Alot of Questions

Hi all,

As per the Title I'll assume you can guess that I'm completely a newbie. I'd like to start learning the basics of Shaping and Skin and Makeup, hair and eyes for avatars. I've been to the Ivory Tower, copied myself all the help cards there, Browsed the forums, ect. There are still some questions I have about it, basic start up ones. I have no problem what so ever with trial and error, and practicing but basically what I really want to know is...

1. Shapes, are these made from prims? Or are people just playing around with the charector appearence generator to get it?

2. Skins and makeup, are these generated in photoshop using the templates then imported and just worn as tattoos?

3. If I wanted to create a totally new avatar for myself, what are the steps involved. I'm basically looking for general steps, like the avatar needs to be made from a prim, skin and makeup in photoshop, poses are scripts. Stuff like that.

4. And last but not least, eyes and hair. Are each of these made from prims as well?

I have no problem going to school ingame to learn these steps, but are there any free ones available? Having about 50l at the time of this posting, I don't think there is much in the game I can afford right now, but I am working on it. Or are there tutorials online that explain the basic steps on how each is made?

I apprecite any and all help on this matter, thank you guys so much! Feel free to IM me if you can point me in the right direction, I'd apprecite it.

Veruca Denneny (Game Name of course)

1. A combination. There are those whose avatars are all slider-created, others who have prims (like my right arm, see profile pic on the left). Yet others completely hide the avatar under prims (with or without invisiprims).

2. Correct. If you intend to make your own, expect a lot of mistakes along the way. It takes quite a bit to get everything right. For now I would advise not creating your own until you have L$ to spend. Each upload costs L$10.

3. That depends on your concept. If it's a normal (to deformed) looking human then the sliders will do, coupled with tattooed skins.

4. Eyes are textures also which you can change. As for hair there is the slider-made hair and there are prim-made hairs. You can easily tell them apart. If you can highlight someone's hair, it's prim-made.

You can achieve quite a bit using just the sliders and the supplied clothing textures. The key is to work using reference photos so you don't tweak things too far. The second key is to make changes incrementally since the Appearance editor does not show the avatar exactly as it would appear, there's some distortion. You will have to go in and out of appearance mode when you're tweaking.

Thank you so much! That helps a great deal. It will take alot of learning but I think it will pay off in the long run, that I will be able to create my own. Good thing I am a stay at home wife. Lots of time to do nothing but practice!

Welcome to SL, Veruca!

1. Shapes, are these made from prims? Or are people just playing around with the charector appearence generator to get it?
In general, most avatars that look largely Human are made using just the appearance sliders and textures. Those who do not look entirely Human, such as Furries (I'm normally an anthropomorphic red fox vixen, myself), tiny avatars (almost anything less than 4 feet tall), cyborgs, etc, usually involve prim parts and possibly animation overrides, as well.

2. Skins and makeup, are these generated in photoshop using the templates then imported and just worn as tattoos?
With very few exceptions, yes. Avatars that use prim parts, as noted above, may or may not have a fair amount of original skin showing. In this case textures also have to match between the skin and the prims texturing. A basic Human skin has three tattoo layers applied to it, for head, torso and lower body. The good human skins are semi-transparent in these layers, so appearance sliders can add things like blush in the cheeks or slight changes in skin tone overall. Makeup variations are usually a different complete skin with the head tattoo changed. Nail polish for hands and toenalis is possible to do directly on a skin, but it works better to do that as gloves and socks, with everything transparent but the nail enamel. (SS Labs sells wonderful nail polish gloves and socks for Humans) Obviously if the entire body is hidden by prims, there is no skin coloring needed. (Such as for a robot, or an armored knight with a full visor...).

Incidentally, there is a request in to Linden Labs for mulitple tattoo layers, so a skin tattoo and the makeup applied over that skin on the face could be two differnet layers, or so a skin could have one additional body art tattoos layered onto it without having to merge the art tattoo with the skin layer tattoo.

3. If I wanted to create a totally new avatar for myself, what are the steps involved. I'm basically looking for general steps, like the avatar needs to be made from a prim, skin and makeup in photoshop, poses are scripts. Stuff like that.
For a Human, a lot can be done just with appearance sliders. I would start with that first, as the final shape of the avatar will distort skin textures differently. For example, an avatar that is muscular versus one who is pregnant. Furries and other avatars that require add-on prim parts require building those parts up out of prims, linking them tohether, and positioning the prims on the avatar. Use of a posing stand helps a lot there, as it holds the body in a static pose, oriented squarely on the NSEW axis lines. Then add skin and prim textures as needed. Scripts can be used to hide/show prim parts, for changing facial expression of a prim head, or doing other things. Tiny avatars use a special script to scrunch up the body, and may use 'invisiprims', which are prims that mask the presence of other nearby prims. Furries that have digitigrade legs often, but not always, use prims and invisiprims to get a decidedly more animal-like leg structure.

Poses and animation overrides for a sexy walk or similar stuff are usually an add-on attachment, worn as a small hidden or invisible object, or as an HUD control. Some times, as mentioned with tinys, some pose scripting is built in to the avatar.

