Need help please

I would like to start making my own clothes and i need some help on this, what do i did to make outfits, ie what program i need. Thank you in advance.

Go to the downloads section of this site, and grab the texture pack. Read the PDF instructions that come with it. If there's anything you don't understand, ask.

Be aware that if you're brand new to graphics, this isn't something you're going to learn overnight. It will take time to learn a digital art program like Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, or GIMP, and then it will take more time after that to learn how to make anything specific like SL clothing. If you're willing to put in the necessary time and effort, awesome. If you're expecting it to be quick and easy though, that's not realistic. There is no shortcut.

Natalia Zelmanov provides some nice tutorials here:
http://slnatalia.blogspot.com/2006/11/build.html

Watch for the GIMP tutorials she provides (Creating Clothes with GIMP) if you can't afford the money for a Photoshop license. Here tutorials are easy to follow and always worth the time to spend. And don't forget to pickup the freebies in here shop - great helpers and time-savers - freebies worth to collect.

Personally I'm using GIMP for my textures, WINGS 3D and GIMP 2 for 3-D works like sculptured prims, Avimator and QAvimator as well as DAZ Studio 1.7 (a free version is available til August 31, 2007 at http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/software/studio/-/download? ) for animations.

Anything mentioned here comes for free. Sure, there are much better and much more productive tools, especially for 3D work and the more advanced things like hair (I never found a technique for making first class hair with GIMP ). However, I'm not sure you really can profit from these expensive toys if you are not a professional.

Oh, and depending on your work you will probably an UVMapper too. There is a free one with a template for SecondLife sculpties. Google around to find these things. I'm not sure but I think it's mentioned in Natalia's tutorial for sculptes prims.

I would suggest to start with GIMP, learn the basics and then take Natalia's Clothing tutorials before going over to tougher things like sculpties (she has a good tutorial for this, too). Don't forget to download DAZ Studio before you have to pay for it. Animations, at least simple ones, are also relatively easy to do.

I have some other free tools I'm using from time to time, but they are not essential, so I don't mention them.

As I always have, I don't suggest you learn to use Gimp, period. I suggest you go download the free trail of Paint sho pro and learn on it. This way you can learn and discover without having to fight the interface.

Then if you like making clothes, you can spend the money to get a quality product.

I love how many will equate GIMP with low quality (in this case by implication). Everyone knows Adobe Photoshop is the "industry standard". It's also the most expensive imaging software package out there. It's the industry standard because it's been around for so long......it's perhaps the first imaging software put on the market. But quality is in the eyes of the beholder........it's what you learned to use and are comfortable with. Like Microsoft Windows. It is the "industry standard" for businesses too. And Linux is not widely used in businesses. Is Windows a more quality product than Linux? It's certainly more widely used than Linux.......therefore better known. Will Windows outperform Linux? For me it definitely does (I've had Linux Mandrake) but for many it does not. I learned Windows and am comfortable with it.........I tried learning Linux and never got comfortable with it. But you would never catch me implying that Lunux is somehow lower quality than Windows.

For people who have learned on GIMP and "fought the interface". I can do anything I want with GIMP. I may have to struggle a little and maybe go to my beloved "Gorking the GIMP" online book........but it does everything I want it to do. I got GIMP for one reason........it's free and it's powerful. Is it easy to use? Not at first.......but it's not hard now. Some people cannot afford the 600 to 800 USD price tag for "quality".........especially when that "quality" is only in the eyes of the person who knows how to use it.

Spend any amount of money you want.........but there is a free product that will serve you quite well if you take the time to "fight the interface".

It's a YMMV situation, and PSP is a lot easier to learn. That's all. If free is her most important consideration, then by all means, get GIMP. But if she has the means and wants to go faster, why shouldn't she try PaintShop Pro, which doesn't cost that much money?

It's not so much the important consideration of being free or cheap to top of the line expensive.......it's about someone wanting to try their hand at making textures for SL (clothes, building or whatever) and is obviously not experienced in imagining software. Everyone wants to point them to "the industry standard". That's a big expense for someone just expressing a desire to explore the possibility. PSP may be quite a bit less in expense.........but still it's a hundred bucks in real money. GIMP is NOT that hard to learn. It is not PS or PSP with a hard copy of instructions to follow along with which makes it sort of intimindating when you first open the program. But that's about the extent of the difficulties. The interface that everyone disses is not really so non intuitive. A brush icon means a paint brush.........like any other software for imaging. The lasso tools look just like the tools in any other imagining program. It's merely the documentation (manual) that makes it hard..........it's file you download and it's not like one you can spread open on your desk as you work along. The manual is also written by geeks............that sure does not help us non geeks. But there is online help if you search Google........."Gorking the GIMP" is one such book available for free.

And not to add that I'm not sure GIMP is as powerful as Photoshop (though I've been told it is) I do know it is more powerful than PSP. My problem is that everyone (well not everyone, but quit a few) always want people to either go top of the line (PS) or second tier (PSP) right off the bat for novices. There is a program that will do whatever you need to do in SL..........it's free. So what? Why spend money if you don't need to? And what if the person exploring the possibilities decides it's not what they thought it was? Wasted money.

I just hate to see people put down a program they have little or no experience with. Just rumors that it's "a steep learning curve". Evidently PS is not so easy to learn either.......so many questions about alpha channels and ghosting. I've never had that problem with GIMP.

