Previewing Skins in Max

I'm trying to design my own skin right now, and have been using 3D Max to preview the skin as I create it. I was wondering if anyone else does it this way, and if you could tell me how you set up your lighting so that it matches the SL viewer. Thanks.

I have a couple of snapshots from SL that use as the render background.

As for lighting, as near as I can tell, SL uses a simple multiplier. To replicate this in 3DS Max, I use Self Illumination > Fall Off > Shadow/Light. One set to pure white and the other set to 50% grey.

I'm sure how accurate it is, replicating SL lighting, but it's good enough for me.

That worked perfectly. Thanks.

I just make the texture 100% self-illuminated and really make no attempt to replicate SL's lighting inside Max. That is unless I'm using render to texture to bake specularity and shadow into a texture. In that case I just light as I would any scene, but use a bit of self-illumination in the texture to make the lighting a bit more subtle than it would otherwise be knowing that SL will be adding additional lighting on top of those effects.

Is there a tutorial about using Max to do skins somewhere? I have Max and that would be great to see what advantages Max has in doing a skin.

Out of the box, Max has a few good things to offer for skin makers. The most useful of which would be the ability to create your own UV mapping which can then be baked out to SL's UV mapping. You could, for instance, map a texture cyllidrically around an arm or leg, or around the torso, to get a cleaner texture pattern in that area, then bake it out to SL's mapping and blend it into your texture. Baking in lighting effects can also be quite useful.

With the addition of the Cebas plugin Ghostpainter, you can turn max into a full fledged 3d paint app. I posted a link to a demo movie on Ghostpainter a week or two ago in a thread about 3d paint. It shouldn't be too far back from the front page.