Tutorial on Clothing

Hey guys! I thought I could try and write a tutorial on making clothing in Photoshop for Second life. This isn’t the only way of making clothing of course, it’s just the method I developed because it works for me
So in this tutorial we’re going to make a simple t-shirt.

1. First thing always, make a new layer (underneath all the length guides but above the grid itself). select > All the entire layer and go to Edit > Fill with the desired color for your shirt. This is essentially your blank canvas.

2. Second thing of course is creating the shape of your shirt. We’ll be using the chip-off method to get this. This basically implys that you erase all areas on the solid layer that won’t be part of the top. Because we are creating a basic t-shirt, all we’ll be needing to ‘chip-off’ is a round collar and some sleeves.
With that said, use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to highlight the area of the arm that you do NOT want sleeves. Delete that area, and then do so on the other arm as well. (make sure you align it so the sleeves line-up) Here is a visual:

3. For a collar, switch to the elliptical marquee tool and highlight up at the neck, then delete.

Also, for the back of the shirt use the marquee tool to cut out a bit for the back of the neck as well.

So far it should be something along the lines of this:

4. Now you have your shape for this particular t-shirt . YAY! Now you have to make this blank texture into something more fabric-like. You can use different methods to make different textiles though for this i’m going to use a basic cotton fabric. To do this add some noise to the layer, something subtle like 2-5%.

5. Now you’ll be wanting some seems on the ends. First select the entire layer using ctrl-click, so that you have an outline of your entire shirt. Create another new layer and go to edit > stroke, and stroke using the same color as the background of your shirt, 3 px will do.

EDIT > A lot of my comments say this step confuses them. The way you select an outline of a layer is by ctrl-clicking the shirt layer on the layer palette.  Others were confused on how the shirt’s outline is selected when the layer is entirely one color.  (see the image in step 1) In steps 2 and 3 i explain that we cut out the sleeves and collar from the solid color. As a result we get the 2nd image in step 3. Hopefully this explains how I got the outline. I hope I’ve clarified this step for people.

6. Deselect, right click on the layer style > Bevel and emboss. I used these exact settings to get the effect I wanted, though don’t hesitate to adjust to your personal liking .

7. Now you might want a bit of light and shadows to make certain features ‘pop-out’ and seem more 3-d. Some people use programs like lightwave to do this. Unfortunately I don’t have any programs like that so I simple do it by hand using the dodge/burn tools. I tend to start with the burn first. You’ll want to use a decent sized-brush. I’d say 65-80. Keep in mind you should be very gradual and subtle with this. You shouldnt raise the exposure any more than 10%. With this, start stroking areas such as the sides, bottom, around seems and edges, and under the breast-area. Don’t forget to do this to the back of the shirt and sleeves as well. Then use the dodge tool (same exposure and brush size) and highlight the center areas of the shirt including the chest, stomche, and center-back.

8. Next up, wrinkles.
A. Create new layer, make a thin (3px) stroke with the paint tool with the SAME color as your shirt. (Note: the original color may be slightly different from your original because of the burning, but that’s all right)
B. Go to Layer Styles > select both Bevel & Emboss and Drop Shadow.
C. Go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Make sure that the angle is set to 0. You can mess around with the amount but something like 50px will do. Change the Layer type to soft light (or perhaps overlay), and lower the Opacity to about 50%.

You can make several wrinkles on one layer, just make more swipes with the brush before embossing and blurring. Make sure to include wrinkles on the back as well. .

And Voila! There is your end result.

I hope I helped some of you on your quest to become a SL designer

-Heather

(PS)Saving help:
You have two options for saving clothing in Secondlife. This is because the parts that are transparent won’t appear so in game. You must either use an alpha channel and save as a .tga (view other tutorials on how to do that, i’m sure you’ll find some). OR recently there has been a more simpler way for things like that, and that is to simply save it as a .png file. Using this process involves no alpha channel. What ever is transparent on your texture will be transparent when you upload it.