Good enough for sale?

Hi. I've been playing around making a few things, mostly skins and a few articles of clothing, and I've come to the point where I'd like to do something besides model them for myself.

I guess my question is, how do you know when your work is good enough to try and sell? I don't suppose there's a checklist out there, or some independent reviewer, or anything? I realize there are a bajillion people in SL who are selling clothes/skins etc, but I'm having so much fun I'd love to share what I've made with people.

Is there a standard for skins in particular? IE, 'must have eyelashes', 'multiple shades of makeup available', etc? I've tried flying around and looking at other people's work, but it's awfully hard to tell from examples posted on vendor boards.

Any advice or tales from experienced texture/skin designers would be very appreciated!

The best thing I can recommend doing is going to SL Boutique or SL Exchange -- or preferably both -- and looking at products similar to what you've made. It's more efficient, the pictures tend to be higher quality, and there are text descriptions of each product (some, admittedly, more helpful than others). So you can see how your work measures up, and read about which features are usually included. It also gives you a good idea of what the price range for that kind of product tends to be.

Multiple makeup options do seem to be standard for skins, yes, as do drawn on genitals (for female skins). That said, I'm sure you'd get customers even with only one makeup option, and you'll certainly get them even without included naughty bits. Free demos (with "demo" written across the texture) are also standard, and with good reason, though if you've been flying around you probably already know that.

There's a number of blogs and similar sites which focus on things released in SL -- see Linden Lifestyles, Pixel Pinup or Fashionista page for example, aside from reviews and such they have sets of links to other, similar pages. Overall, can help you in getting an idea what people look at.

As far as 'standards' go, hard to say. Seems to mostly boil down to "nice selection of skin tones" and ''the wider selection of make ups, the better" so that people have higher chance to pick what they like... but it's not uncommon to see just single skins (one skin tone, one make up version) being sold out of whole such bundle, even by the most recognized creators. Beyond that, any decisions about style you use for your work and whatnot is probably up to what you like and what you think people might be after ^^;;

Thanks to both of you -- that was really helpful advice!

I hope to build up my skills to the point where I'm comfortable sharing my work with others soon.

(Though I must say, there don't seem to be many African-American skin sets out there!)

You've hit on one of my constant gripes about the skin industry. It's difficult to find anything beyond various shades of tan Caucasian.

If you're doing black skins -- or anything beyond "tanned white person" -- I recommend playing that up, because so few people do it. Particularly if you paid more attention to the skin tone than just cranking the lightness up or down, because few people seem to do that, either.

Part of the reason is black skins are a lot harder to make. I've tried, and while I can make a Caucasian skin that has the right colours I can't even get that on African or Aboriginal skins. But if you can do it, and do it well, you'll have a whole niche marjet to yourself almost (barring one or two existing skins)

I'm personally sticking to furry skins for now, and I practice making faces as I do so... doesn't matter if the results aren't great, because they will be covered up by prims anyway.

I've still got some tweaking to do, since the highlights and lowlights come out differently -- some areas that are shadows on Caucasian skin are actually highlights on black skin (hands and the soles of the feet, in particular). I'd like to work on my photography technique, too, to better figure out how the various shadows/light layers show up in game. But this is what I've got so far, more or less:

http://www.noderunner.net/~jolie/ebony-james.jpg


And of course the .jpg is all smudgy and such. Bah. I'm not on my home computer with the original files to make a nicer version for the web, atm, though.

Thanks for all of the advice!

Everything is good enough for sale, it just depends on who the buyer is.