Mesh texturing and designing full perm objects

[AmethystxMoonstone]

Hi!  I've been on SL a few years.  I am an artist in RL and want to learn all I can using and developing my skills in SL.  I've been researching, watching youtube vids, reading the forums etc all I can lately.  I tried working with Blender and Avastar.  I am well versed in Photoshop and would like to do some more work there as I continue to learn.

The reason I am posting here today is to gain some insight to point me in the right direction.  I have bought a few full perm mesh items.  I would like to work on designing and texturing these, compiling themed objects and selling them on the marketplace for art/deco, or even designing buildings or skyboxes etc.  It seems like this is something people do?  I'd love to get my creativity going on something accessible to me, as I realize creating mesh myself is quite difficult for where I'm at.

Are there any guides or write ups where I can read some more info on this topic?  Specifically, I want to learn how to really design these pre built mesh items to make them my own, and how to put multiple objects together.  Do I texture the files in photoshop, then apply textures and combine objects in world?  Then how do I save them as I want them to show up on marketplace?

Thank you so much!!!

[Chic Aeon]

This page is old but has some good info with photos: http://nakedmesh.blogspot.com/p/mesh-faqs.html

Basically you add textures to EITHER the Ambient Maps or the UV maps (sometimes both are supplied, sometimes not so read the description of what you are buying. 

You can add textures you make or buy and yes, you then link them inworld. You cannot link them any other way unless you are making the mesh yourself (hence your combined object will likely be higher land impact than a combined object joined in a 3D program and THEN uploaded. It looks the same however so that's the good part. 

You should add a "creator prim" (often a shadow but could just be an invisible prim that is the root prim ) so that your name is on the object rather than the full perm creators name. This is NOT cheating, this saves the full perm creators a lot of hassle as folks that want to know about the item will see by inspecting that they bought it from you. 

If you don't know how to link objects, then you will want to learn about prims and how to manipulate basic objects in world. For that there are schools which are listed in the official destination guide or you could type in something like "building classes" in search.

Hope that helps some.