how do you make 3d looking clothing?

i don't mean by using prims, but to make the clothing textures really pop more. does anyone know? thanks in advance.

I am not quite sure because at this point I just do textures but it has to do with shading, layers and effects most likely but who knows I might be wrong. I am curious myself.

You can use shading to trick the mind into seeing your 2D texture as a 3D one.

For a start:
On a separate layer, filled with mid-gray and set to, say, overlay:
- Highlight the top of the torso, and shade underneath it. That's the most obvious area to shade, but you can also shade the shoulderbones, the tummy, the collarbone... In fact, any volume that would translate into a shadow in real life can be suggested by shading your texture.
- Add wrinkles (there are tutorials about wrinkling in the forum -- basically, you paint dark lines for the shadows and pale lines for the highlights (top of the fold), and blur and distort until it looks good)

When you add details like buttons or stitches: play with the blending options (right-click on the layer) to give some more relief. For example:
- add a small bevel
- add a drop shadow
- inner glow can be useful too

Here you go

you need an image manipulation program like photoshop or paint or whatever, some white and black finely included as a base texture in yur base fabric say a really shrunk canvas texture added into your base fabric will help create that shimmer, try to get these micro textures ie weave really fine, repeating maybe every 8 pixels or so on a texture

also on way to get fabris really whooshy is to take dark parts to one end of the spectrum say blue and the highlights to another hue say red, the fabric will look different in in differnt levels of light

Very careful work in a graphics editor to match the seams and edit the details by adding shadows, highlights and such.

I have made ONE item of clothing and spent hours just getting the seam and overlap shading to look good and the seams to match up. Placing the buttons took more experiments.

I use the GIMP (www.gimp.org)

Wow Thank you Raindrop! Realizing I am using Alt for some reason, tp's FD in post:
FD waves at you and says "I miaa you, do you remember Landy where my history of layers button is? Can you peek in FD's blog can give some pointers on creating a pearl effect with rainbow shimmering type of faint tone for a dressing table? Can I put your post in blog to remind me?"

/me waves at FD
I have no clue on how to make a pearl. I'v never tried that.