All I can say is 'what?'

First thing I wanted to do on this was make me a nice uniform for my avatar.
30 minutes later, I finally find out how to import textures (which costs money).

I find a shirt template on the site, then my head explodes.

Very unergonomic, and hit and miss, If I screw up a shirt texture, e.g. back and front parts are misaligned, I have to waste more money to upload another, that's no good!
Now my uniform jacket looks like a womans cut off top, except it's doubled. The template was piss poor

Surely theres a way to view your texture ON YOUR PLAYER before purchasing, if not, then well.....not very good.

Can someone guide me in a right, and preferably CLEAR direction.

And yes I have looked at the stickies so don't reply with that

In the texture preview, you SHOULD be able to preview it as a top, bottom or hair. If you use that, you can get an idea on what it'll look like.

Hello Simon!

I dont know why but many people in SL dont know that you can veiw your texture on many things before you upload it. I am not at my house and I'm on my cousins laptop so I can't provide snapshots but I will try to explain. When you goto image upload, it should bring up a menu of what you want to name the texture and it should show the image and "Preveiw image as: image" where it says Image it should be a box that you can click on and it should bring up some more options like veiw as "Hair, Female Top, Skirt, etc." anyways click on which everone in this case choose one of the "Tops" and within that you can see the texture with the sl female/male model. Now hold down alt and click an area of the 3d model and move your mouse you can zoom in and out now while holding alt press ctrl as well then move and you can rotate it now if you press ctrl-alt-shift and move the mouse after clicking a nd dragging you will pan the 3d model This should help you work on seams. Also are you using the regular sl templates if you are, i recomend chip midnights free templates they are very helpfull!

It is possible to preview your creations in 3rd party programs, as long as they allow import of Wavefront .obj files.

Milkshape is one of such programs, and it's free. Once you have this program, you can import Linden's avatar files into it, and apply your texture on either head, torso or leg section to preview what it'll look like in SL.

Note the shape will not be 100% accurate with your avatar, as the mesh is being deformed slightly depending on the clothes settings. It should be enough to verify part alignment and such, though. For absolute accuracy you'd need to use tools which allow to read the SL geometry, and dump it into .obj format... but that's another topic and discussed at length elsewhere due to possible abuse coming with this.

Heh yeah, I figured out the viewing before uploading thing, thank god for that

You can preview on your ingame avatar, by replaceing a few files and then going to "appearance". Detailed instructions are somewhere on these forums. Because's I'm insane enough to put tattoos over UV seams a quick and free preview is essential to me.