Smooth Hammerer

I agree that it appears to be a top secret art when it comes to creating avatar skins for SL use. I have also noticed that people tend to rip off the models made with Poser or Daz and then export them and cleanup the textures in photoshop or Gimp. I think your best approach to learning the proper technique is to start with some of the non human avatars and play around with them. There seems to be a lot more public domain skins for non-human, skins which will allow you to get a basic understanding of rigging and also UV textures and how they work for avatar skins. There are also a couple of inworld classes that will help you. Finally there are a couple of the default avatar skins that were done awhile back. These are important as they are public domain and made to be modified and studied. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Creation_Portal https://sites.google.com/site/another/resources http://avatartoolbox.info/