A Few Newbie Questions

[Jakoul]

Hi, I am brand spanking new to Second Life. As such I would like to try to start making random things however I can't find any useable guides, references or anything so I am asking here. What I want to make is a custom body shape, these are my questions. I am not talking about the sliders, I mean an actual custom shape.

1. How in the world do I make a custom BODY shape that I can wear?

2. Do I need another program or is this all done within Second Life?

3. What limitations are there?

4. Is there somewhere that can explain all of the layers/links/whatever to me?

5. Tiny avatars seem interesting to me and I might want to make one eventually, but I can't find any bodycrush scripts. Can I get an exact name or phrase to search for to find bodycrush scripts?

6. What is this character size in MB on a land thing? Is each land X amount of a server or something?

7. Is there any up-to-date source of information I can use for future questions instead of Google? (Everything is outdated)

8. How do I make clothing/hair/other wearable things?

 

edit: For some odd reason the forum mashed everything together when I first posted.

[Theresa Tennyson]

Uy, lots of questions....

1. and 2. Custom body shapes traditionally were made of individual pieces worn over the various parts of the default body mesh like a suit of armor. These can be made partially in-world but if you want to have elaborate shapes you will want an outside program that will allow you to make "sculpt maps" to shape the pieces. There is a newer way to make a custom shape that involves making a "rigged mesh" but that has to be made in an ouside program like Maya or Blender and be uploaded.

3. All animations work by moving the default character mesh so you need to take into account the "bones" of this mesh - i.e. the hand of your shape has to be somehow connected to the hand of the default character mesh for it to work as a hand.

4. If you're referrring to system clothing layers they're fairly self-explanatory. They're the only things that have dedicated values as clothing. Everything else is an object that is only "clothing" because it's attached to a certain part of the base avatar mesh. If you drop it on the ground it may as well be a tree.

5. The best search term would be "deformer".

6. Character size is independent of the land. The general unit of measure in SL is the "prim" which originally stood for "geometric primitive" but it's been sort of modified recently to a general term called "land impact." A full region (the square named areas on the map) can hold up to 15,000 "prims" on the land as landscaping, etc. As I noted, this doesn't include prims on avatars. A common small lot size can hold 117 prims on the ground but if I walk in wearing a 100-prim necklace this won't count against it.

7. and 8. Before you get into things like this, I'd suggest just hanging around SL for a while and inspecting things you see around you. There are a number of different types of avatars in the "library" in everyone's inventory, for instance. You can "edit" things to learn a certain amount about them even if you can't modify them. Also, if you want to get "hands-on" there's a building in a sim called Natoma called the "Ivory Tower of Primitives" that has a rather old-school demonstration of basic building. A lot of it has been augmented by more specialized procedures but it's still a good way to get started.

Now go out and play for a while before your next round of questions.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

As to 7), up-to-date sources of information, the SL Wiki is a much-neglected reasource, I find.

I would also suggest asking about specific topics in the relevant content creation forums both here and at SLU (that way your questions reach a wider audience of specialists).

For a rather dated, but still very good, introduction to making clothes and lots more, I strongly recommend Natalia Zelmanov's tutorials.  Also, if you join the Builders Brewery group in-world, they offer lots of classes (all free) on a wide variety of topics.

[Jakoul]

Will do. Thank you you two!

[Cinda Windlow]

Another good resource for someone new to sl is the NCI (New Citizens Inc.)  group.  They also have free classes for building as well as for other topics.  Just following the group conversations taught me a lot when I was new.