is there work for a clothing modeler in SL?

[TigerShark Au]

Heyas

I'm just starting to look into mesh for Second. I've been making Poser clothing for mmm more than 12 years now.  Are there any shops hiring 3d modelers or commissioning work ? 

I also do uvmapping, texturing and all that. I just havent messed about with setting the bones and exporting to .dae format for SL yet. 

I'm not interested in running or managing a store and dealing with customers. I just want to make things.  Would I be better off finding a store manager to deal with all that and just go ahead and start a small store?

thanks for any info,

Tiger

[Rolig Loon]

I can sympathize with your desire to avoid customers.  Just making stuff is a lot more fun.  You can certainly find a partner somewhere who would be interested in handling the retail side of the business.  Just put a note (or several notes) in the InWorld Employment forum and stand back.  A disturbing amount of the mesh clothing that's in shops today is being sold by people who are making it from kits, without a clue about how it's actually designed.  The result is a lot of ill-fitting, vertex-heavy clothing with mismatched alpha layers. I'm sure an enterprising shop owner would rather sell higher-qualilty items if you were to make them.

The problem that you will face is that mesh clothing is now priced low enough that it's hard to get paid enough to justify your time -- especially if you have to split the profits with a partner. In order to make any money, you may need to open your own shop anyway.  Fortunately, that's a rather painless thing to do, especially if you sell entirely through Marketplace instead of maintaining a shop in world. 

[Medhue Simoni]

It's really not a big deal being a merchant in SL, but there are issues with mesh clothing in SL that you won't have in Poser. SL doesn't have a proper fitting system to make the clothing fit all avatars well. LL did create a system, but it doesn't work very well, so it makes the whole process much more work than it should be.

What program do you use to make the clothing?

[TigerShark Au]

I model in c4d, map in UVlayout, group and zone in UVMapper pro, AO in Xnormal and texture in pshop. I presume I'd do the rigging and collada export from either c4d or poser, depending.

I've been reading up on the sizing thing .. there are 'standard' sizes and then theres sizes for the various and sundry mesh bodies out there. So about as consistant as rl women fashion sizing *lol*  Making the differrent sizes ought not to be a huge issue ..  I can make morphs in poser on the av base and transfer those to get the sizes in the clothes, then export each one.  Or set up magnets to size the clothes. Either way, easy, if not exactly fun. 

Tiger