I might have placed a curtain between two surfaces and can't touch it now...how do I get it back?

[Vodeechka]

subject line says it all...I thought I was being careful to keep the curtain inside the room and not in the window, but I guess I goofed.  I can't touch it from inside the room, and not from outside the house either.  Thanks to anyone who offers help.

 

~Kat

[EDIT]  I see the first answer and can't find a way to reply, so I choose this edit to expand the conversation.  The house is the free one I got for getting a paid account, and I don't believe I have edit rights to the structiure. So I can't try the first responder's ideas. I got here when I was trying to find Second Life admins to help...perhaps I need to keep looking for a way to find an admin directly.  I appreciate all who respond to me here! 

[SECOND EDIT]  Many thanks to both my early responders Rolig Loon and Innula Zenovka!  I learned a lot about working with my environment.  As it happens I got the best solution from another friend and I will put it here for anyone else to find.  Under the World tab find Area Search.  Here you can search for items by name or any other parameter that helps you single it out, once found you can select edit and you can move it back out where you can reach it.  Very easy! 

[Rolig Loon]

So just use your camera and very gently look inside the wall.  When you see your curtain, select it and pull it back out.

Or -- this is more fun -- grab the wall or even the whole house and move it  until the curtain isn't inside the wall any more.  Then move the curtain and put the wall back where it was.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Since you're a Premium Account customer, you can contact Support, either by submitting a ticket or contacting Live Help.

Alternatively, you could try either camming into the wall, as Rolig suggests, or you could try entering Wireframe View (Control Shft R to toggle it on and off), which should enable you to reach inside the wall and select the item.

Or you might try making sure both Build-Options-Select By Surrounding and Build Options-Select Only My Objects are checked and then, with left-click held down on your mouse, use your pointer to draw a box round the wall in question.  I think that should highlight and select your curtain for you, but I'm not certain.

 

[Rolig Loon]

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Vodeechka wrote:[ ... ]

[EDIT]  I see the first answer and can't find a way to reply, so I choose this edit to expand the conversation.  The house is the free one I got for getting a paid account, and I don't believe I have edit rights to the structiure. So I can't try the first responder's ideas. I got here when I was trying to find Second Life admins to help...perhaps I need to keep looking for a way to find an admin directly.  I appreciate all who respond to me here! 

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I have no idea which post was the "first responder" and which was the other one, but either one ought to work just fine in a Linden Home (or anywhere else).  It takes a while to sharpen SL camera skills, but IMO they are among the very first skills you need to work on.  This is a great opportunity to practice.  Here are some tips you ought to find helpful:

1.  Ditch your on-screen camera control -- that silly window with the arrows in it.  It takes up valuable screen space and it is a very clumsy tool.  Use your keyboard's arrow keys or your mouse instead.  Here's how:

I prefer to use my mouse for each of those motions, but you may use the UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT arrows instead if you like them better.  You can also use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Just be sure that you haven't clicked Don't use the mouse wheel to control zoom level of the camera in Preferences >>> Move and View, or this won't work.

2. Most valuable quick trick -- you can center your view on the cursor by holding down the Alt key and left clicking your mouse. This will save you a LOT of trouble when you try to focus on a particular target.

3. Do engage Disable camera constraints  in that same menu.  That option allows you to move your camera further away from your avatar.

4. As Innula says, you can highlight items by enabling your Build/Edit tool (CTRL + 3) and then dragging a selection rectangle around them with your mouse. Be sure that you have turned on Build >>> Options >>> Select By Surrounding first. This will work even if you can't see the items because they are inside something (like, say, a wall).  It's smart to limit the tool to look for only your own objects, so that you don't select a cloud of your neighbor's things too..  You can set that option with Build >>> Options >>> Select Only My Objects.

5. There is a selection of very handy settings in your Advanced menu, which you need to activate first with CTRL+Alt+ D.  Use your Advanced menu with some caution -- that's why it's called "advanced" -- but explore ones that sound interesting.  In the current context, look at the Rendering Types and Rendering Features options.  They are all ON/OFF toggles that you can use to make different sorts of things disappear when you want to see what's behind them.  One that you might consider is Ctrl-Alt-F2, which makes any item that you have selected with your Build/Edit tool vanish (or reappear). 

Congratulations on discovering that you can respond to a post here by editing your original question.  It works.  You can also reply to any individual post by clicking on the obscurely-named Permalink under it.  The advantage of doing it the way you just did is that everyone can see what you wrote.  The disadvantage is that nobody is notified that you wrote it.  The advantage of Permalink is that anyone who has posted already gets a notification that there's something new to read.  The disadvantage is that most other people will never think to look for a Permalink.

[Vodeechka]

Thank you so much for all this! My friend gave me the idea for Area Search which solved my problem before I could dive into your ideas here, but still, I'm very grateful for these tips, I know I'll be using them soon anyway. (especially the alternative camera control options, quite nice)

[Vodeechka]

Thank you for these ideas. Turns out the select only my objects selection wasn't helping for my lost curtain but here I am with more skills than I had before, thanks to your help. Can you tell me more about Wireframe View? I tried ControlShiftR but wasn't sure I was seeing anything different, perhaps that only works when something else has been activated first?)

[Innula Zenovka]

Ah.. my mistake. It looks as if you need to have the Developer menu activated (i.e. you can see the button on your toolbar) to use Wireframe. First activate the Debug menu if you haven't already done so (Control Alt D) and then activate the Developer menu (Control Alt Q). You can then use the Control Shift R shortcut or toggle Wireframe on and off from the Rendering submenu.

 

Note that Wireframe isn't available if you use RLV and have any attachments locked onto you.

[Rolig Loon]

Aha! Yes, Area Search is a nice tool. It's available only in the Firestorm viewer, like many other nifty options, but that makes it another good reason to use Firestorm. If you like Area Search, try using World >>> Pathfinding >>> Linksets, which is available in all viewers and does a few more tricks. For example, once you find your object in a list, you can return it, or set a beacon to it, or teleport to it.

BTW, I probably should have said .... If you want to use the trick of selecting your object by surrounding it with a selection rectangle, you have to surround the whole thing.  If you only surround part of the object, it isn't selected.