Newbie Questions About Prim Clothing

I'm a newbie who's interested in making (and eventually selling) clothing. I've already put far too much time into one texture, and am fairly pleased with the results, but I've heard about prim clothing. And I've got a small handful of questions about it.

What kinds of clothing can you make with prims? Are there any tutorials out there? I've managed to figure out how to make skirts from spheres, but they're all varying degrees of poofy -- is there any way to make, for instance, a fishtail skirt? (I'm sort of figuring right now that such a thing -might- involve two linked prims, a narrow top one and a flaring bottom one, but I'd have no clue how to make the narrow one.)

Also, my skirts don't act like fabric; if I sit, they go right through my avatar's legs, and generally through whatever she's sitting on. Is this unavoidable, or is there a way around this that I'm clueless about?

Thanks!

unfortunately prims are static things, and while there is now the ability to animate attached prims it certainly will not provide the organic feel you are probably envisioning. Your body will go through the prims -- no helping that. However, as you play, you'll see that the attach points you choose and how your break up your prim sets make a huge difference in terms of how one moves with your prims.

the is no one type of prim that should be used or style that should be emulated. We could use some refreshing approaches. I would start playing with shapes and see where it takes you. What that means is just play play play with the various shapes -- box, cylinder, torus, ring, sphere etc -- and examine what they look like at various levels of cut, taper, hollow, dimple, adv cut, etc.

Then you have to get familiar with how textures sit on the various sides of the prims, and how alpha fighting comes into the equation. this is equally important.

there's no real way to shortcut this learning process as far as I can see... essentially it's like building a shape vocabulary for your creations

common approaches for skirts seem to be cut and hollowed cylinders, and occasionally spheres. A neck ring for a turtleneck is often just a single toroid.

my take on it all: it's really easy to make something giant and poofy, but really making something that feels like folds and organic -- that's much much harder.

I'd also say to remember that avatars now handle prim attachments more efficiently than in earlier days of SL, but try to not to build by throwing a zillion prims at the problem, or your customers will become lag pits everywhere they go. If you find your skirt now has 300 prims, then you need to take a step back and review what you are trying to do.

good luck! there are no rules. let your creativity flow. we need more innovative prim clothing!