Second Life T-Shirt
by Don Singleton

My Second Life Avatar "DJ Earnshaw" was "born" on 11/8/2007 and I was active for a few months, even writing an article on the subject, but for some reason I got involved in other things. When I resurrected TulsaHighTech as a Web Magazine I was curious to see what Tulsa presence existed in Second Life, and I discovered the various Tulsa Technology Campuses, but my interest was only really reactivated when I saw a presentation by Elizabeth Stenger (avatar CallieDel Boa) [here and here] at the APCUG/FACUG Spring Conference.

Since then I have been relearning everything I used to know. I am not quite as green as an avatar fresh off Orientation Island, and with Callie's help, and with some classes at The Learning Experience and Norma Petty and Victoria Paule's Happy Hippo Education Centre, I am learning fast, and I thought I would share what I learned with my readers.

In searching for SL information I stumbled across Robin (Sojourner) Wood's tutorial where he said:

Some time ago, someone mentioned in the Second Life forum that making a t-shirt in Second Life isn't as simple as just dropping a picture onto a shirt, like you would do for Café Press. But some people aren't interested in doing anything more than that; and, for them, perhaps it should be just that simple. So, for all of those people, and for people who are just starting out and want to see what a finished shirt looks like in all of its layers, here you go.

Click here to download a zip file with the layered Photoshop file (RSW T-Shirt.psd) and a Read Me of instructions. If you want more detailed instructions, I've written two tutorials. Both use Photoshop, I'm afraid, since that's the graphics program I use, but you might be able to extrapolate the instructions to your own favorite application. Click here if you are pretty new to computer graphics, and would like a detailed explanation of every step. Click here if you are pretty comfortable with Photoshop, but still want more instruction than you can find in the Read Me file.

I asked Robin for permission to include his tutorial in this article I am writing (something every writer should do). He had no problem with it, but he was kind enough to warn me:

You should be aware, though, that I also have a portion of my site that discusses the religion of Wicca, and a part that has political essays written from a pretty progressive point of view. So if that's a problem for you, you might not want to put the links in. Just a head's up.

I told him:

Personally I am a conservative Christian, and I do not plan to link to your religious or political stuff, but if you have a good tutorial, that explains something well, I have no problem linking to it. If readers decide to take my endorsement of your literary talents in describing something related to SL building as an endorsement to everything you write, they are the ones overreaching.

So if you want additional tutorials look here and learn. And ignore any thing that does not agree with your religious or political views, either on my site, or on his.

I downloaded his tutorial and checked it out, and said "It can't be that easy." But it is. In less than an hours work I was in Second Life, and my avatar was wearing an APCUG t-shirt.

It all starts in Real Life, by unzipping Robin's template, and opening it in Photoshop.

Note the file has a number of layers, some of which are visible (the "eye" icon), and some may be made visible if you wish. Note also that the text layer has a triangle indicating a problem.

Robin used an Apple font called "TextileRegular" that I don't have on my system. If I wanted to exactly duplicate his shirt I might use Lucida Big Casual T Demi Italic, which is very close, but I have plenty of fonts on my computer, and I will just use one of them.

I bring in the APCUG logo, resize it so that it is the same size as his logo, which is on layer "Design Example". Mine goes into "Layer 1". I probably should rename it, but I didn't bother. With both layers visible:

I positioned the APCUG logo over his graphic:

Then I clicked the "eye" on layer "Design Example", to hide it, and I also hid layer "Put Color Here", to make it a white shirt,

and we are ready to go.

I exported the image as a .JPG file, and here is what we have.

I go into Second Life and click File:

Wow. It is going to cost me L$10 to upload. That sounds pretty expensive, just to test to see if it is really this simple, until I check and learn that the conversion rate is approximately 250 Linden Dollars (L$) to the US Dollar. Specifically, on April 3 I bought L$2,000 for US$8.02. So that L$10 upload fee is about $0.04, i.e. less than a nickle. I am living on a fixed income, but I think I can afford a nickle, so I click to do the upload. I get:

where I select the 85kb "APCUG-T-Shirt.jpg" file. It uploads as a "Texture" in my "Inventory":

I put my mouse pointer on my avatar, right click, and select "Appearance":

My avatar turns around, and I select "Shirt":

I am wearing a free t-shirt I got from The Learning Experience

but I click Fabric, and I see the fabric of my TLE shirt, and can select something else from inventory:

I scroll down and click on my APCUG-T-Shirt texture, and I see it in the window. It is 1024x1024, while the TLE bear was just 512x512, but apparently that is ok (maybe my shirt has twice the number of threads per inch as theirs).

