Instructions and Templates

Could someone please tell me where I might get instructions on creating a skin. And if possible, make sure it's "Creating Skins for Dummies". I'm a lil slow. Also, could someone tell me where i could get templates for everything, including clothes and skins. Thanks so much!

See the link at the top of the page for downloads? Click it and then click where it says "Templates" to download the templates. Then click where it says "Help Guide" to download the instructions. When you've done that and you've got a working mastery of how to use the templates, I'd recommend upgrading to Chip Midnight's High Res Templates, which you can find right on this forum, almost always on the first page. Just look for the thread with the 5 gold stars next to it and the 11,000+ views. (If you use Chip's just remember to resize everything to 512x512 before you upload to SL, since those templates are double sized.)

As for instructions on creating a skin specifically, that's a pretty tall order. Making a convincing skin is a highly artistic, extremely involved process. It's not exactly something you can pick up from a tutorial "for dummies". It takes a solid mastery of color, texture, and shading techniques to acheive realism, some basic knowledge of artistic anatomy, a good sense of asthetics, a keen artistic eye, a working knowledge of Photoshop (or a comparable raster editor), and a real understanding of how 2D images wrap around 3D objects. In other words, it takes a lot of practice.

A good place to start is to take a look at the images in your \SecondLife\Characters\ directory on your hard drive. Those will help give you a sense of where the "musculature" is on the avatar.

Actually painting the skin though is something you're going to have to work at. In RL, it can take years to master the art of painting realistic looking human figures. In SL, it probably won't take you years, but it will take considerable time and effort. There's really now way around that.