How do I make quality clothing?

I have asked many people in the game about how do you make quality clothing, suchas shirts with straps and thongs, real skin ect.... The Only response I seem to get is with Adobe Photo Shop.

I have the photo shop program and still is dont know how to make clothing of better quality. Please can someone tell me the secret? Thank you

Taypink

I really just comes down to lots of practice, knowing photoshop well, and understanding the quirks of the clothing templates. There's no simple answer to your question, unfortunately

Taylaa, I'm going to assume you have already downloaded the templates from this spot on the SL website. If not, these patterns provide a basis upon which to build your clothing and other body textures.

When you say "better quality," are you talking about photo-realistic textures, or clothing/skin textures that line up at the seams, or... what, exactly? Making quality SL textures, whether from real pictures or swatches or hand painting, is a meticulous and exacting process that takes patience and practice to learn.

There are several player-created texture tutorials posted on these forums; the two I can think of are by Nephilaine Protagonist and Nicola Escher. If you do a search for "tutorial" in this forum or just page back through the forums threads, you should find some tutorial information.

no other way than practising

keep in mind no software is ganna help you to do high quality clothing, only your hands, like in RL, you can have the most sophisticated sewing machine, the result still belong to your own skill, and skill building take time

itys the sum of many things and tons of hours of work

it is like asking "how do you become World best Quake player"

answer: time and the learning curve is long , sometimes steep

To tack onto all the great advice given here by the masters, I'll share my pitifully brief experience. You see, I had rented store space and planned to start cranking out "quality" clothing in a week or two.

Not gonna happen.

I've spent the last week playing with PSP (Paintshop is due to arrive today). I've created some simple stuff, but mostly I've been observing. Observation is #1 if your goal is to create quality. You will see as you spend time window-shopping and gauging the competition that there is the expected amount of mediocre (some even junk) clothing out there. Any moron with a mouse can create a black undershirt. And the market for pink panties and thigh-high stockings must surely be glutted by now.

What draws the eye of the discerning shopper and impresses more than anything is the creative use of texture. And that, after Observation, is the #2 criteria for "quality". Good stuff in SL is all about the texture. Finding and mapping good fabric textures to the SL avie templates is time consuming, but it's necessary. The three sources I recommend are digital camera, scanner, and downloaded Poser clothing textures -- the latter is easily done by Googling on "Poser" plus clothing, textures, free, etc. or going over to www.renderosity.com. You'll find that the Poser templates are pretty close to SL's, so it doesn't require a rocket science degree to convert them. Some of the quality isn't much better than the average $50L SL outfit, but you can find some exceptions. I also have been pouring through my various catalogs looking for ideas. Everything from J.Crew to Frederick's is a good source (it's my opinion that most SL women's clothing fits better with the latter than the former ).

The #3 criteria, for me, is going to be learning how to create and attach prims to clothing. Which is more impressive - a red satin bow tied to the front of a corset that's been painted on and looks flat? Or one that's built from small prims and is actually 3D? Prims are the only way you can get outside the box of the templates and build truly impressive clothes. It's one skill I'm only just learning.

Cindy

It took me almost two years, countless questions and finally just clicking all the buttons in PhotoShop to try and see what they do.

I just put out my first line this past weekend. I have a long way to go but the best way is to just throw yourself in the program and use the resources on the internet for your materials as I do.

I am loving it. If u come visit me in world or just IM I can help u with a tool that I received in world from someone that taught how to make clothing. It comes with screen shots of various programs such as PSP, PS and GIMP.

I wish u luck and don't give up.

/me subscribes to thread

can you use poser 5/6, whatever version, to export clothing and skin/textures? that would seeem to be a whole lot easier than using photoshop as i don't yet understand how to use ps nor how the templates are to be used. ever any classes in sl for this kind of thing?

All my Poser skills are rusty now, so I can't tell you for sure whether you can export clothing directly from Poser to SL. My uneducated guess would be that no, their templates differ slightly (I've compared them in Photoshop) but there may be a way. What I plan to use my Poser for is just to create animations/poses. Notably, you have to create the pose using a Poser 2 figure to get the BHZ file to work. Higher versions of Poser use too many polygons/morph targets. With the addition of dynamic clothing in P5, you might have other serious problems trying to do the same thing with clothing that isn't P2 compatible.

Note that most of the commercially available Poser clothing was first designed in Photoshop (or something similar). You can't create the kind of textures and transparencies in Poser that you need to build really good, original clothing.

That said, I was using Paintshop Pro version 5 to get the hang of clothes for some time and it was adequate for creating transparencies and layers. I'm back on the learning ramp now with Photoshop, but quick & dirty stuff doesn't always require the full functionality of Photoshop.