I click Select, and I am wearing my APCUG shirt:

I can save the shirt in inventory, preferably giving it a name other than the default, which is "New New Shirt". "White APCUG T-Shirt" sounds nice.

Appearance also allows me to change the Color/Tint, and I was able to save a number of variations on the shirt. If the texture has a Photoshop assigned color, altering it with Color/Tint in Appearance produces some unpredictable colors.

I put all of the colored shirts in a folder,

and gave it to my Mentor friend, CallieDel Boa. She was impressed, and showed me I should have created a box, and put them in it, with a price of L$0 (in other words making them free).

She is right. That is a better way, but hey, I am still a newbie. I am still learning how this Second Life works, and Mentor CallieDel Boa is a fantastic teacher.

I sent the picture of all of the T-Shirts to Callie and the APCUG Board, and someone jokingly said "I love it. Great avatars which capture the essence of studly APCUG males. But where are the equally buff Babes of APCUG?" Callie saw it, and returned several picture of her avatar wearing various APCUG shirts, which I put in this montage:

The second and fourth image (blue shirt with bare midriff), shows how you can use Appearances to alter the length of a shirt. But the first picture (white shirt), was one I took with her on the lawn in Kimokeo Cove, where she teleported to see me after I gave her the folder of shirts, and it was hard (for me at least), to edit out the background. When Callie took her pictures of APCUG Babes, she wisely used a white background.

Let us see how she must have made it. I went to the Happy Hippo Sandbox (249, 241, 255) where I could build (I do not own my own land in Second Life yet, so I must do my building either in the public sandboxes, which are sometimes crowded, or in one like Happy Hippo, which is used with the learning tutorials they offer.

I click on Build and select the cube:

I touch the ground with my magic wand, and there is a cube:

We see the size of the cube is 0.5 meters for all three dimensions, X, Y, and Z.

Change it to X=5.0, Y=5.0, and Z=0.01 meters, and our wooden cube has become a sheet of plywood, 5 meters square and 1 cm thick.

Click on texture and blank, and our plywood sheet turns white.

Holding the shift key down, we drag a copy of the plywood up with the blue arrow.

Holding Ctrl down we get the rotate tool, and can rotate it along the red axis to a vertical position.

It is in the center of the bottom sheet, but we can push it back along the green axis:

We have it where we want it, but the white sheet looks gray, because it is in the shade. Click Full Bright, and it is white, even in the shade.

We have what we want, but it is two separated "prims", i.e. two separate pieces of plywood. Select the vertical piece and go into Edit:

The yellow rim shows it is selected:

Holding Shift down click on the bottom piece, and both have a yellow rim:

Holding Ctrl down and pressing L links the two prims into one, and the blue rim shows the vertical is the "Base Prim".

If my avatar stands on the structure we just built:

And turns around to face out:

I can use the camera controls:

to take a picture of him against the white background:

I am a little disturbed about the shadows on the shirt. I IM Callie, who makes some suggestions that I can't get to work, and she is at a Candida Play at The Learning Experience Theatrical Complex, so she can't come see me, and the other Mentor she IMed never contacted me, so I left SL and came back to work on this article. A while later I went back inworld, but she was not there so I tried a few things. A white background was not going to be good for separating a white shirt, so I opened the Color Selector:

and changed the color of my background to green:

I created a white panel to try to act as a "kicker light", to lighten the shadows but I am not sure how effective it was:

I took a picture of each shirt, such as:

Just as I couldn't easily separate a white shirt from a white background, I knew I would have trouble separating a green shirt from my "Green Screen", so for it I turned my contraption into a "Blue Screen":

Then using "Color Range" in Photoshop I was able to separate each image from the background,

and I created a montage, with some images actually overlapping on other images:

It may not be much for an experienced SL clothing designer, and I could improve on the poses if I can figure out how to use a "Posing Stand", and I am sure my friend Paula could do a lot better, both with the Photoshop work and the clothing itself, but it's not bad for a "Newbie", and they must look somewhat life-like, because after seeing the montage of photos I made, I had someone ask if I had any extra shirts he could give out to his user group. I had to explain the difference between the "Real World", and the "Virtual World" of Second Life. But I told him if any of his group came "inworld" to have them IM me and I would give them a whole box of the shirts, and they are marked "transferable" and "copyable", so the recipient can make as many as they want.