanktop.pdn" and so on?

Another thing I've considered is to just keep the flattened images around, and if I need to go through the work of recreating it, do it then, rather than keeping several huge, multi-layered PDN files that act as a repository of all of them. That would be a pain, if I ever need to do that, but it might be less pain than this increasing degradation of performance.

Thanks,

mmm

[mmm]

I make clothing images for Second Life. When I make a shirt (for example), I usually make several variations--men's, women's, v-neck, tank top, etc. If there's text or an image on the shirt, I usually have to change the position for the different style (lower for v-neck and tank top, higher for others) to compensate for the way SL renders.

Currently I have a handful of PDN files for the men/women/tanktop/etc styles, and use layers to mix shirt/collar colors and text/image/patterns.

This works okay, but some of the PDNs are 15MB in size (the layers are 1024x1024), and take a while to redraw when I Ctrl+Tab between open images. And, it's taking longer and longer to flatten the image when I finally save it out as a PNG, even though there are usually only 3-5 layers visible. My largest file has 80+ layers.

Is anyone else doing something like this? If so, what are some suggestions for better organizing it? E.g., should I just save each version in a separate PDN file, and have a "i-love-sl-mens.pdn", "i-love-sl-womens.pdn", "i-love-sl-tanktop.pdn" and so on?

Another thing I've considered is to just keep the flattened images around, and if I need to go through the work of recreating it, do it then, rather than keeping several huge, multi-layered PDN files that act as a repository of all of them. That would be a pain, if I ever need to do that, but it might be less pain than this increasing degradation of performance.

Thanks,

mmm

[mmm]

I make clothing images for Second Life. When I make a shirt (for example), I usually make several variations--men's, women's, v-neck, tank top, etc. If there's text or an image on the shirt, I usually have to change the position for the different style (lower for v-neck and tank top, higher for others) to compensate for the way SL renders.

Currently I have a handful of PDN files for the men/women/tanktop/etc styles, and use layers to mix shirt/collar colors and text/image/patterns.

This works okay, but some of the PDNs are 15MB in size (the layers are 1024x1024), and take a while to redraw when I Ctrl+Tab between open images. And, it's taking longer and longer to flatten the image when I finally save it out as a PNG, even though there are usually only 3-5 layers visible. My largest file has 80+ layers.

Is anyone else doing something like this? If so, what are some suggestions for better organizing it? E.g., should I just save each version in a separate PDN file, and have a "i-love-sl-mens.pdn", "i-love-sl-womens.pdn", "i-love-sl-tanktop.pdn" and so on?

Another thing I've considered is to just keep the flattened images around, and if I need to go through the work of recreating it, do it then, rather than keeping several huge, multi-layered PDN files that act as a repository of all of them. That would be a pain, if I ever need to do that, but it might be less pain than this increasing degradation of performance.

Thanks,

mmm

[mmm]

I make clothing images for Second Life. When I make a shirt (for example), I usually make several variations--men's, women's, v-neck, tank top, etc. If there's text or an image on the shirt, I usually have to change the position for the different style (lower for v-neck and tank top, higher for others) to compensate for the way SL renders.

Currently I have a handful of PDN files for the men/women/tanktop/etc styles, and use layers to mix shirt/collar colors and text/image/patterns.

This works okay, but some of the PDNs are 15MB in size (the layers are 1024x1024), and take a while to redraw when I Ctrl+Tab between open images. And, it's taking longer and longer to flatten the image when I finally save it out as a PNG, even though there are usually only 3-5 layers visible. My largest file has 80+ layers.

Is anyone else doing something like this? If so, what are some suggestions for better organizing it? E.g., should I just save each version in a separate PDN file, and have a "i-love-sl-mens.pdn", "i-love-sl-womens.pdn", "i-love-sl-tanktop.pdn" and so on?

Another thing I've considered is to just keep the flattened images around, and if I need to go through the work of recreating it, do it then, rather than keeping several huge, multi-layered PDN files that act as a repository of all of them. That would be a pain, if I ever need to do that, but it might be less pain than this increasing degradation of performance.

Thanks,

mmm