Scooter Hollow

Have you tried using Smart UV Project?

Well, if someone has shadows turned on in their graphics settings, anything under a roof will be darker. You could also set all the textures to be colored dark grey.

Shared media is just opening up a web browser inside the world. And like when you look at a transparent image in a web browser, what you (usually?) see is white, not the desktop behind your browser.

I would imagine anything close to realistic hair/fur would be way too complex a model...even just the flat layers used for heads can be pretty complex. The only reasonable way to go is with texturing.

I just checked, and they still have 8 for download up until May 20th. There's plenty of other places to download it though, CNet goes back to SketchUp 3. Just fyi.

You can continue to use Sketchup 8 for commercial purposes, which is the last version from before the TOS change. Last I checked it could do pretty much all the same stuff, except open Warehouse models made in the latest version (which seems to be a small amount).

Rigging mesh is possibly a completely different issue. You don't need to worry about that at all if someone already has the mesh in mind for you to work on. In that case all you need is the skin texture. Adding a tattoo to it may be difficult if the skin's been unwrapped or heavily distorted right where you want to place the tattoo at, but that depends on the skin and the tattoo. There might be software out there (Substance Painter maybe?) that would allow you to import the model and the texture and apply it without worrying about wrapping distortions.

Automatic weights is rarely the entire solution, you'll almost always need to clean it up manually. I mean, there wouldn't be a professional career out there in model rigging if one button did all the work. If manual rigging isn't working, it may not be done entirely correctly, although I would also suggest having the zipper and the top (jacket?) be made the same model. Having two different attachments move exactly the same way isn't neccesarily something I would bet on, even if they were weighted perfectly, especially for something like a zipper which looks wrong if it's even half an inch off.

You don't lose eye movements with mesh eyes, in fact you need to be careful with your weighting or your entire face might start wriggling around with eye movements.

If you're expecting to have more than 8 materials, or needing to move around parts individually, having separate meshes is the better (in same upload or otherwise). However, if you can put all of your materials on a single mesh, the object is easier to scale in-world, and for things like avatar attachments you'll have a much easier time attaching everything.

I think that's kind of a defeatist way of thinking of things. I guarantee you nobody sat down with any real modelling program on their first day of experimentation and immediately had it all figured out. The only way to become an expert at anything is with hours (days, weeks, months) of practice.

It'd be great if rigging mesh was as simple as a one-button click, 'parent with automatic weights', and boom, done, but it really, really isn't. That's just the first step, it's almost guaranteed that you'll have to manually clean up the weights yourself before it's usable. You've probably got your face rigged to your eyeballs or something.

I'll say that I do do a fair bit of initial construction in Sketchup (and the access to Warehouse models is nice too), but then I clean up the models in Blender before I import them. The Sketchup UI is a lot more intuitive for making shapes with and such, but before actually using the models, I need to take it into Blender to remove doubles, join surfaces into single objects, select and delete random floating edges, etc. I can also use Blender to do UV unwrapping for texturing, decimate to simplify the model, and such. Some things just need to be done entirely in blender though, like rigged mesh or certain shape manipulations. I'll agree that Blender is probably the most complicated software I've ever used, but it pretty much has to be. There's not a lot of getting around that it'll take...probably months...of practice to get good at.

There's a plugin out there for Gimp, but for paid tools I use Bitmap2Material (which I got during a steam sale). It's also possible to make one off of a 3d model of an object in Blender, if you have one, bit complicated though.

Unfortunately the only mesh that can really move naturally is rigged mesh worn by an avatar. The best you could do for animated mesh otherwise would be to have multiple mesh parts and use transparency for 'frames' of an animation, but it would certainly increase the mesh complexity a fair bit.