Making nails- Need Help To Get Started

[GreenDrake]

Hey there, I'm a student on course to virtual worlds and I need to make an project in SL, now me and my partner thought about making an machine that will generate 3-4 different colors of nails to the avatar.

Now, here comes the problem : I know there are two ways to make nails:

1. Sculpted nails

2. Gloves or tattoo layer

I managed to create one finger on sculpted but I didn't knew what to do with it and how to attach it to someone/upload it to SL, so I tried to look for tutorial on how to make gloves that I can make them transparent except the nails.

So I hope you will get what I meant, English is now my mother language.

thnx in advance! 

[Innula Zenovka]

You might want to ask a moderator to move this to the Building and Texturing Forum, where it's maybe more likely to be seen by content creators (click the "report inappropriate content" button and ask for it to be moved).

As to your project, the only way you're going to be able to have a Second Life "machine" generate colours of nails is if you're using sculpted nails.   You can change the colour of objects (like sculpted prim nails) by script, you see, but scripts can't affect clothing layers  (like gloves)  that way.

In order to upload texures -- whether you mean the sculpt map for the nails or the texture for the gloves -- to SL, open your inventory, click the + button and choose "Upload".  It costs L$ 10 for each texture.

For a good, though rather dated, introduction to building and making clothes, I strongly recommend Natalia Zelmanov's tutorials.

Now, the bad news.  I am sorry to say this, but I think yo uand your friend may want to reconsider the project, for various reasons.

I said earlier that you would need to use sculpted nails for your project.   By this I meant that you can't use gloves if you want to colour them using a "machine".  However, I don't think using sculpted nails is the right way to do it, either.   You could make sculpted ones, but (quite apart from the sculpting)  it's difficult to construct satisfactory sets with sculpted prims, and it's an outdated technology anyway.   

I don't buy sculpted nails any more, certainly.  I buy rigged mesh hands, which look far better than the hands that come with your avatar, and which allow me to choose between lots of presets for the nails.   

So in your position, certainly, I would either want to make rigged mesh hands, if I knew how to make rigged mesh, that is (and I think it might be too much to learn simply for a project like this), or I would be considering a different project.

How about ear-rings that change colour or texture?  If you can make the ear-ring that would be a lot simpler, and the scripting problems would be the same (which is the other part of the project, of course).  

[Madeline Blackbart]

I disagree witht he above statemnt I've never bought rigged mesh hands and some people in SL still can't/won't agree to see mesh so I think there's still a place for sculpted nails

[Innula Zenovka]

People certainly do buy sculpted nails still, I agree.

All I'm saying is that they are a pain in the neck to make, or so I am told by friends who are skilled sculptie-makers, and for the customer, they're a pain to wear and adjust -- certainly as compared with mesh hands.   

If I were trying to learn to make things in SL, I probably wouldn't use this a first project anyway, but if I were, I would learn how to make mesh rather sculpties.   Certainly, all things being equal, mesh seems to me the more sensible medium to use to make nails.    

The number of people who're connecting to SL with a viewer that's incapable of seeing mesh, or on a computer that can't cope with mesh, must be pretty small now.   There's apparently a lot of people using Phoenix who don't seem to realise they almost certainly could see mesh if they made some adjustments to their viewer settings but I am sceptical that there's any great number of people who actually can't see mesh at all.

[Madeline Blackbart]

yeah I geuss I could see that it's just the way you put it it seemed like you were saying no one uses them. Yes I agree mesh is easier to do. I upload mesh on open sim all the time as I find sculpties in general to hard to work with.

[Morgaine Christensen]

I agree there is a market for sculpted nails if you like that sort of thing.  The pair I received was impossible to fit correctly and finally just deleted them.  They looked sort of nice in a "deadly let me rake your face and kill you sort of way" but, I suppose there are those out there that like that look.

Meh, mesh hands...I really hate most things for the AV that is mesh.  I have to compromise my shape to much for the sake of some designer's creation.  No thanks!

I think the best solution, until the OP has more skills and understands how things works In-World, would be see what you can do with glove and sock layers.