Orwar

Arrogant, me? No, no. I just think that it's a reasonable expectation for an individual to at least master a language to a degree that communicating with them doesn't become a chore, and that before one begins to cry out in desperation for social exchange, one takes a moment to reflect upon what they themselves have to offer in return, rather than to just tell others what they themselves require. If a person is unwilling to do that, then why should I - or anyone else - waste our time on them? No one is entitled to having friends. Friends can only be made through one's own merits and the opportunities that are presented to us; Second Life is such an opportunity, and for one to fail to make friends through it, it certainly appears it must be a lack of merits.

You'll have to do it the other way around. You can either use mesh or a prim as the canvas, upload in image to Second Life, and put the image on the object.

Depends on what you mean by 'artwork'. Textures? Mesh? You can upload both images and meshes into Second Life very easily (build -> upload -> select). Opening a store in-world is also quite straight forward once you've decided what you want to sell. You'll need to rent or buy a piece of land (makes sure it's labelled as commercial if you're renting), and pop down vendors / displays on it. Most people prefer to build an actual house to put them in, but technically that's optional.

In Gimp you can. Simply open the depth image to your project, select it, and copy (Ctrl + C). Then create a duplicate of your working layer, run a gaussian blur filter over it, right-click it, add layer mask, select the mask and paste the depth map (Ctrl + V) - then anchor the floating layer onto the layer mask. You can then tinker with the contrast and different depth intensities by using the colour select tool to increase or decrease the opacity of the various depths. Wrote a guide on that too.

Ach, aye s'a tough one'ae be readin' wh'n'a folks be writin' all lazy like, s'jus'n'ae good 'n proper. Aa'v'n'ae gott'n'ae'dae 'ow'na folks be 'nae learin'a be communicatin' wi'v claritae 'n such, s'tha' whoo'l point'a be writin' if ye kin'ae be n'derstood, eh?

DOF in Firestorm feels pretty borked, to be fair. The way it treats alphas just, bleh - BDW certainly has a better tool for DOF.

What in the seven Hells. I feel like @Rat Luv may somehow be responsible. Squints eyes.

Yes, that's something I've been none too fond of as well. Luckily there are deformers to help reduce that! Unfortunately it feels as if Geralt has been receiving less and less support over time. Some creators did rig for it for a bit when it was newer, but has since dropped it.

The rules are very simple - don't nick other people's stuff unless you want to get DMCA'd. Alternatively nick whatever you like but avoid getting caught. The issue with copyright infringement is complex when it comes to SL. Firstly, only the owner of an IP can dole out a DMCA (i.e. if you see a Mickey Mouse T-shirt on the MP, you can report it to give LL a heads up, or you can prod the Disney legal department and they may decide to file a complaint). Furthermore, in that scenario, Disney don't file a complaint against the 'creator' who nicked the IP, but against LL - in 99,999 out of 100,000 cases, LL will choose to immediately remove whatever they received a complaint about, and whack the responsible individual on the fingers (or occasionally just plant a fist behind their nostrils). Even if a case is uncertain, you must remove the content during the court proceedings (which is why, for example, Genus was out of commission for a while whilst working out a DMCA complaint made against them). As far as I'm aware, LL tries to be proactive and will remove stuff that's in clear violation against copyright law before a DMCA happens (especially with big brands, like Marvel, DC, Nintendo, etc.), but they can't check everything that people upload to the grid - and some people make a business out of scavenging game assets from various video games to upload them into SL (I once bumped into a warehouse on the mainland that had just about every asset you can find in Skyrim, including static character models labelled as 'statues'). Then we have the whole 'fair use' thing, which whilst a good thing, does make it more complicated still. Then there's the whole thing about how US laws apply, but then SL has people from outside the US using their services, which whilst not too complicated (LL being registered in California abiding by California laws) means that part of the userbase may simply be unaware of what laws apply, and when to look at global copyright agreements and when to look at US law. There's also the whole thing about how at least in Europe we tend to giggle at US legal proceedings for being plain silly ('in the US anyone can file a lawsuit for just about anything, how bizarre!' - as I grew up I figured some of the stories must have just been urban legends, but as it turns out that yes, someone did file a lawsuit for getting burnt on McDonald's coffee, and someone did file a lawsuit against Nike because they tripped over their untied shoelaces - here you would be laughed out of court if you demanded a fantasy sum because you didn't realize that coffee is served hot). ... TL:DR: play nice, or don't get caught playing naughty.

