Welcome back! I'm sure some of you remember my Avimator tutorial which I used to teach you how to create your own poses in Second Life. I'd like to take this opportunity to teach you how to use Qavimator,... basically, Avimator's "big brother". It is slightly more user friendly and much more fuller featured than its Avimator counterpart, and as a bonus, can also be used to create simple animations!

What You'll Need For This Tutorial:

1. Qavimator, downloaded and installed (WIN / MAC)

2. Second Life

3. About 10 minutes. ;)

If you are lost at any time, feel free to check out the Qavimator Wiki for more information and help. Enjoy the video! As usual, I'll do my best to answer questions in the comments section.

Today, we'll be learning how to create your own tattoo using Photoshop and/or GIMP! The techniques described in this tutorial will also work when creating clothing or other transparent textures, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be making just a simple tattoo. :)

What You Will Need For This Tutorial

1. Photoshop or GIMP

2. The upper or lower avatar PSD files (if you do not have them, you may download them here). For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be working on the upper avatar layer.

Please choose which tutorial you would like to read: Photoshop | GIMP

Creating Your Own Tattoos Using Photoshop

The first thing we'll need to do is create our tattoo in Photoshop! To do this, open the avatar PSD file you'd like to work on. Upper or lower, it is your choice! For this tutorial, we will be working on the upper avatar layer.

I apologize in advance for this being a Photoshop-specific tutorial! I am still very much a GIMP newbie, but, as soon as I learn the lay of the land for how to do this process in GIMP, you bet I'll be posting another tute for it! For now, Photoshoppers, here we go!

Today, we'll be learning how to combine a depth snapshot with a color snapshot to create the illusion of "depth of field" in your Second Life snapshots!

Let me define the term "depth of field" quick, just to give a frame of reference for those of you scratching your heads right now! The term "depth of field" refers to the portion of a photograph (or in this case, snapshot) that will be in-focus (i.e. not blurry!). What we are going to do here is make an attempt at mimicing real life photography by combining a depth shot with a color snapshot to immitate depth.

An example of a real life depth shot (we will be trying to mimic this effect with this tutorial):

Welcome to the first of what I hope will be many tutorials to come. Seeing as how this is the question I get asked the most, I thought it only fitting to begin this weekly blogging with a green screen removal tutorial.You will need three things for this lesson:

1. A snapshot taken on a greenscreen (you may download the one I will be working on, or you may set up your own green screen - instructions below - and take one for yourself to work on).

2. Photoshop or GIMP.

3. Patience.

Ready? Great! Let's get started. First, let's learn how to create our own in-world green screen. For those of you who would like to skip ahead, I have provided two seperate tutorials in this post - one will teach you how to remove the green screen in Photoshop, the other will explain the process in GIMP. Please select which you'd like to read: Photoshop | GIMP.

Setting up your own, one prim green screen in world; step-by-step: