Olila’s Second Life - Tutorials & Diary Diary & Tutorials

Before you start making your own Second Life clothes or skins there are some stuff you really, really need:

Graphic Program
Texture-map Templates & Texture Costume

And some stuff (free) that will make your life so much easier - and save you lots of Linden Dollars:

UV Mapper
SL Avatar Mesh-files

And finally! Learn how to:

Put it all together

Graphic Program

I use the 2D graphic program Photoshop CS when I make textures for Second Life. Photoshop is a really nice program - but rather expensive - and CS is not the latest one… But I’m sure you can make my tutorials work with older or newer versions, PS Elements and other graphic programs, like Paint Shop Pro, Gimp etc.

BUT! Your program must have functions for layers, transparency and Alpha channels - and you have to be able to save your files as TARGA (TGA) files.

If you want a free solution GIMP is your choice! GIMP is free! Read more about it here: www.gimp.org and download your own copy here: www.gimp.org/downloads

Texture-map Templates & Texture Costume

Texture-map Templates

If you want to make clothes or skins in Second Life you have to use a ‘texture-map template‘.

Weather it is clothes or a skin… In Second Life your 3D avatar is “dressed” in flat 2D texture-files.

The ‘texture-map template’ will help you understand how the 2D textures works on a 3D SL avatar body. Both female and male avatars are using the same texture maps.

Without a ‘texture-map template’ its almost impossible to make clothes or skins! You will have to use them as a guide in your graphic program. Otherwise you’ll not have a clue where to draw the different parts of your clothing in the texture-file.

Most people that makes clothes or skins in Second Life uses already made texture-template-sets from Robin Wood or Chip Midnight (they are both free) or make their “own” templates mixing these two together! There are templates for: HEAD, UPPER-BODY, LOWER-BODY and SKIRTS.

Here is how Robin Woods four templates look:

If you want to make clothing-outfits or skins - you have to use more than one of these templates and be very aware of where the seams in the templates meet on the 3D avatars body. A full body skin uses all the templates: HEAD, UPPER-BODY, LOWER-BODY to cover the whole body and clothing-outfits often uses both UPPER-BODY & LOWER-BODY or UPPER-BODY & SKIRT to create the outfit.

My tutorials are most of the time based on Robin Wood’s texture-templates 1024×1024 pixels. You can get both Robins and Chips templates as Photoshop-files (.psd) and the great thing is that these files work in many other Graphic Programs as well - for sure in Paintshop Pro and Gimp.

Linden Labs also have simple texture-templates for download - much less detailed. But if you are going to create EYES - you should use their template!

• Here is where you can download the texture-templates:
  Robin Wood’s Templates, Chip Midnight’s Templates.
• And here you’ll find some useful reading regarding how to make a great mix between the Robin & Chip texture-files:
  pixelboxcreative.com

Texture Costume

The best (and only) way to get a really good idea of how the 2D textures work on the 3D avatar body is to wear a skin - made of texture-map templates - and watch your avatars moves in Second Life.

For experience the best way is to make the template-skin yourself… ( It will cost you 30 L$) But the second best is to pick one up for free in Second Life

At Robin Sojourners place you can get an already made template-skin along with some really good tips regarding how to make them work ( Robin Wood is Robin Sojourner in SL).

SLURL: Livingtree (127/99/25).

UV Mapper

A really helpful tool if you are making clothes or skins is a program called: UV Mapper. It’s used for “mapping” 3D stuff. UV Mapper is not a free program - buy it if you can afford it - but for the purpose of creating clothes and skins the demo-version works great for checking out how a texture looks on a SL-avatar.

You can’t save any files in the demo-version, but that’s not necessary for this purpose - we just want to have a LOOK. That will save you a lot of Linden dollars because you don’t have to upload your textures to Second Life (for 10L$ each) to see how your creation works on an actual SL-avatar.

Read more about UV Mapper here: www.uvmapper.com and here you can download UV Mapper Professional DEMO (I’m not sure if there is a demo-version for mac…).

EDIT 2009-02-27:
There have been some comments about difficulties with this program… But I checked the latest version of UV MAPPER Professional Demo (3.5c). It works and looks exactly the same way as described in the following tutorial. It supports BMP, JPG and GIF images (BMP is best choice here). Please take your time to read, and it should work just fine! ( if not try the UV MAPPER Help… )

SL Avatar Mesh-files

If you want to use the program UV Mapper to have a look at your creations before you upload them to Second Life you’ll need Linden Labs 3D models of the SL-avatar: The Avatar Mesh files. For this purpose you’ll only use the object files (.obj): FEMALE, MALE or SKIRT.

Here you can download Second Life Avatar Mesh files.

Put it all together

This part is a quick overall picture of how to make these programs and textures work together! Ok, have you got all the stuff? You will need:

Texture-map templates
UV Mapper
SL Avatar Mesh-files

Okidoki, then! :))

• Open up your Graphic program. I’m using Photoshop CS. Open one of the texture-map template-files. I’m using: Robin Woods ‘SL Avatar Top VSmart.psd‘.
• This is the template you would use to create for example a T-shirt, Tank, Shirt or Upper-body skin for an avatar.In the 2D template map the body is in pieces: Front, Back, Arms - or should I say ARM.The template includes the texture-map for only ONE arm. Both your avatars arms will be wrapped in that - and will look the same.Noo! One cant have different tattoos on your arms… Sorry sailors!
  
  
  Let’s see how this texture actually looks on a SL-avatar without having to upload it to Second Life!
  
  Save the file as a bmp-file: File/Save As. Remember where you saved the file. I named mine: SLupperTexture.bmp




• Open UV Mapper. Select: File/Open from the top menu bar and open one of the models you downloaded from Linden Labs. It has to be an object-file (.obj). I’m using: ‘SL_Female.obj‘ (when the ‘Statistics’ window pops up - just click OK).
  Click the square in the open palette to get the model shown in the whole window. (If you can’t see this palette, you can make it visible by clicking: View and then Layout)





• Select: Tools/Normals/Smooth from the top menu bar. Chose: Using all facets/85. Click OK!





• Select: Texture/Load from the top menu bar. Open the file you saved: SLupperTexture.bmp. As you can see the upperbody texture also covers the head and lower body. That looks a bit strange - but never mind that. Concentrate at the upper body. Move the mesh around, zoom in and out - using the tools in the toolbar - and have a look at how the texture-map template looks on a 3D body.

If the texture you saved instead of the texture-map template was a creation of your own (like a shirt) you would get an idea of where the seams and edges will meet. And if you didn’t get it right the first time - go back into your graphic program and do some changes, save the file again, and have a look at it in UV Mapper again.

If you are making a pair of pants it works exactly the same but you’ll have to use the lower body texture-map template. The same goes for the head. But if you are making a skirt you will have to load SL_Skirt.obj into UV Mapper. If you are making male clothes or skins you should of course use: SL_Male.obj with UV mapper instead…

When you create your first piece of clothing you may have to go through this procedure many, many times. But it is still sooo much easier than having to get the textures into Second Life.

NOTE! In UV Mapper you will see the texture on the default avatar mesh. But avatars have different looks! So you might discover that your creations need some further adjustments to match different shapes even after you uploaded it to Second Life!

Hope this was helpful! Tjingeling!

Tutorials by Subject

Preparations Part 2 »

Updated: November 2007