4. And last but not least, eyes and hair. Are each of these made from prims as well?
For eyes, it depends on the avatar. For most Humans, eyes are a texture applied in the Appearance controls. You can apply an eye texture there and save an appearance file, which will give you an object in your inventory that can be dragged to an avatar to change just the eyes. My "Feral Eyes" products, which give a human avatar eyes with cat-line vertical slit pupils, work like that. Avatars with prim heads usually use animated textures on prim surfaces to have eyes that can blink. My current favorite furry avatar has three parts to the eyes - a top layer that is the eye expression and blink animation, and two lower layers that allow the two eyes fo be colored seperately, by showing through a transparent part in the upper layer. Scripts allow the eye expression to change with facial expression. On the other hand (or paw, as it were ), some furry avatars use only a partial head mask of prims, and still use the Human eyes. Most of the avatars from Jakkal's Werehouse are like that.

For hair, the more complex styles are usually at least partly made of prims. Most prim hair will include a 'bald wig' that is an avatar hair setting for no visible hair, so the other hair doesn't show through. But I have a couple of lovely ponytail styles that use custom-textured avatar hair (non-prim) for on the head, and prim hair for the pony tail.

If you are interested in developing non-Human avatars, the best starting point is to obtain several free or inexpensive avatars similar to what you want to do, that are sold with modification rights, and take them apart to see how they were built. For no-mod avatars, you can usually still highlight the prim parts in edit mode to get a rough idea of what prims were used to make the shapes.

Of course, directly copying another person's work is not a good thing. But learning from the work of othrs and making something new on your own is welcome.

You may also want to contact other avatar makers directly, if there is some feature that they have accomplished that you would like to learn how to do. While some may want to protect their specific textures or scripts that make their work special, many avatar makers are willing to help new content creators to get started.

Thank you so much! That really help a bunch. Now for the trial and error..going to be a long process but I hope I can learn it! You guys are great and I apprecite the help very much, more then you'll ever know!

Lots of Luvvies!
Veruca

You can ask questions in-world too. You can leave offline IMs.

Yup! We don't bite! (Just ignore the fangs on my furry avatars, dear. ) Seriously, a lot of the content creators are quite approachable. Be polite and respect the fact that they are probably pretty busy people, and you'll be surprised how friendly some of us are!

FYI - Except for that ponytail that I mentioned, all my favorite female hairstyles are prims. Non-prim hair does have one advantage, however. It's less lag inducing! Avatars that have lots of prim parts cause lag, for themselves and those near them. Some hairstyles that have tons of tiny twstied toruses can cause a very noticable amout of lag when the wearer enters the area. (The nickname for such styles is 'Hoochie Hair').

As previously stated we dop moy bite if you wish any help with building just ask online that way we can show you how things are done and give tips on how to make it easier for yourself. if you have a working knowledge of Photoshop or Paint shop you have a great advantage over a lot of people in SL. If not then tutorials on the web are very helpful as they generally give short vidoes of how to do some of the main functions. Once you have an idea of how their mind works it becomes a lot easier.

Once you have the basics of building you can apply it to most things inworld from houses to hair/ clothing to cars.

Good luck and enjoy yourself

Yeah, I thought about doing that, asking people that is..but figured they might deem a threat towards their buisness. I don't want to copy peoples work, just make my own. But I will attempt to! I definatly have knowledge of Photoshop, I am not a pro (only been working in it a few months, and no classes) but I can work my way around stuff. It is alot easier with that, sense if there is something specific I am looking to do, there are alot of tutorials for Photoshop, but building is another thing all together! As a matter of fact, I have my own RL online T-Shirt shop, with my Photoshop work on them, so at least I have a heads up in that department!

When your making non prim hair how exactly do you get volume, just painting a hair on the head template then editing it in appearence? I will have to try that one, nothing like playing tringo and 3 hours later your piece finally appears on the board, I have to admit I have a set of 'hoochie hair' I didn't realize I was partially causing the lag with it LOL..I just wanted to be perty, like all the other people, it's just expensive to say the least! Thank you all for being so nice, I apprecite it so very much.

Yes, to do non-prim hair, you paint on the head template, apply that texture to the hair in the Appearance dialog, and then play with sliders to get it right. Making great textures for non-prim hair is an art, considering the wide range of distortions that the appearance sliders can apply to avatar hair.

I am on a really marginal computer for SL, so I was only getting about 5 FPS on a good day. When I first heard of 'Hoochie Hair', I really worried about some of my favorite hairstyles causing lag. Didn't have any that were tons and tons of ringlets, fortunately, but I did run some tests.

What I found was that by switching from well-made prim hair to avatar hair, I could get a, increase of a couple frames per second. If I dropped the furry avatar, which has a fair number of prim attachments, I gained a bit more speed. By switching from my most complex furry form with prim hair to a Human in jeans and a T-shirt with non-prim hair, I almost doubled my frame rate.

Generally though, unless you are someplace really laggy, a prim hairstyle that isn't tons of twisted toruses will probably not have much effect on you or on those around you. I have one avatar that is a very simple Human with textured non-prim hair that I use almost exclusively for going into high-lag locations. She has minimal attachments and no unnecessary scripts. Makes shopping in texture-overloaded malls more pleasant.

How laggy is flexi-hair? I have some flexi-hair that I love, but I also just bought a new comp so I might be messing other people up without realizing it. I usually take it off when building because it can swing and get in my eyes, but that's the only time.