When Placing tattoos onto the skins...it is important to have a good knowledge of your skins layout...so this is one of the reasons I am adding this tutorial ...to better help you understand the 2D texture files of skins.

You will first need to go and download the skin file templates from here . Both Master Head and Master Body of both gender's. These are Photoshop files but most good graphic programs should open these files just fine.

Once you have the files....unzip them and first open your MaleBodyMASTERTEMPLATE in your photo editing program...For this tutorial I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS version 8.

Your avi in IMVU is made up of layers....First you have your Body ...basically known as your Avi....Then comes your Skin this wraps around your body......and last you have all the stuff that can go over your skin....clothes...accessories....some of these items can change the shape of your avi body...Give a guy bigger muscles or a gal bigger breasts or a tiny waist. So these body changes come from your Clothing mesh...NOT your skin

So you can not make a skin have bigger muscles or bigger breasts.....all you can do with your skin....is give it the best appearance with shadows and colors to seam like they have....so when you place your clothing over the skin it will make those
enhancements you added...look 10 times more awesome.

What you see here is the 2D layout that wraps around your avi mesh ....I have labeled the parts for better understanding.

The head file placement is basically the same for both avi's....so Ill label the male head only so you can see what goes where     

On each set of skin files you will see a layer called Mapping guide... If you select the eye to turn the layer to visable you will see a mesh showing you where your skin will map around your avi...if you cant see it very well just change the Opacity slider on your layers panel to a higher opacity...this is what it will look like..

Have a play around on the skins just using the paint brush tool....diff color lines...then save your file as a .png file.

For skins and tattoos...I ALWAYS suggest you save your files as .png...or .bmp.
If you save them as jpeg you will get poorly pixelated tattoos and poor looking skins.

Jpeg files are good for big size rooms or texturing furniture items because they will save on the kb download size..Its the file type that is mainly used for the web to speed up page loading ...but when you are going for the best quality look and sharpest Tattoos always use .png...or .bmp.

So save your file and assuming you did the first tutorial on the previewer you should know now how to place your files into the material section and hit the apply now..

NOTE*.....when drawing onto your skin files...always create a new layer so you can later delete this without touching your basic template. go to your Layer tab up top and on the drop down...select New...then across to layer....You can name this anything u like....and then that new layer will appear in your layers panel for later altering or deleting.

That concludes the second Tutorial in this series....Next is onto Working with the Male Skin Layers in Photoshop....Or if you dont have photoshop..then you can use Gimp...

Mwah

MissVix