Two shortcuts to a career in virtual fashion

Is there a particular kind of virtual content you need, and can’t find — and are seriously considering making yourself?

For example, my time in virtual worlds is all spent working — mostly, attending business meetings, hosting shows, interviewing people. I like to wear skirts when I do this, but most skirts in OpenSim tend to be either too short or too fancy for business meetings.

All the Kitely Market offers in the “business skirt” category is a bunch of mesh mini-skirts. Regular system skirts are too ugly, prim skirts hang straight down when you sit — and my experiments with Blender proved that I won’t be making any rigged clothing for years.

I was willing to hire someone to make custom clothing for me, and posted a note to that effect on OpenSim Virtual. And I was pointed to resources I never knew about, discovered some other resources that I only vaguely knew about, and found a new source for old resources that are sometimes a pain to import.

Let’s start with the best one first

Ready-to-texture mesh clothing

It turns out that if you get a full-perm mesh, you can slap a texture onto it in-world, just like you do on a prim. You can make original rigged mesh clothing without ever having to download Blender.

Back in 2012, Second Life clothing Damien Fate put all his templates up on his website, for free download.

But you don’t have to spend the time and effort downloading everything and trying to figure out how to import it into OpenSim. Nara Malone of Nara’s Nook has already done it. Just hypergrid teleport over to world.narasnook.com:8900 and walk over to coordinates 72, 192, 23 — also known as the Crates & Barrels store.

Crates & Barrels store on Nara's Nook at world.narasnook.com:8900.
Crates & Barrels store on Nara’s Nook at world.narasnook.com:8900.

Then simply click to pick up copies of the male and female mesh models, alpha layers, and bake maps located just to the right of the entrance.

There’s also a barrel of public domain hair there, and a barrel of public domain male skins, and some other goodies. But the main thing is the mesh models.

Touch the gray hoodie for the male mesh models, and the long dress for the female mesh models.
Touch the gray hoodie for the male mesh models, and the long dress for the female mesh models.

Bring it home, unpack it, then put on one of the mesh items after copying it and renaming it.

Here’s a model avatar wearing the strapless short mesh dress.

Damien Fate's mesh dress_001

The dress isn’t a great fit — the legs and the belly show through, but undershirts and underpants will fix that, as would the provided alpha layers. Personally, I prefer to use under clothing were possible because it just looks creepy when parts of my body are missing.

While wearing the dress, right-click on it, select edit, open the texture tab, and select any texture you want. I happened to have some textures I recently created at hand.

So here’s the same dress after I applied a texture, applied the same texture to a pair of long underpants, and added a tube-top shaped alpha layer to cover the belly.

Damien Fate's mesh dress with texture_001

You can change the vertical and horizontal scale on the texture, as you can see on the dress below, worn with the mesh jacket, textured with a matching fabric.

Damien Fate's mesh dress with jacket_001

Writing up the description of how to do it, and taking pictures, took several times longer than the work itself.

Here’s another outfit, this time using the skirt instead of the dress, and a plain white tank undershirt.

Damien Fate's gray mesh skirtwith jacket_001

Now all I need to do is get these clothes into Kitely somehow and upload them to the Kitely Market.

The license terms are not bad, either. According to the creator, while you can’t resell the raw templates themselves, you can give them away, and you can also modify them, use them to create clothing, and sell the final products.

“I am happy for people to use them however they see fit as long as they’re not selling them as a template pack,” Dash told Hypergrid Business. “You can modify and sell the files as clothing in any virtual world without credit. I just don’t like the thought of someone charging people for the resources that I offer freely, that is my main concern.”

He admitted that his license terms are a bit out of date.

“I suppose I should update my terms since the virtual landscape has altered since I first released these files,” he said.

You can follow Damien Fate on Facebook or visit his Second Life Marketplace store here.

Ready-to-use sculpts and templates

Next, we all know and love Linda Kellie and the fact that all her content is CC0 licensed, for any use whatsoever. Her clothing and pre-made regions are just everywhere.

But she also has clothing templates and sculpty pieces that can be used to create prim clothing.

You can download it from Zaradoo, but the Sandbox region on the Great Canadian Grid has a nice setup where you can come, browse, and take what you need. Just teleport to login.greatcanadiangrid.ca:8002:sandbox.

Warning: The Great Canadian Grid has been changing around its export permissions lately, and you might not be able to bring that content to other grids with you. But there is also a Linda Kellie Building Supply region on the Kitely grid, located at grid.kitely.com:8002:LK’s Building Supply.

If anyone knows of any others, please say so in the comments!

Linda Kellie clothing templates on the Great Canadian Grid.
Linda Kellie clothing templates on the Great Canadian Grid.

There are prim skirts of various sizes, collar and wrist pieces, and other miscellaneous parts.

While mesh clothing has some advantages over prim and system clothes, the latter are much easier to work with. You can play with them, change them, tweak them, and, of course, texture them in various ways.

Plus, system clothing is good for layering, even if you have mesh for the outer layer.

Start selling

You don’t need a full collection of content to get started. You can start with one item, tweak it, and add more later on.

You also don’t need to compete with the best fashions out there. If someone tries to put you down, ignore them — they’re just jealous that you’re taking a risk and getting out there while they just sit around and criticize.

No, you only have to be better than the worst that’s out there.

Plus, with time and practice, you’ll only get better.

Haters are gonna hate, but creators are gonna create.

Sell on Kitely Market. Plus, many grids offer free stores to creators to get them to come to their grids.

And don’t forget that the Tangle grid fashion expo starts today, and they might still have some booths available if you hurry. In fact, that’s why I started playing around with this — they dared me to start making my own clothes!

Maria Korolov