The templates are little more than just patterns. They're outlines that show you where SL will cut the clothing to fit, and also have UV (horiz/vertical) matrices that give you a clue on how your avatar's body bends and shapes. They're priceless for making clothes. I don't know how anyone could make good items without them.

My suggestion: the difficulty is not in understanding the templates. The difficulty for most new designers is in learning their chosen graphics software. And there are lots of tutorials around to help with that. This recent thread includes some great tips and some helpful links to get you started.

Cindy

All my Poser skills are rusty now, so I can't tell you for sure whether you can export clothing directly from Poser to SL. My uneducated guess would be that no, their templates differ slightly (I've compared them in Photoshop) but there may be a way. What I plan to use my Poser for is just to create animations/poses. Notably, you have to create the pose using a Poser 2 figure to get the BHZ file to work. Higher versions of Poser use too many polygons/morph targets. With the addition of dynamic clothing in P5, you might have other serious problems trying to do the same thing with clothing that isn't P2 compatible.

Note that most of the commercially available Poser clothing was first designed in Photoshop (or something similar). You can't create the kind of textures and transparencies in Poser that you need to build really good, original clothing.

That said, I was using Paintshop Pro version 5 to get the hang of clothes for some time and it was adequate for creating transparencies and layers. I'm back on the learning ramp now with Photoshop, but quick & dirty stuff doesn't always require the full functionality of Photoshop.

The templates are little more than just patterns. They're outlines that show you where SL will cut the clothing to fit, and also have UV (horiz/vertical) matrices that give you a clue on how your avatar's body bends and shapes. They're priceless for making clothes. I don't know how anyone could make good items without them.

My suggestion: the difficulty is not in understanding the templates. The difficulty for most new designers is in learning their chosen graphics software. And there are lots of tutorials around to help with that. This recent thread includes some great tips and some helpful links to get you started.

Cindy

Hi Jaren!

I'm not sure what you mean, "export clothing from Poser." Can you please be more specific?

Are you trying to make clothing in the program? How?

Are you trying to export clothing and skins you have for the Poser models? That won't work, because the UVs are different. (As Cindy mentions, UVs tell programs where to put what pixels from the image. Since the SL Avatar doesn't have the same points, or points at the same co-ordinates, the maps don't "fit." Try it, you'll see what I mean.) Besides, all that stuff is copyrighted by the original creators.

Are you trying to export the cloth simulations from Poser? Ummm.... SL doesn't support cloth simulations.

As everyone in this thread has said, the only way to really make quality clothing is to learn to use a graphics program well. Having a good sense of design and style helps, too.

just one more take on "quality" clothing

omg i ahve been making virtural clothing for over 3 years now i started in there and moved to second life last sept.
i will tell you as others have there are a few thing that are of the utmost importance in making quality clothing and all take time to learn.

1 know your paint program weather its photoshop or paintshop pro you will get no where if you dont know at leat the basics of your paint program.
my preferance is ps 7.0 i emphasise 7.0 because it has a known bug that adobie fixed in later versions but the 7.0 version is perfect for second life because it allows you to by pass the alpha layer. in 7.0 to get a transparancey all you need to do is leave any thing you want to be transparent in world transparent in photoshop.

2 know the clothing templates. work with them experment with them up load text textures with the overlay layer turned on so you can see where certain parts of the template fall on the avatar in world.

3 practice

4 practice

5 practice

6 practice

7 read the fourms for help from others

8 search the web for tutorials for your paint program i have over the last few years found some helpfull toturials that showed me tricks in photoshop i would not have found on my own.

9 did i say practice ?

10 as some one else said a good sense of style is also very help full.

good luck to you all
hugs and kisses
crucial

Ummm, Niki, I really wouldn't do this.

Even the clothing and skins that are marked for commercial use normally have something that says that you can't resell the texture as a texture. In other words, what they are allowing is rendered images, used in a painting, game, or other finished form. Not reworking and reselling the textures as such.

Leaving the very shaky legal ground aside, and I'm sure you probably haven't thought of this, but.. ummm .. how would you feel if you labored long hours over something, and put it up for sale at Renderosity, only to come into SL and find someone else selling your outfit as their own?

I know that the majority of the people in SL have no idea of copyright, and mostly just ignore it, feeling that if they aren't getting any money from it then everything is fine. But the truth is that the law doesn't care about money earned or not. And the real danger is that, if the artist doesn't protect copyright, the work can become Public Domain.

I'm certain that you wouldn't want to harm the original creators of the clothing you admire in any way. So please, please don't do this.

I'm trying not to come across too strongly here, and I really don't want to hurt or offend you, so please don't take it that way.

But you are much better off creating your own clothing from scratch, especially if you have the Photoshop skills to do so (and it sounds like you really do. )