Help needed!

Hey everyone,

Okay, I'm relatively new to Second Life, and I'm really interested in starting out my own business here. I'd like to start off small, maybe create some furniture/cothing, and I was wondering how I'd even begin to do so?

What do I need to get started?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

The best way to learn to build in SL is simply to practice. Press the blue Build button at the bottom of the screen, and experiment with creating different types of prims, editing them, linking them together to create more complex shapes, etc. You might also want to pay a visit to the Ivory Tower of Primitives for an overview of all the prim types, and the various parametric options for each.

For making clothing, and for texturing your objects, you'll need to be fluent with Photoshop or another good raster painting program. I recommend Photoshop if you can afford it ($600 US), but if you can't, then Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP are good popular alternatives. PSP is less powerful than Photoshop, but it's adequate for SL purposes, and it's very reasonably priced at around $100 US. The GIMP is free, which is nice, and it's almost as powerful as Photoshop, but it's harder to use than the others. GIMP's interface is, well, bad.

If you're not familiar with any of these programs yet, pick one and learn it before you attempt to make SL clothing. Learning to manipulate digital images is a skill which most people do not find intuitive in the beginning. Some people take to it instantly, but for the vast majority, it takes a lot of practice to get good at it.

Learning to texture for 3D is a more advanced skill, which requires a more complex level of abstraction in your process. I don't want to scare you into thinking it's hard, but it is entirely dependent at the start on your existing 2D digital art abilities. If you've already gotten good at image manipulation, learning to texture for 3D is just the next step, but if you haven't, it's a million miles away.

When you develop the two skill sets one at a time in the correct order, there comes a point where it all sort of just clicks, and you find yourself able to think instinctively in 3D while you're painting in 2D. However, should you attempt to learn the whole thing at once, you can pretty much count on nothing but frustration and disaster. So, patience, Grasshopper. Don't try to put the cart before the horse, and you'll do fine.

How fast you learn will depend on how much practice time you put into it each day. Be ready to practice a lot. There's no way around it.

Anyway, once you're familiar with your paint program of choice, grab the clothing/skin template collection from the downloads section of this site, and read the instructions (the PDF on the same page as the template pack). Then, if you have any questions, these forums are a great place to find the answers.

Look around the net, I don't have the site handy but you can get a PaintShop Pro demo, 30 or 60 days, which you can try out before you put any money into buying one.

Take that time to work on a few items of clothing and see if you like it. To make something really nice takes a lot of time and skill. I did work on clothing for a while but I didn't have the patience for it and stuck to building prim objects.

GIMP is free.

Take classes.

Make stuff that appeals to you.

I suggest you check out Teazers University. They teach classes throughout the day on how to build anything from a candy apple to a living room set. Search for Teazers under events and it'll show you day/time of classes. There are also a few other universities out there.

Hope this helps!