SL stuff it took you an embarrassingly long time to discover

[stlshayne]

I thought this could be a fun one. Is there any SL control, tip, setting, ect, that you should have discovered much sooner than you did? 

 

My main one: I'm someone who loves to build and decorate and whatnot... and it took maybe a couple of years until I discovered you can "drag-copy" an item. I legitimately would "Take copy" of an item and rez that. It hurts my soul thinking about all that time wasted. 

Edited July 15 by stlshayne

[Amata Karas]

For me it was not knowing about copy selection>center copy for lining up prims. I would make a new prim every time, move them close, zoom in and move 0.001 at a time until things lined not as perfectly as center copy would have accomplished  😒 

Or that if I was placing multiple items together in a build placed at an odd angle, I could just line everything up at 0 rotation, then rotate the combined set into place. 

Really though, I think the worst was when I first started 17 years ago, I thought the shoe base was an extra, system layer version of the shoe -- why would I want that? So I deleted them. And then I couldn't figure out why no shoes worked on my av. 

[Luna Bliss]

Oh I have a good one. For some time I didn't know about this jelly avatar thing. I'd be building in the sky and glance down to my store customers from time-to-time to see if anybody needed help, and I started noticing these blobby-looking avatars. I wondered, "wow..why are so many people buying that new weird-looking blobby avatar these days...must be some strange new fad".  LOL

[stlshayne]

Okay, I've got another one. It might be worse than my OP, so please tell me I'm not alone in this! 

When I first joined SL, I'd rez, say - a table. So how do I pick it up? Well of course I don't want to "Delete" that table forever; I want to "Take" it back to my inventory. That became such second-nature that I'd even do it with rezzed test prims, and I am still fighting that habbit!

Edited July 15 by stlshayne

[Katherine Heartsong]

In Firestorm, typing "gth 2500" immediately flies you up to 2500m. Thank you @Rowan Amore.

Add instead of Wear.

[stlshayne]

33 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

In Firestorm, typing "gth 2500" immediately flies you up to 2500m. Thank you @Rowan Amore.

Add instead of Wear.

I just taught someone that yesterday! He thought I was a wizard. 

[Emma Krokus]

Aligning to grid - so glad Builders' Brewery taught me that!

[Harper Held]

There's buttons in the building interface to copy different parameters (location, size,object properties). I was building for 10 years before I noticed that.

[JeromFranzic]

(*takes notes* thanks )

[Emma Krokus]

3 minutes ago, Harper Held said:

There's buttons in the building interface to copy different parameters (location, size,object properties). I was building for 10 years before I noticed that.

Yes, that was another wonderful discovery for a builder!

[Frionil Fang]

You can use basic math in the input fields, not just numbers. Parentheses, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raising to a power (^), trigonometric functions (sin(), cos(), tan(), atan()), square roots (sqrt()), natural logarithm and exponentiation (log(), exp()) and pi are all valid.

Want to move the object 1 meter on the X axis? Put down the move tool, just add a +1 at the end of the current X position and press enter. Want to scale the size to 2x only on Z axis? Don't bother with scaling, add a *2 at the end. Can't remember what 1/√2 is? Skip the calculator, 1/sqrt(2) is fine.

[Emma Krokus]

1 hour ago, Frionil Fang said:

You can use basic math in the input fields, not just numbers. Parentheses, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raising to a power (^), trigonometric functions (sin(), cos(), tan(), atan()), square roots (sqrt()), natural logarithm and exponentiation (log(), exp()) and pi are all valid.

Want to move the object 1 meter on the X axis? Put down the move tool, just add a +1 at the end of the current X position and press enter. Want to scale the size to 2x only on Z axis? Don't bother with scaling, add a *2 at the end. Can't remember what 1/√2 is? Skip the calculator, 1/sqrt(2) is fine.

I had no idea it would do more than basic algebra! Thanks!

 

 

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

On 7/14/2024 at 7:36 PM, Amata Karas said:

For me it was not knowing about copy selection>center copy for lining up prims. I would make a new prim every time, move them close, zoom in and move 0.001 at a time until things lined not as perfectly as center copy would have accomplished  😒 

Or that if I was placing multiple items together in a build placed at an odd angle, I could just line everything up at 0 rotation, then rotate the combined set into place. 

Really though, I think the worst was when I first started 17 years ago, I thought the shoe base was an extra, system layer version of the shoe -- why would I want that? So I deleted them. And then I couldn't figure out why no shoes worked on my av. 

