Custom body shapes - how to make them?

Hey all, curious as I'd like to get into this (not sure if I should have posted this in the building section though) - how do people create the custom avatars? Is there some external program you need to use? If anyone knows of a page that describes it, I'd appreciate the link. I'm thinking you have to use some kind of 3D modeling program and upload it to SL? (shrug) Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Remember on Orientation Island, the first thing it had you do was alter your avatar shape? (unless it's changed since I was new) Well, that's how. It's all just manipulating the appearance sliders.

If you're talking about attachments though, that's done with the building tool. For example, if you want to look like a robot, you might want to attach blocky, metallic looking objects to your body. Those objects would be built inworld, the same way as a house or a car or anything else gets built, and then simply attached to the avatar.

The only part of the process that's done in a 3rd party application is the texturing. For that, most people use Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or GIMP. I recommend Photoshop if you can afford it, but any of the three will work just fine (well, not PSP if you're on a Mac).

Custom shapes are created using the built in appearance sliders. No external programs are needed.

To make a new shape, right click a folder in your inventory and select "new/body part/shape" from the menu. Double click the shape to wear it. Right click your avatar and select "appearance" from the pie menu. In the appearance editor, go to the shape tab. That's where you'll find the sliders that control all the individual aspects of avatar shape. They're divided into categories which you select with the category buttons (head, torso, legs, etc.). When you have your shape the way you want it, click "save" at the bottom of the appearance window.

Wow thanks guys for such a quick response! That answered it exactly, I was curious about the non-human shapes and such. And I do have Photoshop CE.

Wow thanks guys for such a quick response! That answered it exactly, I was curious about the non-human shapes and such. And I do have Photoshop CE.

Non-human shapes are normally designed with prims. You can create a part of a body that you attach to a part fo your avatar - e.g. a paw of a furry avatar to your hand. So those kind of avis usually mean a lot of work.

A question I would like to add to this thread: What is the best way to create a skin? I played around with some different programs to check what results I can get but I have to find the one I really want to use. So any suggestion to this are very welcome.

The type of applications you use may differ a little depending upon what type of process you use to create the skin (photo sampling, or hand rendering), but a few applications will always remain a constant:

1. Photoshop (or your favorite image editor)

2. SL Previewer (or another 3rd party previewer)

For photo sampling:

All of the above plus ZBrush

For hand rendering:

All of the above plus Corel Painter and Deep Paint 3D

There are dozens of applications similar to the ones I've mentioned here. I'm sure others will make similar recommendations, add to this list of applications, or recommend others over the ones I've listed, but I can only recommend what I have used extensively.

So if the prims all hang off an existing people shape, how do you create something that isn't even humanoid? Can you make a body part invisible somehow? Like making the head and upper torso invisible, and attaching a crocodile-shape to the lower torso? Or is there some other way to radically alter the base shape?

The human shape can't be altered directly to a fish's shape say, nor to a convinving quadraped, you're stuck with being humanoid *for the shape*

However, you can play anims that will radically alter that shape. There is a widely available freebie called meatball amongst other things, that wraps you up into a small ball. If you can still find a tiny (Hermia Linden is often a tiny) they use anims to fold the body and limbs up in ways that humans can't do in RL and play from there.

Dragons of all sizes from the Council of Wyrms people use various anims to put the body into odd positions.

There are also invisprims, prims that make you see through, as seen in many (but not all) shoes. They can be made larger, and cover limbs etc. if needed.

Is it possible to do custom avatars outside of using the engine on SL? I've been creating images using Daz STUDIOS for a while and doing them to make a fairly life like image of real people. Of course I realize it won't look the same in game as in DAZ, but the main thing I am looking for is how do I create custom skins. I've looked all over the forums for a tutorial that works but the only one I have found is down. If there is a tutorial and someone could point me to it, that would be great, if someone could explain it that also would be great. Thank you in advance for helping

Bran Gray

That question has been asked and answered dozens of times on the building forum. The short answer is no. due to a fundament difference between what SL uses and what everyone else does. Two people have been able to build progs that convert outputs from the Progarms blender and Maya to text that be pastes to notepads and via in world creations rendered rapidly but that is as close as you've gotten. So for texture, clothes etc making Daz is good for previewing. Poser is used for previwing and animation generation. You will find that when you get the SL templates it completely different than the way Poser/Daz does theres. So while your skills will follow, it is not directly translatable without alot of rework.

A dozen times. Actually I went back and counted it's like three. So okay now WHERE do I find out how to make custom skins? Just point to a tutorial that works, I'll do the rest. Thanks Bran Gray