Some folks have asked, "how do you do all this graphics stuff?" Well, here's a short demonstration on how an image ends up on a tshirt. (as always, click to enlarge)
First, I'll select a model that needs texturing. Here is ASMyShirt, something I downloaded from «A HREF="http://www.awfulsoul.com/"»AwfulSoul«/A» this morning. This is what the shirt looks like, with the polygons that make up the object visible:
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo1.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo1.php','popup','width=569,height=521,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo1-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="137" border="0" /»«/a»
Now, as anyone who owns a globe and a map of the earth knows, taking the spherical coordinates of the globe map make a distorted 2D map, and the inverse is also true. This means I just can't paste an image onto the object, it will come out all funny and stretched out. What I do instead is load up the object into a program that produces a UV map, and that looks like this:
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo2.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo2.php','popup','width=350,height=350,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo2-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /»«/a»
This is a cyndrilical UV map of the shirt object. All the polygons are represented here, but flattened out in such a way as to allow me to color and texture without distortion. Each vertex, or where the lines cross each other, is congruent with it's point on the 3D surface.
So now I'll fill in the lines, and add an old graphic of mine I have sitting on the hard drive...and that gives us something like this:
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo4.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo4.php','popup','width=350,height=350,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo4-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /»«/a»
I then take the final graphic and drop it into the rendering software, in this case, Poser, which maps everything automatically for me, and I end up with this:
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo5.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo5.php','popup','width=340,height=532,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo5-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="234" border="0" /»«/a»
Of course, there are errors. Even a simple mesh as the shirt was complex enough to cause some distortion in the UV mapping. It's not a perfect solution, and I would have to tweak the UV mesh, or try a different projection, to even things out and get right of all the white.
What is usually done is that more complex models are broken down into parts, then each part can be textured individually, making for smaller textures and less mapping errors, but this increases memory use. It's a tradeoff.
This texturing process can be used for any object. The tattoos of the female model are added in a much similar fashion. Without the texture mapping, each individual bump and body feature would have to be added into the mesh itself, and as meshes increase in complexity, memory requirements for storing the object increase as well.
Here's another example for texturing, this is my head, UV mapped:
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myheadmap.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myheadmap.php','popup','width=512,height=512,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myheadmap-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /»«/a»
...which looks like this, when wrapped around the proper mesh.
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myself.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myself.php','popup','width=571,height=562,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myself-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="147" border="0" /»«/a»
Yeah, it looks dorky, I just haven't worked on it in a long time. You can appreciate nonetheless the trickiness of detailed texturing. Sticking a logo on a tshirt is simple compared to creating a human face, even when I already have pictures of myself to work with.
Anyway, that's how it's done on the amateur side.