TIPS

Making your own alpha layers.

Once you get a garment made, there are often areas of skin that poke through. THAT's not pretty after all your work. So to fix that you can add an alpha layer to your clothing item.

When you upload your texture, you want it to be set as a MASK. The alpha masks are small. I made mine 128 x 128. The ones with the default clothes are apparently 64 x 64.

The word on the street is that you don't have to be all that careful when making your masks. That may be true for pants and items that cover a large block of your body, but I found I needed several tries to get what I wanted to disappear and the skin that I wanted to see, stay.

I started with a 1024 x 1024 UV map from the default female avatar (see below).

From there I added  a plain white layer, made it slightly transparent so I could see the UV lines on the layer below. I then painted on the black areas.

Your finished product should be solid black and white.

This is the actual file that I used for my jumpsuit. Since there was no skin poking through the lower legs, I didn't bother worrying about that area.   

Add the alpha to the clothing item in the editing panel.

And here is the UV map that I used as my template. NOTE THAT THE CP AVATAR MAY CHANGE OVER TIME -- and indeed these instructions could become out of date. This was written in November 2013.

Click the photo for the full sized file. 

Adjusting hard attached items

Fitting attachments like belts and necklaces and such is a little tricky at Cloud Party -- well, it's a skill to be learned anywhere. Happily it DOES get much easier with a little practice and most items conform to the same basic rules when you are importing from your 3D editing software.

A widget is on the way (yeah) but I made this instruction sheet to add to my attached items. Since someone seemed to be taking a photo of it from the Marketplace while visiting my shop, I have to assume that some folks would like it.

So I am posting it here for folks to grab.