Some questions about selling my new skin

OK, so what started out as a fun little project has turned into (typically for me), a perfectionists nightmare. So with a photoshop file just over 200mb and topping out at something like 90-ish layers (maybe more, i haven't counted in a while), this skin is finally beginning to approach the quality I'd like out of a hand painted skin. Given the flexibility all those layers offer me, I can change her ethnicity and melanin saturation at will to a variety of very realistic skin tones. I can give her more or less muscle tone. I can apply make-up at will (although only "normal" eye shadow patterns for now. After the initial release I'll get into more wild makeup patterns.

Things I still need to do...
- I'm not happy with the fingernail and toenail lighting. needs work. placement is fine.
- I'm not happy with the nostrils, don't quite know why yet.
- The eyebrows need to be redrawn hair by hair as I did the pubic hair.
- The pubic hair needs t to be redrawn with finer hairs. Good news here is that I was smart and drew/lighted a single hair and kept that in a separate file so it's just a matter of resizing that before scattering it around again.
- Need to redo the soles of feet and palms of hands. Good but not good enough
- One last visual inspection for seam blending (thank you AVpainter )
- And, the biggie... skin texture. Some of the faces on the AV model are significantly larger than others causing the texture to stretch. I need to go over this face by face and make sure the texture is satisfactory.

So, here are the questions...
a) What are the advantages and disadvantages to selling skin with modify privileges?
b) I've read some posts talking about an SL skin being opaque or not. I'm not quite sure what this means although I'm guessing by putting a partial alpha mask over the whole image, you allow the underlying SL character skin to show through enabling the sliders to work? Is that correct? Can anyone comment on this whole topic of "transparent" skins? Right now, mine is opaque.
c) Any way anyone knows of to get rid of those nasty creases in the SL avatar that run from the nose to the corners of the mouth in certain lighting?
d) Makeup packs. OK, so I can make zillions of different makeup combinations. Obviously, i can sell the skin no-mod and just sell skin packs that have complete skins of the desired ethnicity and darkness with the makeup applied. Namssur's method is a bit to labor intensive for me although I am considering it. Are there any other methods commonly in use?
e) Artifical shading (such as bottoms of butt cheeks). Love it or hate it? Right now, this skin has a really cute butt when she's standing up, but of course, if she is bent over, then that shadow stretches out into ugly smears.
e) Any comments about getting the word out? Maybe I'll have to email a few of the fashionista bloggers and see what their policies are around doing reviews.

** NOTE ** Ad copy below is just text as a placeholder. Obviously, it needs to be redone totally.

Any other words of wisdom anyone would like to impart. I've made a variety of things in second life, some of them fairly nice. But this is the first time I'm considering selling one of them.

That's a really nice skin, Brandi! Great work.

I'm just finishing up my own skin and I have a lot of the same questions. I'm especially curious to hear what people think about the transparent tintable skins. Myself, I'm torn on the subject. I really want to provide customers a full-featured product with maximum customization, but I'm concerned that making the skin semi transparent will wash away some of the more subtle shading. I'd really love to know just how important a factor tintability is to skin buyers.

As to your other questions, I'm no expert, but I can share some of what Ive figured out through this whole skin painting process. Its been a very different experience for me. Ive done a lot of figure painting and I thought it would be a breeze to paint up a flat skin texture. I couldn't have been more wrong. I'm used to painting deep shadows and really modeling out the forms and letting my brushstrokes show. It was hard to get used to how subtle and smooth the shading needs to be on a flat skin in order to be convincing.

The ugly creases around the nose are pretty much unavoidable, and look especially bad in certain light. A face light can evenly light your face and hide the ugly edges for photos, even at high noon.

I painted the shading on the buttcheeks very soft and kind of subtle for the same reasons you mentioned. I really think the butt needs the definition that only good shading can give it, but I've seen some skins that were way too heavy handed with the shading, where the butt almost looked dirty to my eye. On my own skin, I kept the shading soft and mainly on the insides of the cheeks, letting it fade off toward the outside of the leg.

A certain amount of texture smearing is unavoidable though, especially the way the avatar twists in certain poses. When I think of the effort I put into the elbows, only to know that most of the time they would be twisted and scrunched luke broken accordians! Uuugh! All I could suggest personally, is to keep the shading soft and avoid hard edged shadows.

BTW, that's an interesting tip about creating a pre-lit hair and duplicating it. I have to give that a try

Good luck with your new skin line!

