Please Help Me This Issue Is Very Important

Okay I Am Trying To Make Skins In Secondlife And Ive Been To Youtube And Searched For Tutorials On This Subject Also.

I Did Go To Olivia's Second Life Website With The Tutorial On How To Make Skin But Thats Basic And Its Not Helping Me Cause Like It Does Not Show How The Eye Brows Are Made And The Lips Etc. And I'm Trying To Make Actors And Celebrities Skin Etc. So I Need A Tutorial Thats Straight To The Point Or Maybe Some One In This Forum Can Give Me The Best Step By Step Tutorial This Has Been On My Mind For Years And I Still Have Not Learned This And Its A Huge Market In Sl I Need To Get My Hands In This Skin Game. Please Help The Best You Can

Have you looked at Eloh's skin PSDs? Playing with them can give you a pretty good idea of how it works.

http://eloheliot.blogspot.com/2007/12/my-psds-let-me-show-u-them.html

Hi Imani,

Some advice: first off, the creation of anythign that goes onto the avatar mesh can be challenging. I would consider myself to be better than average at content creation, and I turn white as a sheet at the very idea. Doing skins is well beyond me - and most. This is why they often comand a premium price.

There is definirelty a lot of competition in this, too. You will have to invest a lot of *real* money to break into that market. You'll have to look at advertising costs, promotions, etc. before you even begin to make any substantial money in the field, I suspect.

You may wish to home your skills in photoshop and the like. Given at least a fair background in art, you should be able to work out the lips and such with a bit of work -- there isn't really a "eyebrows for dummies," out there. Not that I've seen at least.

Also, and as a personal aside, you may wish to look at your sentence structure and capitalization. It's a bit on the hard side to follow.

Mari

There are forums dedicated to content creation, and in this particular case you need to go to Texturing Tips. Lots of stickies and tutorials there and skin questions come up all the time there.

/109/1.html

Before you invest a lot of time and money in this idea, better look at what's already available in SL. There are several sources for celebrity shapes and skins. Take a look at Dark Dominions/Body Doubles for example. Their shapes come with notecards with specific identification of skins to put on them. The result is rather amazingly accurate. There are also photo-realistic celebrity skins available from several places (which I can't at the moment list).

As the product from Body Doubles shows, it is more essential to have a "look-alike" shape than skin. Fortunately, shapes are much easier to make match a picture of someone than are skins.

I strongly suggest getting Avpainter, it helps you see in 3d the uv template and you can draw and add textures a whole lot easier.
It great tool but still you need to have working knowledge of some type about drawing, how to use your art program of choice, i.e how to make basic fabric textures, how to make files right resolution size that you upload, how to do either png or alpha type textures.
Png is easier but you need to do web safe colors only or images colors change.
Lot of making clothings is lot about experimenting, practicing techniques and testing what works and what doesn't.
If you don't have lot of money and can't figure out gimp and can't afford AVpaint.
Download paint.net, use it, play, draw, experiment with tools with in the program.
Or if you have only tiny bit to spend and don't like paint.net look for Paintshoppro 7 you can often buy it for quite cheap I got mine for 20 usd from ebay.
Go look up Robin's in world uv suit, put them on study the lines and where each part of
the lines connect to body.
Find a texture alignment grid. If you don't have any contact me I will
give you some Dagmon and other friends gave me.
Put it on prim.
Practice putting in specific textures for that grid covered box
I am no pro but this is what I have done.
Make textures that you think would work with your grid covered box or body.
Upload try them out test and experiment, repeat until you get what you want.
Make fabrics of your own choice, put fabrics of your choice on its own layer over the free UV templates.
On another layer place things like buttons, etc.
Upload, test out your work in world some way either through beta, etc.
Repeat until you get it right.
Also if you have spare L$ or way to get it I suggest following
1) Buy Avpainter either inworld or at slexchange
2) Buy some templates of clothes or find free ones to study and experiment
with.
3) Experiment with 2 above with different layers, upload, observe, study
your work, test and experiment more until you produce what you want.

Other sites to check out for lots of reading material/tools -
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLTutSet.html
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLTutSet.html

I wanted to send you a pm but you have them turned off

you can also go to avatar island and have your face (or any face) put onto an avatar, you get the entire skin as texture files emailed to you (once you pay and submit the photos of your face)

these work great for someone who wants to be able to have a basis to start with for a skin, then build from there, or for someone who actually wants their own face on their avatar

if you have any questions give me a shout, I work for them and can assist with the process.

You're right about skinning being profitable. I've funded my computer and software collecting hobby by skinning. I've spent the better part of 4 years and a LOT of money on hardware and software, refining my 3D texturing skills. Much of that comes as overlap, being a professional illustrator in RL, so the money and time has gotten it's mileage. I may not be the fastest learner, but I stuck with it because it's fun and challenging. You're going to have to dedicate a LOT of time and some money to learning the processes, even if you are the worlds best artist.

Correct me if I'm wrong Imani, but I see a few red flags here!

Your avatar is roughly one year old. That doesn't compute with your "This Has Been On My Mind For Years" statement, unless you were thinking about it as an Alt, or way prior to joining SL.

You're posting in the wrong spot for this question. This tells me you haven't read much on avatar texturing. 'Texturing Tips' is where you want to be. There is enough reading on avatar texturing techniques there to keep you busy for the next 6 months, not to mention some nice tutorials.

You sound way too anxious, almost like you have a project deadline that requires you to learn skinning from scratch in less than a month. That is a recipe for disaster. Take your time to learn the details. There are millions of them.

There is no one-shot easy tutorial for skins that will teach you to master everything quickly, not that I can find anyway! I will second Ann's suggestion, though - I'm learning to make skins to package with my shapes for full avatars and I am finding Eloh's skin PSDs to be incredibly useful. One thing I've learned is that making skins is MUCH harder than it looks!

Creating avatar skins is one of the hardest content creation products you could have chosen.

Before I came to Second Life, I had spent some years developing skills making passable skin textures for Poser characters. And that experience didn't help me a lot when it came to trying Second Life avatar skin textures; the geometry of the SL avatar is much, much tougher to work with.

If you have not done anything comparable to making skin textures for 3D figures before now, you are many months from developing skills to create an SL skin worthy of scale. Many months at best.

Plus, you are coming in on the wrong side of the market bubble when it comes to skins. A lot of people who were part of the explosion in resident population at the end of 2006 / beginning of 2007 have finally developed some good skills at making skin textures, and prices have been dropped significantly.

Do it if you think you'll have fun doing it.

Don't do it as a quick-money plan. You'll be disappointed.

Skinning is hard, I didn't start off there.
And I probably won't being selling skins for long time because I am perfectionist.
I don't have tons of money for equipment but I do what I can. I have made a skin but it got long ways to go before its nice but it will never be as good as some of photo realistic skins.
There is lot of very knowledgeable, talented creators in Second Life and only small minority make any money at it.
Do it because you enjoy it or don't bother because you'll just stress yourself out if you're expecting whole lot from it.

WOW! with a capital letter on every word, the riddler in me keeps trying to decipher something out of that paragraph. LOL

OIATTMSISAIBTYASFTOTSA...

I'm not seeing any words here. *frowns*

Simple: Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.