The original poster mentioned something like spending a day to learn Photoshop. Well, maybe it's easy to get Photoshop and install it in a few minutes but learning how to use it and learning how to use it for SL content will take several days, if not weeks or months for good quality skins.
Having said all that, it shouldn't be so hard to create skins or clothes. The avatars in SL look very bad and compared to what other similar 3D simulation software is out there, people expect to be able to create something better with the minimum of effort, and I think it's a reasonable expectation.
I don't question the skill of professional designers who produce quality items, but avatars should be easier to make better looking than what they are now. Not to mention that you shouldn't need a $500+ application that can do specialized 3D editing to put a text logo on a t-shirt without looking as bad as it does now - unless there's an easy and simple way to do this and I've missed it... Is there?
Now back to reading FAQs
Having said all that, it shouldn't be so hard to create skins or clothes. The avatars in SL look very bad and compared to what other similar 3D simulation software is out there, people expect to be able to create something better with the minimum of effort, and I think it's a reasonable expectation.
I don't question the skill of professional designers who produce quality items, but avatars should be easier to make better looking than what they are now. Not to mention that you shouldn't need a $500+ application that can do specialized 3D editing to put a text logo on a t-shirt without looking as bad as it does now - unless there's an easy and simple way to do this and I've missed it... Is there?
Now back to reading FAQs
Daz, if someone's really good in painting, AVPainter is free to use and I'm pretty sure that it's possible to make a good looking t-shirt pretty easily.
About Photoshop: learning to use it in one day is impossible. I mean you can probably learn the basics, but you'll find out about new things even after months! It's like any other professional tool for any other job. Making skins is the same, some people here proved that you can earn some money with it, so I think there's nothing wrong if it's that hard to make a good skin. By the way, it's not that hard to make a decent looking skin though, I'm sure that it's possible to do one that would sell nicely for 50-100L$ - in about a weekend. Of course, you'll need some experience with Photoshop to do that too.
That particular skin would not be able to compete with the top skins out there, but it would still be a lot better than the newbie skin you get at the start.
(Aelin 184,194,22)