What is an IMVU Creator?
Creators are the talented digital artists behind every product in the IMVU Shop catalog.
What Can I Make?
As a Creator, you express yourself as a digital artist by making three main types of assets:
- 2D Images (Textures)
- 3D Models
- Animations
Everything you create becomes a product in the IMVU Shop.
What Types of Products Can I Make?
IMVU lets you bring your imagination to life by creating nearly anything, including avatars, clothes, environments, vehicles, animals, and more.
These creations fall into five main product types:
- Avatars
- The base for Avatar Body Parts, Clothing, Skin and Attachments
- Avatar Body Parts & Clothing
- Tops, bottoms, shoes, heads, hair, hands, gloves, etc
- Avatar Skins
- Skin tones for avatars
- Avatar Attachments
- Also known as accessories, these include hats, jewelry, pets, and more
- Rooms & Furniture
- Environments for avatars to interact in, and objects including tables, chairs, cars, horses, or anything avatars can sit in, ride, or interact with
For more information about product types check out IMVU Product Types
What are the Basic Components of a Product?
Products are made up of one or more of the following components:
- Materials – Textures and various settings affecting how a product looks
- Meshes (3D Models) – The visual structure players see on screen
- Skeletons – Framework that controls meshes via animation
- Actions – Animation system in IMVU
- Particle Systems – Effects like sparkles, fire, or smoke
What Applications Do I Need?
To start creating, you’ll need:
- An image editor like Photoshop or GIMP
- A 3D editor like Blender or 3ds Max
- (Optional) IMVU Studio Toolkit for Blender or 3ds Max
- IMVU Studio – IMVU’s official creation platform
For more information, see What Software Should I Use?
How are Products Made?
Depending on your ambitions, you can get started creating without having to do any 3d modeling. It is as simple as following this basic workflow:
- Derive – In IMVU Studio, derive from an existing IMVU product
- Deriving is the unique way products are created in IMVU
- Edit – Add texture maps and set material properties, preview changes and save your project
- Submit – Submitting a product creates it in the IMVU shop and on IMVU’s servers, but it won’t be immediately visible to others
- Publish – To make it available to others you must publish the product
- Once you publish a product it enters Peer Review and will not be available to others until it passes Peer Review
If you are already familiar with working in 3d and making meshes (modeling) or animating, then before deriving you would:
- Create – Create 3d models (meshes) and apply textures using the 3d editor of your choice
- Export – Export to FBX file. (Using IMVU Studio Toolkit makes this super easy!)
- Derive
- Import – Import the FBX file in to IMVU Studio
- Once you have imported, just follow the rest of the basic workflow: edit, submit, and publish
For more information, check out Basic Workflow.
How Do I Get Started as an IMVU Creator?
Want to learn more? Check out Being a Creator.