Mannequins

The mannequins that I'm seeing in stores that can preview clothing -- they're actually having textures applied, right? Not actual clothing?

Yes, and no. 'Actual clothing' is just made of textures, remember? But yes, they are having textures applied, rather than the finished project.

On top of this, it's generally going to be a different texture than the clothing texture, unless the mannequin is made specifically to line up perfectly with the avatar mesh UV layout. This is definitely possible, but getting it to line up perfectly, and so on, would be very hard.

ETA:: It is impossible to apply finished clothing to an object, they can only be applied to avatars.

You might be seeing bots, which are avatars being run with libopenmetaverse applications. They have profiles, and they can wear clothes.

lol

It would be nice to have a script function that would allow one to rez just an avatar shell, and support functions for applying clothing, attachments, and gestures. Yeah, bots can do the same thing, but they're full blown avatars that put the full load of an avatar on the server, whereas, an 'avatar' object could have much less impact on the server. Maybe a bit too lofty to suggest, maybe not.

Yep, yep.

It was just that I saw one so convincing by Ayiki Takakura at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lingua%20Franca/239/99/33, especially with skirts, that I'd thought I'd ask some others, just to make sure I wasn't judging solely on my own presuppositions.

Her mannequin seems very well done (caveat: as anyone who has seen me will know, a fashionista I am not) so I was just "intellectually" curious whether someone had figured out a way around the seemingly impossible.

Yep, just sculpts with textures, no clothing applied. I do agree, though, very well done for a mannequin.

this looks like the actual clothing textures to me very well done too

edit: ohh i think i figured out how it was done too cools! awesome work

I have my own sculpted menequins, full body, women at the moment who can take the standard clothing textures from sl. but not the face ( i had to use a bought head and texture to match.

It takes clothes and also the skin on another. took me 9 weeks to complete, and they are not for sale but can be seen on my island.

It takes clothes? Prim clothes, or clothing textures?

the clothing textures, you can't use any of the avatar layers on objects. you can however use the texture that was used to create that layer.

Prim clothes

prim clothes are just objects, they don't always have to be worn to be seen. you will have to play with positioning and rotating to get it to rez in the right place relative to the mannequin, so that it looks the same/similar to when worn on an avatar

I agree that's almost certainly it, but madddyyy Schnook mentioned clothing textures, and then later said "it takes clothes" so I was clarifying with him what he meant as he used two different terms.

you can use photoshop or gimp, or whatever software you use and put all the layers together into one texture. may not be as flexible to mix and match, but but will help to reduce prim use and texture loading (especially for alpha overlapping glitches)