Using Archipelis Designer to customize an avatar

Does anyone know if Archipelis Designer can be used to customize an avatar? The product looks promising and if they aren't doing it, someone should write a product that does.

What do you mean by 'Customize an avatar'?

You can use it to create sculpt maps to create sculpted prims in Second Life, and then use those to create attachments...

But there is currently no program on the market to change avatar shape settings outside of Second Life, and no real need for one, since SL has a relatively good one built in.

Yes, it is fairly complete, but hard to use for new users. What's needed is a program that could take a photograph, or set of photos, and use them to render a life-like avatar.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to do.

You CAN take photos, and manipulate them to create a more-or-less photo-realistic avatar, but it takes a shit load of work and know how. The low quality of the SL avatar mesh doesn't help, either.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'Render A Lifelike Avatar'. If you're just trying to create a human in a 3d modeling program, and create a render, MakeHuman is a tool wonderful for creating very accurate, high quality generic models.
http://makehuman.org

If you're trying to get the SL avatar into a program, so that you can create attachments out of sculpty prims around it and whatnot, you can easily import the SL base avatar mesh into just about any currently available 3d modeler, as it's available in .obj format, the most commonly used 3d asset format.

For that, go to:
http://secondlife.com/community/avatar.php

"Life-like" is a relative term. You can go nuts trying to make an avatar look like a specific person in RL --- a virtual clone. Fortunately, most people really don't want to do that. For most people, I think "life-like" means pleasingly human-shaped. LL has provided some fairly good default shapes and skins in the library, and the Appearance sliders really aren't all that hard to figure out. You just start with a default shape and play with it. They even have nice little pictures to show you what each slider does.

Anyone can be a good amateur shape-shifter with those simple tools, just like anyone can be a good amateur builder with the edit tools. If you want to take "life-like" to another level that means not just "pleasingly human-shaped" but a "stand-up-and-make-people-notice" shape, that takes more skill and practice -- just as making really super buildings does. Still, SL's basic tool kit does the job.

Personally as an owner of "Archipelis Designer" I would say save your money it is a goodish program but definatley NOT worth the price. there are better free alternatives out there.

You need a very steady mouse hand to guide your cursor around the photo though it does have a part where you can edit points after this is still awkward as you move 1 point and a host of points follow to keep them even. why the creator didnt put in a point click instead I dont know so you could use it as a sort of PS Polygonal lasso type tool would have worked better.

Is that place still around that made skins from rl pictures?