Tag Archives: Tutorials

On Various Subjects

Skin Design Tutorial

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Base Skin Color

This is a research and learning project for me. It will be a multi-part series as I work my way through it. The series will have the best of the information I find and the information I feel is important for a new skin artist, much of what others have left out as they covered the basics in their tutorials. The first article on skin design is: Skin Design – The Windlight Age

For a skin design it is often easier to work with a larger canvas/image. A 2048×2048 is reasonable. The templates others have made are mostly 1024×1024. You can save yourself some effort on you first attempt working at 1024. The larger sizes are easier to paint, IMO, and mistakes and paint strokes are minimized when reduced in size for use in-world. Reducing can help.

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Skin Design – The Windlight Age

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Skin Design – The Windlight Age

Nomine SKin – Raw Viewer Picture

I recently got interested in skin design… well facial tattoos really, that sort of forces one to look at skin design. This article is about the basic concepts and where to find great information on skins. It is my basic research work and learning as I begin to explore skin design.

When it comes to understanding skin there is the Ruth skin, the default skin one has when they first come into SL. It is pretty bland. The Ruth skin makes one look very cartoony. There are enough free skins around that anyone that cares about AV appearance can upgrade. Just takes a little looking around. Some great free skins are older models made by top designers. So, you can look good for free. Check out Freebies Beach for a good free or cheap skin. For those that want an anatomically correct skin look around Zindra. Many of the dance clubs have good free skins for their dancers and new patrons.

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Facial Expressions Tutorial

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This is something I found interesting. I’m sure many of us in Second Life have facial expression HUD’s (If you are new that is Heads Up Display – the control panels one attaches to their screen). Those work for some situations and photographs.

If one wants more expression, and sublte expressions, that can be done with changing your shape. Sound a bit scary? If you have tweaked your shape like I have for over a year now, making changes may not sound like fun. However one can back up their shape. There are several ways to do that. The two easy ones are copy the shape in inventory and via Appearance save it as a new shape. I use a name and date so I know which is the latest.

If you want to expreiment, check out Melanie Kidd’s tutorial on Grid Expectations: subtle facial expressions for Second Life

Dress Making and Color Matching

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Showing Prim and Clothes Color Mismatch

There are lots of tutorials on dress making. Yet, one of the things most have left out is color matching between prim clothes and … I guess AV clothes, the clothes one sees in the appearance menu. The image from Meara D shows the problem. Getting the two to match and blend together since Windlight has been a problem. While this may be old news to some of you, I just found it. What The Fug has a tutorial on just this problem. Also known as ‘WeHateWhatYourWearing’ blog. Snarky but fun.

I have loads of tight miniskirts (you know the ones) with a prim panel that does not match. Other prim skirts have the same problem. There is a fix. Even better there is a tutorial See Tinting Prims for Windlight.

There are lots of broken images on the page, at least for me. They are there, they just may not display. You can click most to see the larger image.