I've recently started making clothes again in Second Life. Part of the reason for this is that we have extended DSF island to the extent that it costs $8 USD per month. Half of the island is free, but we are having to pay for the other half.
However with a little effort and a bit of startup cash, its possible to make money from Second Life. In fact there are now millionaires who have made their fortune from SL and other virtual worlds. One of the first who was publically known is Ansche Chung who I heard about 3 years ago. She made a million dollars (US), moved to china and set up a business employing at least 9 people purely making money out of virtual worlds, with SL being the main one.
So if other people can do it then it should be possible for me to make enough money from SL to be able to pay for the island.
In the next week I intend to set myself up in a shop, selling clothes. So how did I get to this point?
Well its not exactly hard. Clothes are generally an image/picture file, laid over the body of the avatar. In order to create a shape such as a bra, you make most of the image transparent and just paint in the actual bra in the right part of the image. Now I am too lazy to do that bit in an image program so I bought some templates. The first template I used was a bikini template I found free on the web. However there are very few free templates out there and people do make money in SL from selling templates. So I bought some of those.
I found some decent simple ones on www.xstreetsl.com, where you can buy all sorts of stuff for SL. They were L$40 per item (about 10p). However, I was able to click on a link on the page which gave me a location to visit in SL. I went to their shop and found that all the templates were L$20 each instead if you bought them direct.
These templates are basically overlays (alpha layers). So I created an image that was all blue, applied the template and instantly had a t-shirt the right shape in blue* Saved the image as a PNG file and uploaded it. Then its just a case of editing my appearance in SL, creating a new shirt and using that image as the "texture" for the shirt. Done.
(*This can be done in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP(free), etc etc etc)
I've created a few more things since then but mostly along the same lines. So the next step is selling.
You can rent shop space for anything from L$50 per week upwards (I have seen shops costing L$1200 per week). I've located a couple of shops in one mall at 100 per week and 65 per week. I'll be going for the more expensive since it has more space, feels more "airy" and allows more items.
So in the shop I will have to have boxes which contain the items I have for sale. Creating a box is quite straightforward. Just poke the Build button and click on the floor and you get a box. You can drag items from your inventory into this box. In the build tool window, you can resize the box and edit the settings so that its marked as "for sale" and that you are selling a copy of the contents (so that it is not emptied the first time anyone buys).
Of course, a wooden box is not going to work too well, so I need to upload another image to go on the box. No problem. I just take a screenshot of my avatar wearing the clothes and put that screenshot on the box.
Now I do a little more finessing than that, but thats about it. Then just pay for the shop rent (2 weeks minimum, but an extra 2 weeks free) and start arranging my sale boxes around the shop.
So there you have it. It may sound a little complicated but its really just a series of small steps and you learn as you go. And now if that's intrigued you, I have some links for you to check out:
A YouTube vid on how to make a t-shirt (5 mins)
A slightly more complex example
A more complex tutorial on impressive prim skirts
Note: the mermaid diaries has some very good tutorials on several subjects including how to make clothes, jewelry etc as well as guides for people who are new to second life in general.
