Combining SL Clothing Templates
Super-Uber-Mega-Cool Templates for Clothing Design

Chip Midnight and Robin Sojourner both have excellent clothing templates free to download for your SL clothing designs. They are both very useful, and for different reasons, too!

Chip did an excellent job of labeling all of the seams around the AV, as well as well defined glove, sock/boot and lower jacket areas. Additionally, he roughed out some fingernail and toe areas, and has mapped out a very detailed skirt line.

Robin has great details inside the seams by creating colored bands across the AV in order to more easily keep track of where you are. This makes it easier to create pockets, creases, and even define trouble areas quickly.

Too bad you can’t really use them both at the same time…wait! What am I saying!?! Of course you can!

This tutorial will help you create your very own super-uber-mega-cool templates in Photoshop 6 or later, using these free templates from Robin and Chip. I’ll be using Photoshop CS for the demonstration, but with a bit of adaptation, I’m sure you can translate it into your favorite digital imaging program successfully.

Here are the steps:

Create a set folder

Maybe instead of the extremely clever title I gave this tutorial, it should really be called “Photoshop Sets and How to Use Them”. Photoshop sets are excellent for keeping your layers organized, moving around several layers at once (without linking), and for applying blending modes to several layers at once without changing their individual blending mode. Eh? What? What is a blending mode?

Ok, for you novice to Photoshop users, a blending mode is a way to change how that layer’s pixels interact with the layers below it. I’d probably have to write a separate tutorial to fully explain that, so I’m going to have to leave it up to your own personal tenacity to find out more if you need to. You can change blending modes by using a pull down box at the top of the Layers palette. In the image below, the blue highlighted area is where you change the blending mode.

blending mode location

Ok let’s continue. In principle, a Photoshop set is just a folder. You can put as many layers as you want into that folder. For example, let’s say you are creating a pocket. Well, in order to be able to make tweaks and changes as you see fit, you will probably make separate layers for the pocket itself (it’s background), it’s stitching, and possibly it’s button(s). Suppose you’ve created your pocket but it’s not exactly in the right place, or maybe it’s the wrong size. Without a set, you’d probably have to link those images to move them together or change each of the three layers individually if you had to transform them. If you put these layers in a set, you can move and transform the set! This makes life easier so you can focus on your creation, not your limitations. :)

So, to create a set, all you have to do is click the folder icon at the bottom of the layer’s palette. This will create a new set folder.

a new set folder

Note the blue highlighted folder icon at the bottom

Double-click the text of the set folder, and re-name it to “guides”. Now we’re ready to pull in the layers from those awesome templates!

Grab the needed layers from Robin’s templates

Like we discussed at the beginning of this tutorial, Robin has some unique benefits to her templates. Here are the layers she’s made that we need to copy over to our set folder.

Ok, make sure you can see Robin’s PSD on top and behind it, make sure you can see part of your new PSD file underneath. Now, grab each of the layers listed above, one by one, while holding the SHIFT key, and drag the layer to your PSD and release. Photoshop will copy the layer perfectly in the position it needs to be in your Uber template PSD. Don’t worry about layer order or anything just yet, as we’ll take care of that in a minute. Just get those layers from Robin’s PSD to yours.

Grab/Create the Alpha Channel

Ok, you should have already grabbed the "Match Lines" layer from Robin's template. If you look at that layer in the Layers pallet, you should see that it has two tthumbnails. The thumbnail on the right looks like a black on white outline of the image, with a red X over it (that's because it is disabled). The thumbnail represents a layer mask that can be applied to the layer in order to hide or select off part of the image.

Go ahead and Ctrl + click (Mac = Cmd + click) the right thumbnail, which will make a selection based on the mask. Now hit Ctrl + SHIFT + I to invert the selection.

Now switch tabs to the Channels pallete, and create a new Alpha Channel. Got it? Ok, now make sure your colors are at default by hitting D on your keyboard, then go ahead and fill your selection with white (ALT + BACKSPACE).

Now that you have your alpha channel made, we are ready to move on to Chip’s template.

Grab the needed layers from Chip’s templates

Now do the same for Chip’s template that you did with Robin’s. The layers you need are:

Basically, grab everything but the shaded grid. As far as getting the layers we need we only need one more layer…the Alpha Channel.

Modify the UV background layer

Ok, now we have all the layers we need, but we need to modify Chip’s UV layer in order to give us maximum benefit. I’ll show you what that benefit is at the end of the tutorial. Go to  the “outline” alpha channel, and hold down the CTRL (CMD for Mac) key, and click the alpha channel in the layers palette. As most of you know, this will create a selection based on this alpha channel. Now flip back to the Layers tab, and click on the “Layer 1” layer (which is actually Chip’s background layer). Now hold down CRTL+SHIFT+I, which will invert the selection, and hit the BACKSPACE or DELETE key. Doing this removes the black background from Chip’s UV layer so that you have just the shirt shape grid. Change the blending mode of this layer to “Multiply”, and rename the layer to “UV”.

Create background layer

Click on the new layer icon to create a new layer and fill it with white by following these commands:

Now we are ready to order the layers in our set.

Order the layers into the set

Well, we have our set folder named “guides” and we have all the layers we need, but none of them are actually in the set yet, and they also may be in the wrong order. Actually the only layer that needs to be in a specific place is the UV layer we just modified, so first, grab each layer and drag it to the “guides” set folder. You should see the layer indent a little from the rest. This is the way you can tell if the layer is actually in the set folder. Do this with all the layers except the “background” layer. Next, make sure that the UV layer is at the very bottom of the set by click-dragging it to the proper location. This is how my “guides” folder looks...

the guides set folder

Just make sure that the UV layer is at the bottom of the set. Now you are done, and you can save this PSD as something like “Clothes Template – Top” or whatever you want. Just save it in a place where you can get to it easily, because you’ll want to start using this as the beginning to any clothing article you make in SL. By the way, you should also follow these procedures to make yourself a lower clothing template as well (using Robin’s and Chip’s lower UV templates, of course.

So as promised, here are the benefits…

Now, since you set the UV layer to multiply, you can change the background color to anything you like, and still have the UV grid showing while you work. Here is an example:

background color visible through guides

This makes it much easier to pay close attention to those alignment issues you run across when creating clothes. But wait! There’s more! Sometimes, the guides can be a bit distracting, and half the time we’ll just hide them when we are doing our detail work. But what if we are doing very accurate adjustments with the detail? Well, just change the opacity of the whole SET! Make the folder active by clicking on it, and set the Opacity to whatever you want! (I think 20 – 30% is a good range).

guide set opacity change

Now look how easy it is to have your guides showing while doing detail!

detail work with guides visible

Other benefits you get from combining the templates are as described at the beginning of this tutorial…numbered and labeled seams, and color banding to help you keep your place!

Hope this helps out! Again, thank you Chip Midnight and thank you Robin Sojourner for your awesome templates!!!