How do you bake your clothing textures to look 3D?

Baked avatar textures makes an avatar stand out more because of the accurate shading of the avatar that the baked textures hold. Also if it's baked, it seems more realistic in second life, in my opinion.

http://dominodesigns.info has an avatar.blend file available for download. It's a lot easier than messing with obj files

It has all the shape keys for the avatar ( http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartVIII/Shape_Keys ) so you can adjust the mesh to better match the outfit you want to bake.

You'll have a lot of learning to do though. If you are new to Blender I'd recommend starting with sculpties and getting used to texturing those before moving on to the avatar.

CanI see a coparison if any exhist? pictures to show with and without baked effect?

http://blog.loonsbury.com/?p=37 shows texture baking on spheres in SL.. The difference from normal textures should be clear without a before shot

Well yes but this is for static objects , on clothes you move adn the light source would change a lot so what the point of using it on clothes? there is no dynamic shadowing or ambient occlusion in SL apart for the rough selfshading of the avatar...

Obviously you'd use more subtle lighting than that for clothing, most likely a dome light setup to give even lighting. It really depends on your workflow what the point is. It's not just about the lighting, you could create separate unwraps of the avatar with even distribution of the faces to act like a sewing pattern for applying a fabric. Something like fishnet is going to be a lot easier to do this way than trying to match all the seams.

You could model the clothes over the avatar and bake from the clothing mesh to the avatar, you could even use a cloth simulation to give realistic folds and creases.

Even things like logo's on t-shirts can benefit as the bake process will minimize distortion.

It's not a magic button that will suddenly make everything awesome, it's just more tools that expand your creative options.

I have followed the PixelDolls tutorial, but for some reason when I render the image the bump and specularity have no effect on the output file, even though they show up correctly on the rendered image on the progress window and render display. I have tried many times, making sure I follow the tutorial exactly but still get the same problem, anyone got any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Some of us will simply have to rely on the kindness of strangers for these "baked" sorts of things or do without.