Designing clothes

I used to design for TS2 and Im trying to find my way to be a designer at SL.
Can someone point me to links, sites, people, information that could answer my questions? Maybe to some former TS2ers? Any help would be appreciated.

I keep getting textures and other thing that are showing up as boxes and I cant figure out how to use the boxes other than wearing them, which looks dumb, and putting them on the floor. I can open a box of textures but it opens in a new window. How do I access it from the change appearance menu and such?

Anyway.. thats my main question among others. Again. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Alright, what you do...

-open the box of textures
-copy (drag and drop) all of the ones you want to use into some folder or other in your inventory (doesn't matter which).
-Open up the appearance menu. Create a new one of whatever article of clothing you want the texture to become (you may have to remove something to do this)
-click on the texture box and choose the texture from whatever folder you put it in
-play with the sliders until you're satisfied
-choose "save as" at the bottom


Other things in boxes will also have to be moved into a folder to be used.

The switch from TS2 to SL for clothing was very easy for me. The templates are different, but you use the same concepts you would for a TS2 skin, with one exception. An alpha is a seperate file in TS2 with greyscale information for transparency, and in SL it's its own channel in the clothing file, saved as a 32-bit .tga file. Also SL doesn't have the bump or normal map, but then most TS2 clothes didn't either when I stopped playing. As well there's only one arm that's repeated on the top template, so one-sleeved shirts are impossible.

Download Chip Midnight's templates here
Or the default templates (not as detailed) here

Check out the tutorials and things mentioned in this forum, they will probably help you adjust to the differences in TS2 and SL clothing design, and will explain a bit more about the alpha channel thing.

PS - I was "Alaska Smith" in the Sims community, had a site called "Goth Sims" and a TS2 site that was quickly abandoned (didn't like the blatent thievery on the Exchange) called the "Rock Shoppe".