making my own male skin/clothing templates?

Hello, I have been studying the available templates by Robin Wood and Chip Midnight and find them very useful once knowing how to use them. Thanks for those.

I am a fledgling 3D student and am curious if i can use any of my available 3D tools to do an import/export of my own shape, or standard male shapes and generate some custom templates that I can use. I have Modo, ZBrush , AC3D & the Daz3D set.

If there's any postings or tutorials that I failed to discover, links are much appreciated. I am a professional in 2D, and a beginner in 3D. Therefore I'd like to use Illustrator to draw and photoshop to create the shadows in the end, as that's my "edge" .

I did manage to find a AC3D & obj file of the avatar, but don't know if theres a way to import a new shape, or export to UV map, etc.

Thanks for any tips.

-Court

You'll find as many approaches to designing clothes for SL as there are designers, or so it seems at times. I use CS3 for virtually all of my designing, doing the detailed adjustments by putting trial versions on the mannequin in John Durant's free SL Previewer. That means my work is done really in 2D. A lot of people use AvPainter or, now, CS4's 3D tools to paint directly on an avatar body. I envy them greatly, but not enough to take the financial plunge for the software -- especially when I seem to be doing OK without it. Once some of those folks start responding, I think you'll get a lot of good advice about the limitations of 3D modelling as well as the joys. Until then, try searching this forum for keywords like "shape" to see what comes up. Here are a couple of interesting threads, for example ....

Hi Rolig, thanks (again). I keep forgetting Photoshop has 3D capabilities now...I have CS3 and havent justified upgrading yet since i have to upgrade the entire suite. I'm not sure how much i'll get into it, due to Modo and Zbrush having amazing painting capabilities and.psd file readability, but geez, its too hard to keep up now! haha. It seems lightwave is what was used to make the 2D templates, and is immensly popular in here alongside Maya as the "ultimate" solution, but I chose to learn on Modo for a few reasons outside of second life. Even then, it's such a Zen art that it took months just to get a grasp on the general 3D environments.

I have started to figure out the right 'paths' to take on a 2D template for my avatars shape (vector, not emotional), Im realizing how relatively simple it is to design women's clothing, but maybe because of that, continuing by working on my male avatar's shape is a better way to learn.

These links have given me some clues as to how to use my existing software to get a better impression of 3D before uploading 25 iterations. I think Modo is the best app I have to view (and export if i can figure it out), and the painting airbrush in modo is beautiful Thanks for the tips.


-Court