I’ve been creating content in Second Life for well over three years now. I’ve built things out of prims, I’ve made my own shapes, I’ve sculpted, I’ve scripted I’ve even made my own hair and shoes. I’ve animated a bit (and I just don’t have the knack for really good stuff there).. but I’ve textured and built, and done just about every kind of content creation there was in Second Life.. except one.

Making Clothes.

Making clothes in Second Life, is a thankless job. The market is saturated with lots of “simple garbage” and there are some very skilled creators who, because the market is saturated, can’t charge what their work is worth. In many cases, it’s a true labor of love, and people seem to create clothes in SL with little thought towards making a profit.

Today, I am a clothes maker, and I can tell you.. it is tedious and agravating. Aside from all the usual complaints, about how uneven the mesh is, how hard it is to even get seams to look “good enough”.. I have to tell you something I didn’t really expect.

Making the same outfit in 12 colours.. that’s not “just” 12 or 24 uploads.

I just finished uploading 201 files. that’s TWO HUNDRED AND ONE.

I started with the idea of making 12 simple catsuits. Black, Red, Blue, Pink, etc..  There are things, you just don’t know, going into clothing creation, like the fact that the pants and underpants layers don’t stop in the same places. Or the fact that the undershirt layer continues further down the arm than the shirt layer. That you can’t just use the same “torso” texture for shirt, undershirt, and gloves.. when I was done, like I said, I had 201 textures to upload.

Tomorrow begins the project of making a clothing item, and modding it 11 times, then making the next clothing item,lather, rinse, and repeat.. until the undershirts, pants, stockings, and gloves, and everything else has it’s proper textures, proper filenames, proper fit, and proper permissions…

I’ve already spent a week just finalizing the photoshop files, saving off the 201 tga files, testing them on the beta grid, finding my errors, re-doing them, etc etc.. Clothes makers in SL are under appreciated.. and very often, a good deal more work goes into something than may first be apparent. Tomorrow will be another tedious, repetitive day.. and then I can experience the joy of making 36 or so vendors.

As I approach the finishing line on this project, I look forward not so much to being done, as to no longer being working on it any more.

Sunday October 18, 2009 - 4:36am | Filed under: Blog