Well, the OP still hasn't said which gender body they want ... Meh, still: For women: I'd strongly suggest Maitreya for your first body, as it is very versatile (can be thin and athletic or more curvy), it's also by far the most supported body out there, so finding clothes isn't difficult at all. Belleza's bodies are curvier, and whilst I quite like Slink Physique, it doesn't have nearly enough creator support for me (even the HG which is the more popular of Slink's doesn't receive support from a large amount of creators). Legacy (TMP) is a dumpster fire I wouldn't suggest to my worst enemies. For men: I personally prefer Signature Geralt, however it's not supported very well and finding clothes for it is iffy. Gianni is a little bulkier, but has about as much support as Jake does. Jake is from Belleza and appears to be a decent body overall, though I have no experience of it personally. Legacy (TMP) is, again, absolute garbage that should never be suggested to anyone unless you're so mad at them you're considering drowning their children whilst streaming it live for the world to see, in which case suggesting TMP is still only marginally less cruel. Demo the bodies, play around with shapes and skins, if a slider doesn't go far enough you can try out some deformers to see if you can get the shape you want.

Neph as the Queen of the Night from W. A. Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.

I feel like in the past few years when the Zombie genre got overdone, the actual horror aspect of the theme was lost. It has been brought in a few different directions to try to make it more 'difficult' again, introducing various mutations and 'special types' of zombies (Nemesis in Resident Evil for example) - but it has gone from fright to just action, both in games and in films / series. In the Night of the Living Dead, the protagonists didn't have access to firearms, and they didn't fully understand the threat or how to deal with it, and the undead weren't so malformed and decayed (if recently deceased) that it was obviously apparent that 'this is a zombie' at first glance. But the zombies did go down if you whacked them over the head hard enough. In the Return of the Living Dead series, the threat is further increased by making the 'destroying the brain' part moot. The only way they find to stop the undead, is to entirely destroy them, and at the same time the undead retain intelligence and even the ability to communicate ('send more cops!'). It's in many ways a parallel to the general horror genre's descent over the past decade. The art of suspense has been pretty much lost in favour of shock value, gruesome practical effects have largely been lost with the introduction of CGI (I don't dislike CGI per se, I love me some CGI galore SciFi spectacles, but the gruesome graphics of films like The Thing just can't be beat by it). Zombies have gone from being a direct, relentless threat to being an inconvenience that will occasionally be the death of someone who's being careless or arrogant, or when someone betrays them. In the modern zombie genre, zombies aren't the antagonists, it's usually humans that are. The zombies are just scenery.

Pet peeve: when you buy a fatpack at an event and they've only included a HUD for the belt of the outfit, when the demo very clearly had a HUD that worked with the whole thing. In the last month I've had it happen twice, plus one time the fatpack wasn't even HUD driven but you got a folder with 12 colours each for 4 separate attachments - and of course the black one was mislabeled (though they did send an update after a day or so). You should always check, double-check, and triple-check something before it goes into a vendor. Mistakes happens, but I'm getting pretty sick and tired of writing notecards to creators to point out that they've gone screwed up something as simple as looking at the contents of their box before whamming it into a vendor and smacking a price tag on it - it will make me hesitate to buy from them again.

I preferred that way of typing to the miniature keyboards on smartphones. I've pretty much stopped texting because of how uncomfortable and inaccurate they are, especially when each button is half the width of a fingertip.

Or you could just do what 97% of the tattoo 'artists' in SL do and nick images off of Google. Much easier!

