KRYPTON RADIO

The Justice League Unlimited (JLU) meets everybody sooner or later, and we’ve acquired a vast storehouse of information about how to make practically anything in Second Life.  The most popular topic seems to be clothes – everyone needs them!  Here are some links to articles around the ‘net that will show you how:

• Eloh Eliot’s open source.psd skin files. If you’ve wanted to make skins or add face textures to your costumes but were daunted by the difficulty of skin making this is a great learning aid! Highly recommended!
• Internet resources for textures and reference images
• Pyxel Courier’s Clothing Creation Tutorial – created by a member of the Justice League, ths tutorial shows you how!

• SculptyPaint, a program for Windows, Linux and Macintosh that makes the creation of unusual forms in sculpty prims possible (including single-prim staircases).
• Blacksmith3D, a 3D sculpting program. This isn’t useful for Second Life, but their Blacksmith3D Paint program is useful, can paint on the Second Life avatar model files directly, and has a price tag you’ll appreciate: “free”.
• Animated Sculpty Exporter For Maya A little harder to work with, but lets you build morph sequences for sculpties. The mind boggles – flapping wings, lava lamps, swimming fish, things that breath, clothing that changes shape as you move… the possibilities are endless.
• CCCCybernetics has OBJ file downloads you can use for painting on that will provide correct UV coordinates for male avatars (the ones from Linden Lab are broken with respect to male avatars, and painting on these produces flawed results). Also here are flat UV maps for the male and female forms, and shockingly, the UV maps are different. This explains why painting clothes for males is so much more troublesome than for females – we’ve been using the wrong UV maps the entire time.

• Linden Lab Official Templates – A solid general base to work from.

• Clothing & Skin Templates – By Chip Midnight. You’ll need to be signed into your account on the SL Forums to read this, and more down the page. These templates are even higher-rez than the official ones. Chip Midnight is an original master of fine fashions in SL. Once you get really serious about detail, you’ll want to get these and have a deep look.

• Second Life tutorials – By Robin Sojourner AKA Robin Wood. She has a really elegant, organized approach. Check out her fantasy art as proof! She’s mentioned that she’ll be adding more to this site, so keep watching, and check out her posts on the forums too, like her fab T-Shirt Template — learn how to make wrinkles without photo-sourcing! Download also her UV templates.

• Second Life Clothing Tutorials – By Minmo Dreadlow. A Simple tutorial on how to create a t-shirt using photoshop, or turn your own clothing into secondife clothes with photoshop. Offers several free shirt fabrics as well.

• Tutorials – By Nicola Escher. The presentation of these tuts is aesthetically pleasing. These have been newly updated for ‘07, and are also available in German, Dutch (Nederlands), Chinese, and Norwegian translations. Nicola says: “I’ve got Spanish and Italian on the way.” Very easy to follow, effectively illustrated. These elegant episodes include:

Introduction to Creating Clothing Creating Your First Shirt Alpha Channel Primer

Creating A Tattoo Creating A Mannequin

• T-Shirt Tutorial – By Nephilaine Protagonist, head of PixelDolls, quality in quantity for the avatar. Here she shows how to make a shirt. It’s a bit hard to read, but follow the directions and keep at it. Note: the tutorial is currently missing, but Nephi left a note that she’s planning to rewrite it.

• Chosen Few’s SL forum posts – This sci-fi expert is a texturing databank. Watching him answer questions is like a cross between classical opera and a current events talk show, without the boring parts. The often-messy structure of the SL Forums has ironically lent itself well to his clarity. Just read his posts!

• SLUniverse Knowledge Base – By Cristiano Midnight. More than just clothing tutorials, this is a whole potpourri of SLinfo you’ll want to plunge into.

• Tattoo Creation – By Amber Stonecutter. Tattoos may be likened to clothes that are harder to take off, at least offline. The magic unfolds in this thread. Amber had never made a tutorial before, and in response to Flugel inquiring, she spontaneously cooked one up — pictures and all! She even got props from Chosen and Robin.

• Natalia’s SL Diary – By Natalia Zelmanov. A listing of over 30 tutorials from her blog, including clothing, hair, jewelry, particle, shoes, and techniques. Here are some highlights:

Creating Clothes with GIMP Creating Clothes with Photoshop Creating Flexi Skirts Creating Jewelry

Creating Particle Effects Creating Prim Hair Creating Prim Shoes (Heels)

• How to make SL clothes in the Gimp – By Seshat Czeret. The first in a series of SL clothing tutorials. The series starts with preparation, and continues with making a simple t-shirt and adding highlights and shadows. Much more is planned.