There's a lot to learn when you arrive in world, and most people don't get to wondering about clothes making until they have been in-world a few weeks, by which time they may have left greeters and mentors far behind them. This is a very basic guide to clothes making, but I recommend that you check out the design and textures forum, read the detailed tutorials which are linked to there, and ask questions on that forum if you have problems.

The first confusing thing about clothing, is that it is possible to make clothes entirely in world, using the appearance menu, and it is possible to import clothes, using texture upload. If you use the latter method, however, you will still need to make the actual item using appearance. Let me explain....

Tip 1: Save your appearance

Before you begin: it is always a good idea to save your appearance in case of accidents. Right click your avatar, and choose appearance, then click the make outfit button at the bottom of the menu. Check the boxes for hair, skin, shape, eyes and then entitle the saved appearance something like: Saving Any

Avatar's appearance Aug 2006. Please note that you have the option to rename everything in the folder with this title. Bear in mind that anything no copy will migrate to the new folder you are making, which may make your clothing folders a bit more complicated. The advantage of sending everything to one folder is that you can drag it onto your avatar and get back to this appearance any time.

Making clothes in world

To make an item of clothing in-world, you need to right click your avatar, and choose appearance. When the appearance menu comes up, you will see a list of clothing on the lower left hand side of the menu. To make a shirt, for example, click on shirt. If you aren't wearing one, or you are already wearing one, and it is modifiable, you will see the pictures for the various sliders displayed on the shirt page of the appearance menu. If you see a grey page, with "you do not have permission to modify this clothing" then you are wearing one which isn't modifiable.

Now then ... if you are wearing a shirt made by someone else and it is modifiable, then if you use it as the basis for your new shirt, you won't show up as the creator. To make your own shirt, you need to take off the shirt you are wearing and choose to make a new one.

If you are wearing a shirt by someone else and it is not modifiable, you will have to take it off in order to make a new one of your own.

If you are wearing a jacket layer, then that will show up over the top of your shirt layer. If you want to be able to see your shirt layer, you will have to take it off. Click on jacket, take it off, and then click back to shirt.

Once you choose to make a new shirt, a white untextured shirt will show up on your avatar. You will notice that there are two blank windows, one for a texture and one for colour. You can choose a texture out of your texture folder or the library, to make a shirt, and, depending on the type of texture, this may be quite successful. I have a velvet texture I have used a lot, which works pretty well on clothing. You can lay colour over it by using the colour picker too.

To change the shape, you are limited to the sliders available on the shirt layer. This means that you cannot choose to have transparent parts to the shirt, unless the texture you have used already has transparent sections, like a lace texture. You also can't introduce detail like collars and lapels and buttons unless these are already on the texture you have used.

The other big disavantage to using a plain texture is that you can't scale it - the texture is the way it is, with mismatching seams and over or undersized pattern repeats. Some textures work better than others, which you can best discover with some experimentation in world.

Once you have made something you want to keep, click on save as at the bottom of the menu, name it with something that will make you remember what it is -- I recommend using your name or an abbreviation in the title on your own items to help with identifying and locating them -- and then save it.

Making clothes using a graphics program

In order to make an item of clothing outside SL, you will need a graphics program such as Photoshop, PaintShopPro or the free graphic program GIMP. I highly recommend that you use Chip Midnight's clothes texture templates.

It takes a while to understand that when you upload a texture, a different part of it will be used depending upon whether you are making a skirt, or a shirt, or a pair of trousers. There are SL templates which give you this information, but don't give you a lot of information, or Chip's templates which give you a lot of other information like joining points and seams.

The other area where people find clothing difficult is in achieving transparent layers. There is a procedure for saving alpha layers which has to be conformed to, and then the texture has to be saved as a tga file in order for it to retain its transparency. There is a LOT of information about this on the design and textures forum, and people are always happy to help if you need it.

When you have made a texture, you can upload it to SL. You do get the option to be able to see how it will look on an avatar, before you have to commit to the $10 linden upload fee. Bear in mind that once you have used your texture for a piece of clothing, in order to include transparent parts, or detailing such as buttons, you will not be able to choose a separate texture for the actual fabric of the clothing - that has to be on the texture you have uploaded too. you can choose to lay colour over your texture. The advantage of including the fabric in the texture you import, is that you can scale fabric patterns to fit the template.

Make your piece of clothing in the usual way, except that you need to choose your clothing texture as the texture.

Finally, some reassurance

Be reassured that it does take time to understand how things work. Most people fail with their first alpha upload. Some people (looks at the ceiling and whistles) don't get it for months. I still say that my PSP was sulking. The best advice I can give you is to keep experimenting and reading the advice on the forums.