*sighs* And I have never done any kind of figure painting before, so I'm sure you can imagine how much of a learnign curve this was for me. That's why I put my shadows and highlights on their own layer. What I learned was that for the actual painting, dodge/burn at 10% exposure or less are my friend. I'm using an overlay layer set to 50% grey. Then I dodge and burn as required to get the shadows/highlights. I played around with hard/soft light layers, but wasn't satisfied with what I got for various reasons. I may need to go back and try some more with those.

The other thing that was invaluable to me was AVPainter. Being able to sketch in the lines there helped me get things positioned properly on the actual file. I made the 50% grey textures. Loaded them into AV painter. Roughed in the shadow lines (which kind of dictate the highlights also). Then I brought that back out and into photoshop again. I made another 50 grey layer. Used the lines ont eh first one as guides and dodged/burned my way to what I needed. It was a long and tedious process, but since everything is on separate layes like that, i can "turn down her musculature" or other tweaks like that as I see fit.

Salome Strangelove ran pretty in-depth survey on the skin preferences a while ago, that netted considerable amount of answers... it's available at http://lindenlifestyles.com/?p=503 and might be of some use.

Re: some of your questions...

* setting modify permission on the skin will allow the owner to rename it, replace one (or all) skin textures with another and/or modify/save position of SL appearance sliders that affect the skin. Appearance sliders only have use for skins with alpha channel, ability to replace textures is only useful if you plan to allow your user such ability. Being able to rename the skin might be helpful for some customers. All these benefits are very situational, but then on the other hand there isn't any apparent benefit in denying these options to the customer, save maybe to prevent them from accidentally breaking the skin.

* semi-transparent or tintable skins -- by adding alpha channel to your skin you can make it a more or less sheer overlay on default SL skin. This can be applied to whole body or just selected parts like lips, eyebrows, nails or eyelids. The drawback is like you mention, depending on how transparent you make these areas some detail of your own work can be lost.

* creases are result of shading on AV geometry which you as skin maker have no control over. Some people use attachments that emit light placed in front of their AV to reduce that effect as well as soften the dreadful noon lighting.

* makeups, bum shading -- these are personal preferences, you can check survey i linked to see sample of answeres regarding them.

Semi-related note... Iris Ophelia has a nice brief tutorial how to improve the AV pictures you can take in SL... quite useful for these posters on skin vendors and such. http://drownophelia.blogspot.com/2007/08/picture-perfect.html

Thanks for that great survey link Joannah! That's exactly the kind of information I was looking for. I havent yet been able to parse the entire thing, but so far, from what I can gather, people prefer neutral subtle makeups with glossy lips, heavy eyeliner, brown/chestnut naturally sculpted eyebrows, but also like them tintable, trimmed and tintable kitties, and there seems to be an even split so far between those who like photorealism and those who like a blend of photoreal/anime style.

On the technical subject of the original poster's question. How much transparency on the skin would give a good level of tintability? And for that matter, how much for the eyebrows/kitty and what would be a good hair base color to provide good tintability?

Tanya Book did a very nice statistical summary of that survey on her blog, that may be of some help ^^

http://slfashionnotices.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/linden-lifestyles-did-a-skin-survery/


Not sure about the skin transparency amount, this is something for individual maker to decide since it's sort of sliding scale between amount of available customization and the detail/definition the skin itself can provide. For the eyebrows etc, probably best to check out skins that offer that option (Celestial City, Sin Skins, Tete a Pied iirc) ... i think they used brunette hair as the base colour.

OK, the worst item on my list... by far... the skin texture.



Given how the meshes are applied to the avatar, this was my worst nightmare. Some meshes stretch over large areas others over small ones... all in different directions. So, a small adventure in blender (biggest understatement of the year) got me a new texture layer and the results are shown below.

I deliberately took this shot of her belly right where the seam happens. Also, I provided a closeup of the side so you can see how the texture wraps properly around the side meshes as well as the front. Getting this fixed was a nightmare but the results are worth it. In game, zoomed way in with ctrl-0, I'd say that she's getting as close to photo-realistic as you can hope for given how few pixels there are to work with. I'm very pleased with these results.

Here's a closeup of another portion of her belly HUGELY sharpened so you can see what's going on there. In game, this would be way to sharp, but some of the detail is lost when I screen cap it then pull it down, resize it, etc. It amazes me that this is not photosourced. I think i am going to learn to love blender even as I hate it's user interface.

Note that you can see the belly seam here. This, I think, is inescapable given the differing number of pixels involved and the huge sharpening filter I've put on it.