Say what???  I am still that first paragraph. 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

Say what???  I am still that first paragraph. 

Rez a prim, edit the prim, hold down the shift key, left click and hold on the axis arrows, drag sideways, now you have moved the original prim and left an exact copy behind.

If you tick "snap to" in the options top of the build panel, you can use shift-move to copy both in straight lines, and in arcs.

Want 6 bar stool around a table? Res one, rez a cube under the table, left click the bar stool, shift-left click the cube, then use a shift-move copy to rotate the cube several times, this will leave a circular tail of bar stools around the cubes. Lefty click the table to deselect the stool/cube pair, then lift click on the cubes and delete one by one, ta-da! Bar stools around a table.

 

[Caitlin Tobias]

It took me 5-6 years and countless houses to rezz again before someone told me you can 'lock' it. It was (second) life-changing!

[InnerCity Elf]

Edit linked! ✨ 

[Rowan Amore]

This was when I first started SL and pretty much irrelevant now but system skirts.  I had tried on dozens of gowns that had system skirts and could not understand why anyone would wear one when it made you behind look enormously out of proportion.  Then one day, a creator included a notecard inside the demo folder on how to adjust your shape to fit the skirt.  EUREKA!    I still think system skirts with some flexi were superior to mesh gowns.  They just moved more realistically.

[Nalates Urriah]

11 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

Say what???  I am still that first paragraph. 

If you have not visited the Ivory Tower of Primitive, check it out. There are many trick ways to work with Prims.

[AmeliaJ08]

Think it took me a couple of years to learn how planar texture mapping worked and how to use it to make texture alignment between different prims automatic and perfect. I was a noob tweaking the values in those offset boxes and tearing my hair out...

 

[Aethelwine]

Early on I resized objects with a calculator using edit linked parts and working out the numbers for resizing manually and then moving things back into place... It was sometime later I realised you could buy resize scripts that would do it all for you!

It was maybe 10 years before I worked this out, but a game changer: When searching your inventory, often you are not sure what name of thing you are looking for so you search for maker, you find the folder with what you want in, but when you clear the search field so you can see contents of the folder the view changes and the folder you were looking at has now vanished off the bottom of the screen.. all is not lost, you don't to scroll down searching for highlighted section in your inventory - just press your down arrow and your view moves to the folder you selected and you can find what you were looking for.

 

 

Edited July 17 by Aethelwine

[Rat Luv]

I thought that when you logged out, your avatar stayed in that same spot until you returned. So I used to look for remote seabeds or abandoned land to log out on, in case someone caged me when I was offline 

I told a friend, if I had the money, I'd only rent regions with snowy mountains and Japanese-style houses, or somewhere like Kowloon. He said, "Well you can just add those bits, can't you?" I thought LL designed every sim and you rented or bought them with everything already there, depending on which features you preferred  

Camming while building - I used to walk my avi around the object I was building so I could inspect the other side, until a builder pointed it out 🤦‍♀️

I can't remember when I learned all these, but it was quite a while after joining 

[stlshayne]

1 hour ago, Rat Luv said:

I thought that when you logged out, your avatar stayed in that same spot until you returned. So I used to look for remote seabeds or abandoned land to log out on, in case someone caged me when I was offline 

Ok, this one is adorable

[Kylie Jaxxon]

ugh, literally took weeks, and then only after I happened to mention it to someone what a pain it was, or I would probably still be doing it....didn't know you could change the environment setting to whatever you wanted, so I spent those weeks landscaping/decor work in the dark until it became daylight again

[Emma Krokus]

2 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

Early on I resized objects with a calculator using edit linked parts and working out the numbers for resizing manually and then moving things back into place... It was sometime later I realised you could buy resize scripts that would do it all for you!

It was maybe 10 years before I worked this out, but a game changer: When searching your inventory, often you are not sure what name of thing you are looking for so you search for maker, you find the folder with what you want in, but when you clear the search field so you can see contents of the folder the view changes and the folder you were looking at has now vanished off the bottom of the screen.. all is not lost, you don't to scroll down searching for highlighted section in your inventory - just press your down arrow and your view moves to the folder you selected and you can find what you were looking for.

 

 

OMG I did'nt know this - THANK YOU THANK YOU

[PheebyKatz]

Rotating objects in the Edit window without having to sit there and hold down the little plus or minus thingy on each axis until it looked right. When I realized those colored things that kept getting in my way were handles I could grab and just rotate the damned thing, I kicked myself for about a week and a half.