Peggy, while I obviously can't speak for Thunderclap, my interpretation was not that he was trying to imply that GIMP was a low quality program. It does, however, have an extremely low quality interface, and I don't think anyone would dispute that.

It's also non-standard, which whether its users would care to admit it or not, is a really big deal. As I often say when this subject comes up, if you know one commercial graphics program, chances are good that you can learn another very quickly. For example, knowing Photoshop as well as I do, I was able to learn InDesign in a single afternoon when I found myself on a project that required it (InDesign has since become one of my favorite programs, btw; I use it all the time now). I learned PSP well enough to where I was comfortable writing tutorials for it in about half an hour. Illustrator took me a couple of days to get good with after learning Photoshop first. When you've got a handle on the underlying logic behind these things, it's pretty easy to apply the same logic to all.

That's not the case at all with GIMP though. I'd like to think I'm a bit more versed on this stuff than the average Joe, but I struggle pretty terribly with GIMP every time I try to use it. Most GIMP users say the same thing about Photoshop, which leads me to believe they'd also have trouble with every other piece of commercial graphics software.

And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure no one ever got any closer to landing a job in the industry because they put GIMP on a resume. Photoshop, yes. PSP, tentative maybe. GIMP, almost definitely not.


You get what you pay for with Adobe, both in terms of product quality and support. I remember a few years ago I was having some trouble with Acrobat. I was on the phone with Adobe tech support when I had to jump into a meeting. The guy said "What time is your meeting over? I'll call you back." Guess what? He actually did. He even sent me a follow up E-mail a few days later to make sure everything was still ok since resolving my problem. I've been a die hard Adobe fan ever since.

So, while Adobe software does costs a good amount of money, can it truthfully be called "expensive"? Personally, I think it more than pays for itself, which makes it about as inexpensive as it could possibly be. That return phone call alone that day probably saved me several thousand dollars in business.


Actually, it's the other way around. It's been around so long because it was good enough to be adopted as the industry standard. If people hadn't benefited from using it in a huge way, it would have disappeared long ago.


No, it wasn't. Many have come and gone both before and after Photoshop's inception. Even if it were first though (which it wasn't), how would that automatically make it what people choose to use? MS Paint's been around just as long, but you don't see too many people actively deciding on that as their tool of choice.

What made Photoshop compelling and lasting is its interface. It's got a logic behind it that is easy for the artist to adopt (even if it's not immediately obvious in the very beginning). For whatever reason, Adobe hit on something powerful when they came up with Photoshop's design as a tool. Once its logic is in you, it's in you to stay.


Sure. There can be no argument against that principle.

However, to make the principle applicable, you have to be talking about a level playing field. If someone learns to master both GIMP and Photoshop, and then says, "You know what, I like GIMP better," then that would be something. I've never personally met anyone who's done that and made that decision though. In my experience, every person I've ever heard insist "GIMP can do everything Photoshop can do" has just never learned what Photoshop can really do. In truth, GIMP can do maybe 3/4 of what Photoshop can do, and GIMP users who have never had any reason to know any different just think that that's all there is. It's not.


I think it depends on whatever definition of "quality" is relevant to the conversation. There are a great many things it could mean. In some ways, the "quality" of Windows is abysmal. In other ways, it's fantastic. It's all about the context, as you know.

With that in mind, when someone says a statement like "pay for a quality product", it's a good idea to think about from what perspective and in what aspect they might mean it. With GIMP in particular, if it's regarding things like the interface, the ease of learning for most users, or the potential future application of that learning to multiple programs, then it's easy to see how someone might want to refer to it as "lower quality" than Photoshop or PSP.


You're absolutely right that not everyone will be, or even should be, willing or able to shell out the amount of money that Photoshop costs. If someone's serious about working in the graphics industry, or if they just want the best program they can get, then Photoshop absolutely is the right choice for them. But if someone's just a casual hobbyist, then I'd agree with you that it is a bit hard to justify the cost.

I have to wonder though, why all this attention to Photoshop's price tag when the person you quoted when you started this was talking about Paintshop Pro? PSP is dirt cheap at only a hundred bucks. Surely anyone who can afford a computer capable of running SL, and a broadband connection to go with it, can afford a $100 piece of software.

GIMP is slightly more powerful than PSP, but PSP does adhere to a lot more standards than GIMP does. In my mind, that makes PSP a better choice. For the casual user who might one day decide to get more serious, the transition from PSP to Photoshop and other graphics programs will be relatively painless. The transition from GIMP to any of the more standard applications though will be much harder.


Since time is money, I think "fighting the interface" actually makes GIMP the most expensive program of them all. As I alluded to several times throughout this post, if you start with GIMP, you'll have to do that "fighting" not just on the way in, but also on the way out, as GIMP can't really prepare you for the way more standardized programs tend to operate the way Photoshop or PSP would.

Just my opinion though; you're more than welcome to disagree.

Thank you, Chosen. You summed up what I have been trying to get at.

Its sad that someone had to actually make a interface plugin to emulate PS. And One more thing, with the advent of CS3, I believe the precentage is now 1/2 due the addition of 3d painting and obj reading.

NP, Thunderclap. Glad to hear I was reading you right.

Yeah, the new stuff in CS3 is really cool. Beside the obvious, 3D texture painting, I think my favorite new features are all the things you can now do with Vanishing Point. The ability to accurately measure objects in photographs in 3 dimensions is sooooo helpful for building replicas in SL.