Just me or a conspiracy of Silence

For days now I've been googling for a decent,comprehensive guide to making good quality skins,literally thousands of pages I've visited...anyone can make one in world using the sliders and new skin ...but I'd like to learn how to make good quality skins,I'v even gone the extra yard and advertised in world for someone to assist me.
I have all the templates,even have the crappy full perm skins,which really are just rubbish..I have TGA files which just turned out to be as crappy as the full perm skins and fairly useless without the PSD files.
One person on slxchange is offering a skin in a box business that supposedlywill help you create skins,but details reveal the BIAB for pretty much rubbish and at 47k is just not worth the price.
Even Maddyy Shnook,who has a guide for damned near everything does not offer a tutorial on skinning.
Question...is there a conspiracy of silence on making good quality skins?
Is there a skin mafia who will come along and...'rough you up'...if you offer any help?
If I ever succeed will my store be burnt down or my family kidnapped?
I just want to learn but the semmingl conspiracy of silence is making it extremely difficult.

There is, and they did..I still havent gotten my kids back.

I think it is more of a " too hard to teach" kind of thing

I have actually gotten a set of skins tga files and still confuses me

I can make clothing yep no problem, but skins toooo much details for my mind to want to try to work around, especially when there are already many great skin designers out there

"Question...is there a conspiracy of silence on making good quality skins?
Is there a skin mafia who will come along and...'rough you up'...if you offer any help?" nope, all it takes is a good photo editor and a lot of work. I know how it's done, and have made a few Poser skins; Poser4/5 skinning tutorials will work fine for SL figures. But even knowing how and having the right tools you're still looking at 30-40 hours of work. At $10 usd an hour that's $400 usd of time invested in making a skin.
Also note it takes good photos from the proper angles just to start. Not something that is easy to find.

Making good skins really is a very long, complicated and tedious process. It's no wonder that no one has had the courage to attempt a full blown users guide on the process.

I'm not sure if this will help, but I remember way back when, in my days of making objects for the original "The Sims", a couple of people had some fairly good tutorials for making skins.

You might try googling for "The Sims" + skinning. It may at least give you a few tips that you could use.

(Don't laugh, The Sims had some very good skinning artists at the time, and they were limited to only 256 colors. It's not easy making anything look acceptable with 256 colors - let alone skins. )

Basically, there is no conspiracy, it's just that there's nothing really to tell you. Making skins takes two things: talent and hard work. That's it. There are no tricks, no hints and tips, beyond those two things; put in the work and have the talent. You can't really teach talent.

You hit the nail on the head there. Beyond that, making skins is no different than making clothes. It just has a higher degree of difficulty because we're intuitively a lot more critical when looking at a representation of human anatomy than when looking at an inanimate piece of fabric. The best way to learn is to do it, and keep doing it until you've improved enough to have something you want to show off to others. For people with no previous experience that process might take months or even years. A lot of people want someone else to do the heavy lifting for them but there's simply no shortcut. Also, when people ask specific questions about problems they're having or photoshop techniques or problems wrangling the templates there are many people here happy to help. But a question as general as "show me how to make a skin" is simply too broad a question to answer without writing an illustrated novel. It would also be very difficult for any skin maker to do without giving away their secret sauce which probably took them months or years to develop themselves.

Search the web for tutorials on painting human skin, creating skins for games, and related topics, then apply what you learn to the SL templates. Then practice.

"Basically, there is no conspiracy, it's just that there's nothing really to tell you. Making skins takes two things: talent and hard work. That's it. There are no tricks, no hints and tips, beyond those two things; put in the work and have the talent. You can't really teach talent." Amen. It's a lot of copy, past, fit, blend, repeat a lot. For photo real.

I can crank out low detail; no hair, by the cart load, but then so can a lot of people.

Here is what you do,

Go looking on Websites for the Animation Program Poser by Curious labs. Sites like Daz3D or renderosity for a Start, and Check out the tutorials sections for Creating Texture Maps for the Program. The Principles are the same, all you need after that are the texture UV maps for the SL Characters. You can be taught Some techniques, but in the end it does come down to your own talent.

Good Luck.

Angel.

Thanks to all for the advice,looks like I have some work ahead of me but who know's,if I'm real lucky maybe I'll get rid of the kids....they don't look like they're ready to get out of my house voluntarily.

Hey Ant have you also checked out the Texture forum?
There is lot of information there too not everything I can do yet or even understand but there is lot there. There is a lot information related to skins, templates, textures,etc in the texture forums under content creation here..
I am able to draw things but I haven't yet been able to translate how to stretch out images on templates myself.
I started wanting to make things orginally from being apart of the sims community.
I was more of wall paper, floor and painting maker with some objects when I created stuff for the sims community.
I always thought skins were bit intimidating because for The Sims you needed to deal with very complecated file names.