Making Clothes & Skins - Preparations Part 2
This second part of “Preparations for Making Clothes & Skins” will give you knowledge of how to upload textures to Second Life and use them to create a skin or part of clothing.
For this tutorial I’m using Photoshop CS, but I’m sure you can make it work with older or newer versions, PS Elements and other graphic programs, like Paint Shop Pro, Gimp etc.
BUT! If you are gonna make your own clothes or skins 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.
You will also need: Robin Woods Texture-Map Templates.
Don’t get what I’m talking about?
Well, you probably missed: Making Clothes & Skins - Preparations Part 1 
If you don’t need a Texture-Map Template skin - look at this tutorial as an educational example!
Create a Skin made of Texture-Map Templates
A skin is a “body-costume” that uses the three textures for tattoos that you will find in Appearance Mode: Body Parts/Skin. To make a skin you will have to use 3 textures: HEAD, UPPER_BODY and LOWER-BODY. To create the skin we will be using those templates made by Robin Wood.
Create the TGA-files
Robin Woods templates have the resolution 1024×1024 pixels. That’s a great resolution when you draw your textures in your Graphic Program, but it’s not necessary to have a texture that big in Second Life. The size 512×512 pixels is quite enough. So let’s make them that size before uploading to SL!
Open up your Graphic program and open Robin Wood’s texture-template-file for the HEAD.
Once that one is open and active: Select Image/Image Size from the top menu bar. Change the width to 512 pixels (or 50 %) and make sure ‘Constrain Proportions’ is checked. Click OK.
Select File/Save As from the top menu bar. I named my texture: ‘UV-Map-Head‘. Chose to save it as a Targa-file (*.TGA;*.VDA;*.ICT;*.VST). Click ‘Save‘.
When the ‘Targa Options’ popup window appears, select ‘24 bits/pixel’ (’Compress RLE’ unchecked). Click ‘OK’ to create the Targa-file.
Now! Repeat this with Robin Wood’s texture-template-files for the UPPER-BODY and LOWER-BODY.
When that’s done you should have 3 tga-files 512×512 pixels: HEAD, UPPER-BODY and LOWER-BODY. I named mine: UV-Map-Head.tga / UV-Map-Upper.tga / UV-Map-Lower.tga. OK?!
Upload the files to Second Life
Connect to Second Life. Select: File/Upload Image from the top menu bar.
Select UV-Map-Head.tga from your harddrive. It will open in the preveiw-window in Second Life.
At this point you can chose from a lot of options in: ‘Preview Image as‘
I selected the option Female head and used my mouse to turn it around. Now you may have a final look before you decide weather you want to upload your texture or not.
Upload the image. Click: ‘Upload‘ - this will cost you 10 L$. The texture will be placed in your Inventory Texture-folder.
Now! Repeat the uploading procedure with the files UV-Map-Upper.tga and UV-Map-Lower.tga.
When you’re done you should have 3 new textures in your Inventory Texture-folder: UV-Map-Head, UV-Map-Upper and UV-Map-Lower. OK?!
Create the Texture-Map Skin
In Second Life: Open up your Inventory. Now we are going to create a new skin. Let’s place that one in the ‘Body Parts’ folder, shall we? Rightclick in the folder ‘Body Parts’ and Select ‘New Body Parts/New skin’. Now you should have a new skin there… Called: New Skin…
Wear the new skin! Rightclick on the New Skin and chose: Wear. Now you are wearing a default skin.
Right-click on your avatar and chose: appearance. In that window: Select the Skin-Tab.
In this window you will see three squares for tattoo-textures.
They are grey at this point because the default new skin doesn’t use any textures. Click the first of the squares: Head Tattoo.
A window where you may select a texture pops up. Find your texture-folder and select the UV-Map-Head texture. Click ‘Select’.
Now your avatars head is covered with the template-texture.
(In these pictures you only see the back of my head. That’s not how its supposed to look… But that’s how SL works sometimes! Grrr!)
Repeat the procedure with the Upper and Lower tattoos and select the textures UV-Map-Upper and UV-Map-Lower.
Select: ‘Save as‘ and give your skin a new name. I named mine: UV-Map-Skin.
The skin will be located in the ‘Body part’ folder in your Inventory.
As you might discover the “New Skin” you created before is still there, too… You can delete that now or save it for later.
If you wanna look as great as I do in my UV-Map-Skin you should wear a ‘Bald Hairbase’ to get that absolutely gorgeous totally bald look!
Create Clothing
If you are creating parts of clothing it works very similar to creating a skin. Upload the texture you created (but have a final look in the Preveiw-window first).
Create a new piece of clothing (shirt, pants, glows, shoes etc.) and wear it.
In Appearance Mode: Chose the right clothing-tab and select your new texture. Use the sliders to adjust the look if that is necessary. Give your piece of clothing a name and you’re done!
Tjingeling for now!
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Updated: November 2007
