Difference between outfits and skins ?

I guess the topic says it all; does one create body parts seperately from clothes, or are they both really the same thing?

Thanks

The question as stated doesn't quite make sense...

Skin and clothes are textures - the same process for making them applies in your favourite image editor, although skins use head, upper body and lower body templates, whilst most clothes use only one. Hair and eyes can also be created in your image manipulation software, at least the textures for them can.

Body parts past that, ears, nose, etc. must, at least as far as I know be created in world using the sliders (which, just to confuse things you can also use to *modify* textures for clothes, affecting their extent etc.). You can also make prim body parts - furries use this a lot for example.

I have a horrible feeling I've not answered your question - but that's because I'm not understanding it.

Clothes and skins are essentially the same thing. They're all comprised of textures that conform to the SL avatar's UVW mapping. The difference in the item types has to do with the order in which they're layered on your avatar. You could put skin textures on the jacket layer for instance but any clothing you wore wouldn't show up because it would be layered under your jacket.

In order to save on bandwidth your client takes the skin and clothing textures you're wearing and flattens them into three images in your client (one each for head, upper body, and lower body). Those flattened textures are then uploaded to SL's asset server and distributed to anyone whose draw distance you wander into.

My limited understanding, based on a lot of fooling around and mistakes ( ):

Outfits are collected, saved version of everything you "are", if it's copyable, at the moment. That means the clothes, the attachments, the shape, the skin, the eyes, the shoes, Etc. that you are wearing when you press the make outfit button. However, if some item you are wearing is NOT copyable, it will be left out of the Outfit folder you just created. In my case, I have a lot of outfits from my first week that while named things like "black pants and red shirt" or "cool green top and black jeans" actually consist of some underwear, my shape, my skin and my ciggy. No clothes, because they were not copyable. It took me over a week to figure this out, and I still have to go back and clean up the very repetitive mess I made!

Skins are the attractive wrapper for your avatar (your form), literally, the skin that you see. you can have many skins and when you put one, it wraps around your avatar (your form) and gives you the appearance of whatever the skin is painted to resemble. Marilyn Monroe, a tree, flame, a Goth or the girl next door. However, all of this is wrapped around the features of your shape, so if you don't have the Marilyn Monroe shape, you will only have the "look" of the '50's sex goddess superimposed on you own miserable, less goddess-like shape,

The form is the physical shape of your avatar body. It’s your basic, underlying features. I've found that unless the skin is pretty extreme, I always look like a beautiful Italian or Mediterranean girl from the country. Which is fine with me!

Good Luck!

~Jenni~

Hi Elias, and welcome to Second Life!

If you're asking if you use the same Templates to create both skins and clothing, the answer is "Yes."

If you are asking if skins come with clothing, or if the clothing is worn separately, the answer is, "They are usually separate, although someone could make a skin with built-in clothing if they wanted to." (I don't know of any, though.)

Clothing in SL is really just painted on. The sliders for loosness, etc. simply deform the underlying polygons, to make the clothing appear loose.

Skins you purchase are also painted, but are normally paintings of a nude body, with various degrees of anatomical accuracty, based on the skinner's goal for that skin.

But, if what you are wondering is, "Can I make loose, puffy, semi-transparent sleeves, so you can see my slender little arms under them," the answer is "not without prims." I mean, you can make the semi-transparent sleeves, and you'll see your skin color under them; but when you puff them out, your arms will puff out, too, since it's just poly displacement.

To check this, look under the cuffs of your jeans when you aren't wearning socks. You'll see your skin there, as your ankle polys distort to form the bottom of the jeans.

So, in world, most clothing of that nature is made using primitive objects, or Prims, which are the building blocks that we have used to construct all the things you see in Second Life (except the terrain itself, and the Linden Trees.)

Hope this has something to do with what you were asking!

edited to fix spelling error.

Thaks to everyone who replied to my question, which I now see was a little vague

I was asking more on a technical level, i.e. does the SL system "know" the difference between, say, a shirt and a torso. From the responses I got, it seems the answer is "no"; they are all just textures put on an avatar.

Thanks again!

Not exactly; both shirt and skin use textures with identical UV map, but each of them comes with set of attributes which are item-specific. E.g. where the skin might define base skin tone under the texture and things like the makeup you have applied, the shirt will have parameters defining length of sleeves and how loose they are, etc.

Even more technically, clothing is seen by system as items of type INVENTORY_CLOTHING, while skin, eyes and such are seen as INVENTORY_BODYPART item class.

Hi Elias!

Both shirt and torso use the same texture maps; but no texture is either one until you "make" it into either a shirt or torso tattoo in Appearances.

Once you've done that, as Joannah pointed out, the program does, in fact, know the difference between them.

By the same token, you can use any texture you like as either shirt or torso tattoo. This includes snapshots, terrain textures, or anything else you have or upload!

The only real difference is that you can make portions of the shirt, jacket, or any other clothing invisible by using transparent textures; but you can't do that with the avatar. Transparency in the skin/tattoo textures reveals the Default Base Skin (the one that's controlled with the sliders), not .. nothing. <g>