Day 202: Robin (Sojourner) Wood's Texture Tutorials and Clothing Templates

Ive recently wrote a couple clothing tutorials for GIMP and Photoshop. One very important tool in making clothes for Second Life is the clothing texture template.



Second Life uses a flat texture file (typically 512x512 pixels) and "maps" different parts of it onto your avatar. Thats why when you use generic textures, they tend to look stretched out on your avatar.

The clothing template is a guide that tells you which part of a texture file maps to which part of the avatar. This gives you control over the appearance of the texture on your avatar.

There are 3 popular sets of clothing templates for Second Life: Linden Labs, Robin Wood, and Chip Midnight. The templates from Robin Wood and Chip Midnight are more detailed than the ones from Linden Labs. All of these templates are available free of charge from their creators!

Robin Wood (her SL name is Robin Sojourner) is a long-time resident of Second Life. Many people, including me, use her clothing texture templates to make their clothes.

Robin Wood has templates in 4 different formats. The one I typically use is the "layered Photoshop (.psd) Files". This set of templates would work in most graphics programs, including Photoshop, GIMP, and Paintshop Pro.



Whats really cool is that Robin Wood has a Texture Tutorial site within Second Life. You can find some wonderful resources for making clothes, and for working with prims in general.



First, the clothing stuff :)

Robin has an exhibit about her clothing templates at the Texture Tutorial site. You can get a free set of her clothing texture templates as clothing items that you can wear.

BTW, if you have not tried it, I would recommend that you make at least one clothing item out of her clothing texture templates yourself. Just download the template from her website, save it as a Targa (or JPEG file), upload it to Second Life, and put it on a clothing item (like a shirt). You will get a really good understanding of how these templates work by going through these steps. I wrote a tutorial previously on how to do this.



See, with the right accessories and pose, even clothing templates look good :) Maybe we should have a Miss Clothing Template Pageant...:P

OK seriously, I cannot emphasize how important it is to WEAR your clothing templates. I still do it all the time when trying to decide where to make cuts and adjustments.



Let me give you a simple example. Let's say I want to make a short sleeve top. I want to cut the sleeve where the red circle is (or maybe I want to add some designs at that position).

Because I am wearing the template, I can tell that I want to cut the sleeve at the solid line. The solid line is in between the purple band at the top and the pinkish band at the bottom.



All I have to do is find the corresponding solid line on the clothing texture template. Now I know precisely where to make the cut (or where to add in that extra design element).

Cool, isnt it? :)



Robin also has a number of other exhibits that discuss transparency, the many faces of a prim, animating texture, and UV maps on a prim. This is an excellent resource if you do a lot of work with prims, along with the tutorials at Idea City (I wonder who wrote the blog entry about Idea City? :P)

If you are a builder or clothing designer, definitely come check out Robin (Sojourner) Wood's Texture Tutorial site. Click on Search, select Places, and enter "texture tutorials" as the keyword. The SLURL is Livingtree (136,122,24) (Thanks for the update, Barbara!).

P.S. Pyxel has put together a tutorial on how to combine Robin's and Chip's templates here: Combining SL Clothing Templates. This will create the ultimate clothing template for those of you who love the details :)

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