Ooh, yes ... ... They feel a bit outdated and rambly. I should probably do something about that. Also darn, was I rushing to finish that last one (had a bunch of upload errors because the forums were being silly), that portrait of Neph is absolutely terrible. She looks like she was feeling pretty done with it as well!

Throw some yodel pop in there and I'm game.

It's between this or The Perfect Cult by Deathstars. Mutter by Rammstein was good, too. Or Seven Inches of Satanic Panic by Ghost - but with only two songs, it's a bit short. But repeatable pretty much indefinitely!

Hm, well that guide only really covers the camera controls and zoom. To take a 'HD' picture you'll need to use a viewer that allows higher resolution renderings (not sure whether the standard viewer has that option), such as Firestorm or Black Dragon Viewer. As far as windlights go, and lighting in general, that's a whole little science of its own. You'll want to turn on ambient occlusion and the advanced lighting model in your viewer to make the most out of the in-viewer lighting. You can browse the windlights and just look for something that appeals to you, or you can edit (or create a whole new) windlight to manually set up the lighting - you can also work with local lighting (i.e. prims creating light) to have even more control over how your scene is lit. For blogging photography it's also important that you understand poses and avatar shapes, and how to adjust your avatar to fit a pose (or find poses that fit your avatar), as well as that you know how to adjust attachments (floating or clipping necklaces and gravity-defying earrings can make a picture look off real quick). Then you have your general photography practices for framing and composition, and your rules (such as the rule of thirds, and the rule of breaking the rules). You can learn a lot by reading 'real' photographer blogs as it's all applicable to SL as well. Finally you have editing, which again is its whole thing. The bare minimum for blogging should be that you can at least fix up neck seams, touch up shadows a little, and work with the lighting and pallet if needed - as well as putting in a signature. I did a somewhat longer post a while back where I showed the whole process of building a makeshift backdrop, setting up a completely dark windlight, creating a three-point lighting setup, setting up the camera and framing the shot ... But it's probably a few pages down on the photography board by now.

Yes. In Firestorm and Black Dragon Viewer both, you have an option to 'save' and 'load' a camera position, I mention it in my camera control guide here: There are also camera position save HUDs you can find on the MP. I know there's at least one for free. Cough.

I don't really take it personally, as such. I just find it awkward to have people around who've put a one-way glass between us. I can fully accept that someone is busy, AFKing, otherwise unavailable - or just not in the mood to chat (that's me 96.74% of my online time. Give or take.). But to go out of your way to manually untick all those boxes, when you have auto-responses for that purpose (and that just requires two clicks of the mouse), feels like really peculiar behavior. If it's that someone doesn't respect that you don't want to interact with them, we have another-- 4 mouse clicks (I think, I'm not in-world to check), to deal with that sort. Click their name .. Click 'profile' ... Click the block button ... Accept, I think? Yeah, four. Although if you also want to remove them from your contact list, you'll have to go to your contacts, which is one or two clicks, depending on which list you were looking at, then click their name, then click remove, and then accept. I kinda lost count and I can't be bothered to read this tiny text to count again, but yeah, there we have it. It also appears I've gone made a footnote longer than the actual message, which makes me think maybe I shouldn't use such small text, but then again it's optional reading, so meh. If you did get this far, hai!

It's a bit like asking what you should give your mother for Christmas. You're going to get impersonal, uninspired, cliche gift suggestions for pointless clutter that's unlikely to ever be used; and giving gift cards or cash is just a cop out. They are (presumably) your friends, and surely you should know of some of the things that they enjoy doing, whether individually or together. If they enjoy things that you aren't familiar with, inquire about that instead - 'what would be a good present for someone who enjoys skiing'? The only thing that comes to mind that 'always works' are books. You can get books on just about anything these days. Over the past five years I've successfully turned my brother into a crafts junkie by, bit by bit, giving him a small collection of woodworking books with the basics for wood carving and simple projects you can do with simple hand tools - and in response he has begun to build up a collection of knives and chisels. Now I'm just waiting for the Christmas he'll give me something he made himself, and that will be the best thing he ever gave me.