Hiya,
Is anyone doing skin textures for Second Life characters?
No, but this topic makes me curious though
You’re probably already aware of CannedMushroom’s zbrush->Second Life workflow tutorial…
Second Skin Labs (a skin designer in Second Life) has a downloadable version of the Second Life avatar meshes, for skinning purposes, in .ztl format, and is supposed to include the three polygroups (head, upper body, lower body), at this link:
http://www.secondskinlabs.com/Downloads/downloads2.html
However when I open this tool, on my first subdivision it makes the points on the toes fly up to the chest, requiring masking all but those points and moving them back into place. However when I ctrl-click on the model in edit mode, ZBrush3 vaporizes to desktop, so I don’t know what’s going on there… They seem to have the correct polygroups when loaded into ZBrush2 however.
I hope that helps.
Folks- I’ve explored SL and found it interesting. The main thing I enjoyed was … building stuff as many others do. When I first got Zbrush figured eventually this would do wonders for skins in SL. Looked at Cannedmushrooms tut. and thought it was nice. Though never pursued much after that since I was enthralled with learning zbrush. Maybe i’ll play around with it some see how it goes.
Fierndip- thanks for the SL_avatars tools, by the way I loaded em up in zbrush 3 and decided to try to help resolve the issue with the tools. As you say when you subdivide you get
Tried to upload the tools for you all but either its to big compressed or I dunno keep getting invalid post specified error, at any rate you know how to fix it if you have access to ZB2. Now mind you I have yet to try and sculpt them so no clue how that will affect them, though I think should be fine. The only other answer to the problem would be to retopologize the meshes which I didn’t touch either, they don’t seem to the be the best at the moment but decent I guess. Have fun and I hope it works out, I gotta try to help the forum out as much as I can!! 
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Ok, the sculpting is something i’ve never done before. You guys know how to make a Sculpt Texture or Sculpt Map in RGB colors?
Hey, thanks AngelJ! I will give that a try!
AngelJ, were you able to find the polygroups that are supposed to be assigned to those meshes?
Flerndip- Well, if you do Shift-F or click on the icon that says draw polygroups in transform or on the classic interface on the side with the scale/move/zoom buttons, it has polygroups for the head/chest/legs.
Hope this is what you wanted, if not just send me a private message. I see you asked 3 days ago and I’ve not check in on this thread lately but usually in zbcentral every day. So send me a message and I’ll get back with you in the thread/private message faster. Then again I did have my inbox full lately :o ehehe but its clean out now 
Select Polygroups- Ctrl+Shift then click on a group you want.
Hope that helps
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Hi,
Just getting into Zbrush, and I understand ahead of time that I need to go through the tutorials from the ground up. My question for the moment, though, is when I open this model it isn’t smooth like the ones pictured here, it is the material with the poly faces.
Maybe I’m missing a big one, but all the basic tutorials I can find seem to be starting from a model made in Zbrush, so there is never a step where the view looks like this. How do I chance the view/model to be smooth like this? To be clear, I’m not seeing the wireframe, and hitting ‘a’ doesn’t seem to chance anything, neither does rendering it.
Sorry, I know this is probably a really stupid question. I need eventually to use the program from the ground up, but right now I am mainly wanting to make textures for second life and not really do any modelling, so forgive my need to skip over what is probably a lot of material.
Thanks for your patience.
I did a workflow video for this last yr;)
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http://www.houseoftutorials.net/page2.html
goto the bottom of the page its the last video
Thanks!!
Has been a huge help, zipping right along now. Much appreciated.
I was about to suggest, if you save your tool at its lowest subdivision level, you end up with a much smaller file than if you save at its highest one.
…but then I ran a quick test, and that doesn’t seem to be true in Z3 anymore.
So now I don’t have anything useful to contribute. 
edit:
That problem was four weeks old anyway. You probably don’t care anymore.
cannedmushrooms: Hi again. I’m able to do this now, but my results are far, far less quality than yours. I have had to crank it up to like 2000+ just to see features, where you only use like 279 in the video. I am following your video step by step, and have tried dozens of times over the last few days.
I was wondering, I have read in other tutorials that you have to need to store the MT before dividing. Evidently the lowest level is changed by the dividing (not really sure I understand why that would be, but whatever). I have used the stock (undivided) avatar model and the results are a lot more like yours, but for some reason I get a lot of distortion; I’m thinking it is the poor quality of the model as you mention in the video.
I noticed on the model you offer with the pack that it is already divided. Is it possible that the lack of the original MT levels is why I am getting such poor results? Perhaps the people I read who mentioned the ‘store MT’ step are overblowing its importance in making the maps, but they seem to think it is crucial.
Just wondered. Sorry if this seems dim, I’m struggling with this, and I suppose I should just set aside what I am doing and work from the ground up with the program, drawing, etc., before I start in on this. If you think the original MT are the reason, is there any chance you’d have a cleaned up version of the stock avatar that hasn’t been divided laying around?
If you just had a moment, take the model from the zip and export a map as you do in the video, and see if you get anything close to the result using a setting of anything close to 276 in the Alpha pallete. If you do, then it is something I am doing and I’ll start over from square one.
first before I do anything I’ll ask are you using Zbrush 2 or 3 in your workflow.
Reason I ask is because if you are using 3 I would try these steps
Goto the highest Sub-d
Delete lower and make sure the SUV button is off
then reconstruct -sub D lower res until you can no longer lower the resolution.
Storeing a morph target is not important it only helps your new sculpt float on top of the mesh rather than dig into it as much but it does produce cleaner alphas at the end.
Goto the highest lvl
sculpt
goto the lowest
in displacement use the adaptive/ 2048 resolution / SUV off and MAKE SURE MODE BUTTON IS NOT ON!!! this is very very imporant or it will the current alpha and blend it with the alpha you are about to make.
This is why you are getting such a low depth value because the default alpha is the big white square.
Try that;)
if you are using the stock model you will not be able to get a good enough low to high mesh value but many have used to for coloring use only! and it produces very little seems. My version is good for sculpting and color. Has a little seem at the arm I noticed also to you might want to blur the arm seem in photoshop using the blur tool;)
Woot! Using Zbrush 3. Sounds promising. On my way to try. Again, thanks so much for your patience. By all rights you should be telling me to just go back and start from the ground up until I am comfortable with the program in general. I do intend to, I’d just like to get a couple of skins done first.
Thanks again.
always dug the name canned mushrooms
got the twistedfish from an accident in carrara
what to say
what to say
i came from an abstract 2d self taught background
and what to say
holy cow you people are immense:p 
Hey All,
New girl on the block here o/
Hey Cannedmushrooms, I watched your vid tuts, they have been really helpful so thank you. I’m trying to get the secondlife bodies that you cleaned up and fixed up so nicely, but the link doen’st seem to be working for me? Any chance you could send them my way please? Or just send me the link where they are now if they have moved pretty please.
Look forward to learning and seeing some of your works all.
Best
Cara
been awhile since I did that series but I believe its this file
http://www.houseoftutorials.net/lessonfiles/cleanmodels.zip
for any lessonfile
http://www.houseoftutorials.net/lessonfiles/
is my new dumping ground
enjoy 