SL beginners: making clothes/one

In Another Place I made a long blog about making clothes in SL, and I can see now that I crammed too much information into a single article. I am planning to make this mini-series on making clothes in four parts. Part one: using in-world appearance tools. Part two: using graphics programmes to make and upload clothing. Part three: using flexi prims and attachments to make composite clothes. Part four: shoes. If there’s anything else you’d like me to post about, don’t hesitate to make suggestions to me in world via IM or through the comments.

Using the in-world appearance tools to make clothes has the advantage of being quick and easy. The disavantage of it is that you can only use certain shapes and finishes. Clothes which have beeen made in an external graphics program can have transparent sections wherever you want them, and can have detailing like buttons and zips drawn onto the texture as part of the creative process. Clothes made using the in world appearance menu only won’t have those sorts of details.

If you are already making objects using the in world tools, a lot of the the processes in making clothes will be familiar to you. The conventions for choosing textures and colours are very like those for objects, except that you cannot repeat textures or stretch them for clothing.

Before you start 1: In order to make clothes using the in-world menu, you will need textures to use. These are pictures of cloth or fabric, which you can use to make your clothing. You have a few already in your inventory, and in your library. There are a number of places in-world to get free textures: the Gnubie store, and Stillman Bazaar are two which come to mind immediately. There are also many texture stores in SL.  Sometimes textures will deploy into folders in your inventory, and sometimes they come in boxes. If they come in a box, you will need to have dragged the box out of your inventory, opened and transferred the contents to your inventory in order to use the textures.

There are many places online to get free textures. You will need to save these to your computer, and then upload them into SL, which will cost $10 lindens per texture.

You need to know that some textures tile, that is they can be repeated across something without any join showing, and some textures do not tile. Sometimes that can be deliberate: if you have a texture with a shadow at the top or bottom, the texture will not tile vertically because you will see a hard line where the shadowing ends and the next repeat begins, for example. Some plain textures will tile very well even in parts of repeats. Others are very difficult to use well. Learning which will work and which won’t for clothing is something that’s hard to teach except by experience and experiment.
Before you start 2: save your avatar’s current appearance into a folder to ensure that you do not lose it. To do this right click your avatar, choose appearance, then choose the make outfit button at the bottom of the appearance menu. Click into the boxes for skin, shape, hair and eyes along the left hand side if you wish to keep all the elements of your appearance together in a folder. Unclick the boxes for anything you don’t want to migrate into a new folder. Click to rename your new folder (you can also opt to have the different items rename to match) and then save it.

It took me some time to realise that it was possible to make myself new clothes using the appearance menu. Right click on your avatar and choose appearance, and a bewildering array of choices appears before your eyes. Concentrate on making a pair of trousers and a top first. When you select “pants” in the menu on the left, your current pair of pants, if worn, will appear in the pictures on the right of the window if you are allowed to edit them. If the pants you are wearing are modifyable, you will be able to change anything about them — the texture, the colour, the length … but you will not be shown as the creator of the new pants if you do this, and you will lose the current version of those pants. A window telling you that you can’t modify this object will appear if they are not modifyable.

Either way, select to take them off using the button at the bottom, and then to make a new pair, if you wish to make a new pair of trousers and have yourself appear as the creator. When you choose to make a new pair of trousers, you are asked if you wish to wear the new item. Say yes to this. You will be wearing a white pair of trousers.

You can see two boxes in the middle of the appearance window, between the headings on the left and the pictures on the right. The top box is labelled fabric, and you need to click on this to choose the fabric that you wish to use for your trousers. A texture picker window will open up, looking like this:

All the folders containing textures or pictures will appear in the list to the right of the texture picker window. You may need to click to open the one you want, and then can scroll down to find the texture you want. Select it, and the trousers will show the texture in the window, and the texture will change on the trousers. You can click back into the fabric window if you want to try a different fabric, but remember that the versions will only be saved if you save them, if you change them before saving that variation will be replaced with the next.

In addition to using a fabric texture, you can add colour. This can sometimes provide unusual and attractive effects. You may lose subtlety and contrast, but on the other hand the right colour can hide up variations in shadowing and colour and conceal defects. Click into the colour/tint box to open the colour picker.

Once you are happy with your texture and colour, you can begin to adjust the trousers using the sliders for the windows on the right. Most of them are self-explanatory, and allow you to see the effects of moving the sliders from one extreme to the other. For trousers, you can choose the length, how high they come, looseness, how flared they should be, how wrinkled. don’t be afraid to play with the sliders — this is the only way to learn what the effects of moving them are, for yourself.

Once you are happy with the result, click save as, and name your trousers. I would advise you to try to be as descriptive as possible, because searching through dozens of “my new pants” in the inventory is a very boring game! “My bluegreen velvet long pants” will be far more useful. Make sure that if you make changes and want to keep the original, you always”save as” rather than saving.

For avatars who wear skirts regularly, learning to make trousers is essential, because wearing a pair of trousers in the right colour will avoid show through of the avatar’s legs through the skirt. I really don’t understand why SL creators who make clothes don’t routinely make a pair of undertrousers for their skirts and dresses. Some do, an awful lot more don’t. You can do this, however, and if necessary use just the plain texture and a colour to do it. It looks so much better when your bare skin isn’t showing through. If you want to make a pair of undertrousers of the right length, wear the skirt you are planning to wear over them, and then you can adjust the length of the trousers exactly to fit.

Making your own clothing in SL, even if you never wear it, helps you to understand the way that layering of clothing in SL works. Let’s try a shirt next. Click shirt in the list on the left, and if you are already wearing one, click to take it off, and then to create a shirt.

Again a white shirt will appear on your avatar, once you have OK’d wearing the item you are making. The routine is the same as for the trousers: choose the texture and colour, and then adjust the length of the arms and the length of the shirt. Remember that with the upper body, you have three layers to play with, undershirt, shirt and jacket. You can add gloves and a skirt to a shirt or jacket too. Things to know are that the layers appear in logical sequence on the body. Thus a jacket will always be the top layer, if worn. A jacket can be worn completely open at the front, whereas a shirt or undershirt cannot. You can make a coat using the jacket for the top and a skirt for the bottom section, and both can be open or closed. If you use a lacey texture for an undershirt, it is possible to make it look like a trim to a shirt or jacket layer. Experiment!

Once you have something that you think you might want to keep, do save it by using “save as”. If you revise it and decide you like the revision better, you can always delete it, but it’s hard to retrace your steps if you haven’t saved. Finally, once you have finished making clothes, organise them into folders in your inventory. You can right click on the clothing folder and choose to make new folder, and rename it. Each person organises his or her inventory in a different way, but I organise outfits by name, and then individual pieces of clothing in colour folders. Whatever you prefer, it makes sense to organise it while “top3 green” still means something to you. Even if you aren’t keen on the results you achieve, hold on to them for part three of this series, when we will be making attachments, which could be added to a plain shirt or jacket and transform them….