Blender for clothing?

I do loads of flat textureing work, mostly for fun I don't box or sell most of what i make normally handing it out to my friends and stuff, but I was speaking with someone that indicated that you can use blender to help make clothing and skin textures seamless.

Now, having never used any 3d rendering app in my life.. i boldly downloaded blender and sat in front of my PC with my jaw resting on my KB drooling slightly and clueless as to where to even start.

I kinda looked around for anything other then using it to make sculpies, while that may be a future project LOL if i figure it out.. i have yet to see any refrences of using it to making clothing or skins.

Is this possable or am I barking up the wrong tree?

If it is does anyone have a direction you can point me in to get started in the right direction?

Well if you are just downloading Blender and looking at it for the first time it's going to be a bit daunting. Working with any 3d app is not something you are gonna just "get" suddenly. You are going to have to put in a bit of personal work and research to get where you wanna go. That said, its a great time to learn 3d. There's lots of resources on the web, and Blender, being an open source platform, has a pretty large user base creating tutorials and helping on forums. Blender.org has a bunch of tutorials for starters. I would suggest going there and working through them. The key ones would be on the interface, modeling, UVs, and rendering.

Your friend is probably talking about a UV channel trick like the one illustrated here: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061019/kojesta_01.shtml That one uses Max terminology, but the overall process is the same no matter what application you are using. One channel has the UV layout you use with the model (in this case the standard, and might I say... crappy, SL avatar UVs), the second channel is a map with the seams stitched together so you can paint across the boundary.

Much of the information on texturing sculpties also applies to doing clothing & skins:

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You can get a blender file with the avatar mesh, complete with shape keys for doing flared cuffs etc from http://dominodesigns.info

There's a lot of different techniques you can use for texturing in Blender: procedural materials, additional UV layers with alternate unwraps, painting directly on the mesh, using painted layers to mix procedurals or multiple images and so on.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Materials

That's a work in progress but has a lot of useful info.

http://www.blender-materials.org/ has a lot of materials of various types. You can use these to learn from, or just bake them to your texture.

http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/ has a toolbar with a lot of great sites for Blender stuff including tutorials and other resources.

Thank you both very much!

It gives me a place to start and new things to play with and learn!

Jini