Avatar Skins

I suppose I should start at the Beginning..
An avatar is a representation of you in cyberspace. It can be anything from a simple graphic, (jpeg, png, tga file) or animated gif. to a sophisticated three dimensional digital being that you can control and move around in a virtual simulated world.

An avatar can be anything you imagine from a bowl of soup to a fire breathing Dragon. I won't go into 3d modeling too much, but if you click on the title abave the picture of Chip midnight's torso mesh it will bring you to wiki's explanation of meshing, and will give you a better idea of 3d models and the platform in which they exist.
What I make are called skins. I use mesh templates designed for use within Second Life, (an online virtual world, or Metaverse) and I sell them on SLX (Second Life Marketplace as well as on my own sim called Gothica Skins.

In world, as in the marketplace, the commerce is global and the currency is known as Lindens ~so $ look like this L$s.
lindens are bought sold and traded just like any other market place in the world, and their exchange is known as the Lindex.
There is no actual conversion until Lindens are cashed out through something like Paypal.
Avatar skins can be created in a multitude of photo enhancing or manipulating software that allows you to work with layers.
I work primarily in Adobe Photoshop & Gimp, but I also fall back on Corel and a simple 3d modeling software called Av Painter.

Chip's Texture maps are great for matching up the seams when overlaying, but for the purpose of skins, I use baked textures such as these, that are free downloads.

I take my own renders, (hand painted layers) and overlay them to form something that looks like this

I piece the layers together, touch up the seams in a 3d modeling software called Av paint, and then upload the final textures in tga format to Second Life and viola!

(Touching up seams in Av Paint.

This is my avatar, (Aire Xaris) wearing the skin I just created.

Content Creation for Second Life

When I stumbled across an ad in a forum about making extra money as a q&a person for an online meta verse four years ago, I had absolutely no clue what that was. The fact that it was on an adult site made me even more skeptical, as well as a bit Leary to even click on the link, but like a lot of things I had always experienced in life, that turned out not to have killed me, I became bored halfway through reading the directions and just closed my eyes and jumped ~ or in this case, clicked on the link.

Essentially, Red Light Center was a three dimensional social site, where people from all over the world could log onto a server, download a browser, and walk around a 3d representation of Amsterdam where sex drugs and rock n roll were the theme.
The problem was BUGS. The software was choppy at best, gamers would be tossed off the servers constantly and the graphics were crap.

I found out I could make a few extra bucks testing the software, and I really didn't need to know that much about the inner workings of how it actually functioned, essentially all I had to do was use the software for free and report on any bugs I came across in game.
The pay was minimal, and because the uploads and graphics sucked so bad, even creating components for these 3d representations of ourselves, (known as avatars), became tedious after a while.
I named my avatar AIRE (avatar information retrieval entity) pictured in the skin I made for her using Adobe Photoshop and Chip midnight's avatar Mesh templates.
In Second Life, (One of the largest online metaverses in the world) there are so many content providers, (artists who literally create these worlds known as sims), that we are assigned last names when creating our accounts and avatars.
My avatar there is called Aire Xais.

I found myself creating more avatar components in Second Life, than testing bugs in Utherverse, and I ended up deleting the 3d client altogether, opting to become a full time content provider in SL.

Objects in Second life are known as "Prims" or primitives. essentially it is a 3d object created in world that can be morphed or molded into just about anything you can imagine. these objects can be scripted to perform tasks such as fly, play media, resize themselves and stretch the imaginary boundaries of online physics.

Being the small minded idiot I was and still am ;), I was completely ecstatic when I created my first box- like object and manipulated a sound script to make it fart whenever another avatar came in contact with it. (I'm actually still kind of proud of that :)

But I was not cut out for the tedious and incredibly time consumimg art of learning and manipulating SL's scripting language, so I stuck with what I already knew ~ ART.

this is a scripted object in SL Kknown as Zoltar. You can click him on and he becomes animated just like a RL, (real life) pupet fortune teller you might see at a State Fair or Carnival, only fortunes where modified to fit the 3d world.

I began simply by uploading my artwork into world, and creating my own gallery, known as Gull gallery, for which this blog is named afetr. One of the first gallery showings I had featured some of my artwork and a friend of mine I had met while in Q&A forums back at utherverse, an artist and kindered spirit known as Spikey Velvet.

Gull Gallery promotion.

This too was an exersize in epic fail, 1) because just about everyone else in SL had some sort of an art gallery, and attracting RL artisits to pay for web space on a online metaverse was a hard sell, when you consider that most people had never heard of such a thing.

I returned to my first love ~ farting boxes.

Avatar components are prims that you create in world or in 3d software and can be uploaded then attched to your avatar.

In this picture my avatar is holding an attachable cat and sporting a pair of sunglasses.

In my next Blog I will cover the discovery of avatar skin design.