How to create clothes and how to make money.

[Will3240]

Hi. How do i create clothes and how do i make money in the game am totally new to the game?

[Rolig Loon]

1 hour ago, Will3240 said:

How do i create clothes

With a great deal of artistic skill and practice using 3D modeling software like Blender, Maya, or 3D  Max.  If you browse through the forum archives in the Mesh forum and the Building & Texturing forum, you will find links to some tutorials to get you started.  If you are new to creating mesh objects, don't be surprised by how steep the learning curve is. I'd suggest starting out with making things that are much less complicated than clothing.

1 hour ago, Will3240 said:

how do i make money

That's a very different question. It involves not only having a product that can compete with the quality of what other people are selling, but also a familiarity with the SL economic system.  Plus luck and patience.  Frankly, creators in SL can almost always earn much more money doing exactly the same thing in RL than they can earn in SL.  We create because it's fun and we like having an outlet for our creative work -- a way to share what we love doing with other SL residents.  Earning a little money is certainly nice, but that is not enough to justify our time as creators.  (I'm discounting those many "creators" who do not actually make anything themselves but merely rip off things that they find somewhere else and upload them to SL.  I assume you are not one of them.  I'm also discounting the handful of well-established creators who have spent years building clientele and a reputation for excellent, high quality work.  It takes ages and determination to reach that point.)

If you are mostly interested in having L$, the easiest, fastest way to do it is to buy L$ on the LindeX.  All you need to do is register a verified payment method (credit card or PayPal account) and use your coffee and lunch money every once in a while.  You can live like a king on what it costs to buy a cheeseburger, fries, and a soda.

[Lindal Kidd]

Hello Will, and welcome to Second Life!

I'll try to answer those questions, but first, some general advice.

Don't worry about making money in Second Life, at least not right away.  Go to some freebie stores, pick up group gifts, try your hand at some hunts.  And meet people and explore!  When you do feel it's time to spend money on some things, buy some $L with a credit card or a verified PayPal or Skrill account.  I suggest buying your $L at first, because it's a lot better use of your time than trying to earn it in world.  Most Second Life jobs pay a lot less per hour than you could make at a minimum wage job in Real Life.  Most of the people who make anything like significant amounts of money in SL do so by doing just what you are proposing...making and selling content.  But this too is a risky proposition.  You can invest hundreds or thousands of hours into learning to make quality clothing, and still find that you can't make nearly as much money as you had hoped.  I, and many others, advise people looking to get into a business in SL to find something that you love doing for its own sake...that way, at least you'll have fun doing it, whether it's financially successful or not.

Now, some specifics on clothing.

In the olden days, all clothing was simply textures...templates painted in Photoshop or GIMP and then applied directly to the classic avatar body.  Textures are still in use today, and may even be about to see a resurgence due to a new feature that LL will release soon, "bakes on mesh."  This will allow us to apply clothing and skin textures to mesh body parts.

Today, most clothing is made from "mesh".  Mesh is simply our term for any 3D model that is created in a program outside SL, then imported.  Perhaps the most popular program for this is Blender, because it's free.  But if you happen to have a copy of Maya or LightWave 3D on hand, you can use them, too.  You can build your clothing object, texture it, and rig it to an avatar skeleton (so it will bend and move with the avatar) in Blender.  A 2-D paint program like GIMP will be needed to create the textures.

Many clothing creators don't actually have the skills to make the 3D models.  If you have GIMP skills, but not Blender skills, you can buy full-permission, untextured mesh clothing from a Blender wizard, then apply your own custom textures, and re-sell the finished product.

There are lots of tutorials on the web and on YouTube on how to use GIMP and Blender.  These are both complex programs and are not learned in a day, so be prepared for some months of practice, unless you already have these skills.  Here are some search phrases to get you started:  "Second Life Clothing Templates"  "Clothing Tutorial Second Life"  "Learn Blender"  "Upload Mesh Second Life"  "Avastar" 

Once you have created some things that amaze your friends, you can try selling them.  Start by setting up an online store on the Marketplace.  This way, you don't have the expense of buying or renting land for an in-world store.  If you find you're making sales, then it's time to set up a place in world!

[Will3240]

Am a paid member of SL.

[LittleMe Jewell]

18 minutes ago, Will3240 said:

Am a paid member of SL.

Well then you will already receive 300 L$ every week from LL (and a 1500 L$ bonus after 45 days), which will help get you started on your SL ventures.

[Nalates Urriah]

A couple of things...  First, if you are thinking of SL as a game, you going to get confused. There are no goals, levels, or standardized ways of doing things to achieve some pre established thing.

SL is a virtual world platform... meaning it is a foundation for other things. The original intent for SL was to be a game fast-prototyping environment, the tool used to quickly build games. There are plenty of games within SL. But, the 'players' (users) made SL more of a community than a game.

You'll find considering whether SL is a game or not and just what it actually is, is controversial and often hotly debated. Most of the people that have been around more than 1 or 2 years don't think of it as a game. They think of it as SL, a unique virtual world where they can do anything they can think of... well, almost.

Second, clothes making changes drastically every so often as the tech of computers and virtual worlds advances. We are in a mesh phase, which is a concept peculiar to SL, and that may change toward the end of this year as new features come out, i.e., Bakes-On-Mesh (BoM) and Animesh. We are unsure how clothes making will change. But, BoM has the potential to radically change things. We'll have to wait to see how users decide to use it... or not.

That change is coming is a reason to take your time in deciding what you want to do. You can skim the tutorials on making system clothes, rigged clothes, and fitted mesh clothes. These are three different ways of making clothes. Soon we will have a hybrid fourth type which I'll call fitted-system-like mesh as we don't have a good new phrase yet that people understand.

None of the clothes making is overly complex. But, there is a lot to know to make good lag-free clothes. So, take your time.