Fashion shows have always been popular in Second Life, and with the current generation of highly talented fashion designers bringing a unique — and very realistic! — touch to high-quality clothes in SL, it’s interesting to see how, in a little less than a week, people have been talking about “rules of conduct” on a fashion show.

In fact, they’re much less “rules of conduct” but guidelines of what you’re allowed to wear or not when attending those shows. So far, so good (fashion shows in Maoist China weren’t a pleasure to attend…), but strangely enough, those “guidelines” are based on an incorrect perception of the hugest problem on those shows: lag.

While it’s undeniable that all highly attended events are laggy — it’s a limitation of the technology — I was surprised to see that almost all “rules” are based on very old limitations of the SL technology, which plagued us in 2003-2005, but that have since then be “fixed” by Linden Lab, as both the client and the server software have dramatically improved.

Improved, yes, but the lag is still with us. And, in a desperate attempt to fight down lag, people are coming up with ancient “recipes” for fixing lag — unaware that they’re not really helping out, but just repeating old myths, that simply don’t reflect the state-of-the art of LL’s technology these days. Lag will remain with us for many more years, but not for the same reasons we had it in 2003-2005.

Read Brace Coral’s, Hamlet Au’s or Ana Lutetia’s blog posts on fashion show lag… and then let’s take a look at those myths, why they are still popular enough to be part of the “rules of conduct”, and, well, what we can really do about fighting lag using the technology of 2008.

And let’s enjoy those fashion shows! (more…)

Last year, American Apparel, a popular US clothes brand, opened a shop in Second Life with a lot of positive press. Avatars could get for a few L$ relatively faithful replicas of their clothes in SL. Their project lasted almost a year or so, and then, as they finished their experiment, it was shut down (with a promise to return in the feature).

The media interested in reporting all sort of doomsday predictions about SL was obviously eager to know the reasons why American Apparel went away. Was the experiment a failure? Didn’t they reach their goal? Were they really expecting to sell more SL clothes than the popular SL-only brands? What, in fact, was their purpose?

We won’t probably know more than what was officially announced. Still, although I visited the SL shop, I never thought much about it. It was “just another brand”.

For about half a year, we also have Bershka in-world, a similar clothes brand, popular in several European countries. What is the difference in their approach? Will they also go away like American Apparel did?

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In my never-ending quest of looking for fashionable improvements (believe me, it can entertain me for ages ) I found out a cute thing about some fancy shoes: they have nice, realistic-sounding, heel-clicking sounds.

Sure, I know it’s a “novelty” item — it scares people off the first time you start nagging them with the clicking sounds, then they begin to make silly comments, so it’s also a great way to break some ice!

In any case, this was one of the many things that I imagined that it would be immensely popular, and that after a few months, every shoe I bought had heel sounds.

Alas, it didn’t happen. Only a few designers give that as an option! Why? I investigated…

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Every girl who tried a flexiskirt once (how can you resist not buying them…?) knows about the problem: they look fantastic when standing up, but completely nasty when sitting down.

The image here shows what happens. Flexiskirts, unlike mesh-based skirts (also known as ugly Linden skirts) simply don’t follow your avatar’s skeleton, but gravity. There is nothing you can do about it: the skirt will always be “inside” the chair where you sit on.

Or is there a solution?…

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… you don’t know where the fashionable shops are!

Now, thanks to Ana Lutetia, you’ll know.

Thanks, Ana, for providing this crucial information

I came by chance across this interesting item on SL Exchange: AvPainter - SL Clothes Design and Preview Tool by Pootle Trollop.

I don’t have Windows, so I haven’t tried it out, but the author claims it’s possible to upload a .tga file for your clothing and apply it visually to a polygon mesh representing your avatar (this mesh is freely available from Second Life’s website). This should be able to preview the way the clothes fit in a much better way; and for the cost of around US$10, it’s definitely not an expensive tool to have if you are seriously interested in doing perfect-fitting clothes and tired of doing it “the hard way”, that is, uploading to SL, spending L$10, watch if it works, tweak it, upload it again…

You can download a demo of AvPainter here.

Great work, Pootle

Chip Midnight is often in the forums telling people how to design perfectly-matched clothes. His “secret” is developing wonderful new templates, based both on Linden Lab’s™ own, and on images he has captured in-world to understand where the many avatar polygons join together.

This uppr body template is an attempt of using both Chip Midnight’s templates (his layers are marked CMFF) with the rest of the “standard” templates. I also added one layer for designing female underwear.

Notice that these templates are high-resolution - ie. 1024 x 1024 instead of the SL standard 512 x 512. This means that you should do your work using the higher resolution - which gives much better results when skewing and rotating your textures - and save them back to a 512 x 512 TARGA file when you’re ready to upload. That’s a nifty trick from the master clothiers!

Enjoy the template, and thank Chip for all his work with the templates and the kindness of giving it away!

Upper Body Template (revised)

Well this is probably a very silly concept, but here it goes…

Good clothes design in Second Life is actually very cheap! Some of the best designers (like Von) do amazing creations and sell them for as cheap as L$ 150 (you can search for “House of Von” in the Find Places and teleport there to look at her most excellent clothing store - and there are bargains there!). In some cases, for a little more, you can even order your own outfit! And an “exclusive design” will probably be around L$500 or so. When you compare this with the price of getting a small plot (perhaps 10 times as much for just 512 sq. ft.), you see what I mean.

So, is there a place for second- or third-rate clothes designers at all?

Well, here comes my ShareWear concept: give your clothes away! And make them modifyable and copyable. However, ask the new owner something in return, as a donation - or a rating. Even a rating can be cool, it just costs L$ 1 and you go up in the rankings and improve your weekly stipendium from the Lindens!

Just by giving clothes away there will always be people who’re going to pick them up and remember your name. Who knows, some may even order you a custom-made design. The top clothes designers are always busy and this could be your chance after all…

So, how did I do it?

Actually I’m no designer, much less a clothes designer. What I did was to copy some designs from La Redoute’s online website. This is a French catalog shop, selling their clothes all over Europe. One thing I found out is that they don’t have only models wearing clothes - no, they sometimes have a front picture of the clothes themselves in front of a neutral background.

What I did was to get those images (they have reasonable quality), put them into Photoshop and copy them over the clothes templates you get from Linden’s site. In many cases that’s all I did! Except for some tinkering - stretching and slight distortions - and retouching (to make sure I got the bleed zones right), there is not much else to do!

As a matter of fact, the results can be quite impressive, as you get real-looking textures from this method. In other cases the results are not so spectacular.

Of course, the choice of the clothes you’re wearing also helps a lot :-) This particular outfit comes from my own line of ideas for “casual wear” - nothing too fancy, but also not too out-of-style. The French catalog of La Redoute has some lines exactly in that style (yes, they’ve got a few clothes for going to parties and nightclubs!).

You can grab a copy of this outfit either by getting in touch with me or with Dee McLean. Dee is famous in SL for offering all kinds of things and she generously carries all my clothes to give them away!

Read also about my concept on ShareWear.