Creating Nail Polish for AV's

Hi All...Please someone help me. I am wanting to know step by step how to create nail polish for AVs.

I cant seem to find any tutorials on the internet and a nail artist I know that sells in SL will not help me nor give me any advice.

Please any info would be appreciated!!!

Im not a clothing maker - and Really don't want to do that sort of thing... BUT- If you use this template by Chip Midnight (One of the best of the best) You can see the lay out for it- work with it in photoshop or one of them other fancy programs.. (you will do fine with time)

http://goodies.onrez.com/shop/chipmidnight/CMFF-Master_Template-Upper.jpg

Hope this helps.. There are things on the forums.. just need to search a bit to find them I wish you luck..

Chip's templates are great. Everyone should have a copy.

A couple things to keep in mind with nails are:

The resolution between hands and feet are different (the foot has slightly more pixels in the nail area), so designing a consistent look between hands and feet can sometimes be a challenging compromise.

The foot is quite distorted as a flat texture, and there is no single place that one MUST put toes or nails since the foot is essentialy a flipper. Following someone elses guide helps, but it is not neccesary. It may even be desireable to define a unique placement. It will add character to the feet. The hands, in contrast, are quite well defined on the UV, and proper placement IS essential.

Hers what i do.......Depends on what your using,but when doing skins in photoshop CS2 i chose the fingernail layer.right click choose blending options........then colour overlay.then double click on the colour overlay icon.......this brings up the colour pallette/ chart......choose the colour you want the fingernails to have.

I presume this is what you meant........hope so *smiles

Most of the replies so far assume that the nail polish is created as a part of the skin.

You can also make nail polish on the glove clothing layer. This enables you to sell "just the nails", rather than a whole skin with a different manicure.

You can make the polish cover the whole nail, or you can create just a "sheen"...a bit of reflection that can be added to any existing avatar nails.

The other option for fingernails is prim nails. I love the look of these, because the edges are so much more defined than nails painted on the coarse avatar mesh. However, they tend to come unstuck from the fingers when the avatar is subjected to any pose than closes the hand...which includes a great many AO stand poses. They also go away if anything else is attached to the hand. Pick up a drink, or put on a ring, and your lovely prim manicure vanishes.

This is a very popular way to sell nails. The creation process is nearly identical unless we are talking about complex layering effects (other than transparency) that show or change the underlying color of the skin (possible in Photoshop, but not in SL). Still, if there are two creators involved (one for the skin and one for the nails) alignment issues are going to come up unless both parties are drawing off of the same template. Multiply this across all of SL, with all the different content creators, and alignment is nearly always an issue. It is most noticeable on the feet, and I have also seen very distinct differences in the way fingernails are treated from skin to skin as well. It helps if the nails are opaque textures. That will mask any obvious misalignments under the nail texture.

A great effect if one can match the underlying nail texture exactly (since natural fingernails also give off a bit of reflective sheen too).

This is a shame, otherwise prim nails would be THE logical choice to follow with the attributes of shaping and texturing sculpties, transparency, glow, etc..

Yes...I am talking about making gloves/nailpolish to sell to people. They would be as gloves so I guess I need to know how to make some gloves.

Thanks again all for your responces...the more I get the more I can learn!

Get an upper body template, such as Chip Midnight's. Make a copy of it (always keep an untouched master copy!), and open in your favourite graphics package.

You'll see that it has a shirt section, and two long arms and hands. Chip has kindly labelled the front and back of the arm. You can ignore everything but the hands - zoom in so you can see them clearly.

Make a new layer. Paint the fingernails on that layer.

Turn all the other layers off (so they're invisible/transparent). Reduce your image to 512 by 512. Save as a png or tga with transparency.

Use any of the 'test SL clothing without spending Lindens' tricks in the sticky thread in this forum.

If you use the beta grid method, you'll probably need to make the texture into a glove. Either way, at some point you'll need to. So go into appearance mode, choose 'glove', take off any glove you're currently wearing. You'll get a 'make new glove' option. Do it. You'll see two boxes to the left of the sliders. Choose the top one (Texture). Pick the texture you uploaded. Tadaaa! You now have a fingernails glove. Fiddle with the sliders if you want to.

Look at your pretty new glove. Swear because it didn't come out quite right. Go back to step one. Well, step two, you've already downloaded the template.

You may find it useful to test a version that does have the UV maps, or some other part of the template. Seeing how they fit around an avatar really does help you to get your placement right.