Orwar

There is another approach. Go to the marketplace, search for "bottle", specify the search by ticking Copy, Modify and Transfer (this will make fullperms list only) and refine the search. Find a bottle that looks as if it has a decent enough shape, and make sure that the description mentions that it includes UV maps (why people sell fullperm mesh without them is beyond me, but it happens). Buy your bottle of choice, unpack it, and create a copy of the mesh that you will work on. Download the UV map to your computer. Open the UV map in an image manipulator program (Photoshop, Gimp, whichever you prefer) and texture the UV yourself. If you have no intention of selling the bottles, I don't think even Pepsi would care that you took an image of one of their bottles off of Google and used it privately - but if you want no doubt whatsoever that any legals are broken, design your own soda logo. Upload the texture to second life and apply it to the bottle. I'm seeing fullperm bottles for L$25 that look good, and you've got 120 listing for L$0-10. If you can't figure the texturing bit out yourself, search for a texture designer instead.

That's... Fishy. When you upload a mesh object into Second Life, you can determine how it will be rendered at a distance by reducing the object's amount of rendered triangles. If you make a plain bottle, it would on its own have no real issue being fully drawn. You can either reduce the triangle count automatically in the upload, in which case SL decides what goes and what stays, or you can make a lower-poly object to replace it. For small clutter objects, a lower poly count at a distance means that it will have less impact on your rendering performance when your camera is far away from it by making it less detailed - but it's also an issue of how many items and, more importantly, how many (and how large) textures are on them. You can change how far this distance is by changing your LOD distance in your viewer, and for a bottle which is already quite few triangles (again, unless the design is too intricate), it may be argued that there's no need for a lower-poly model at all as the object is so 'light' to begin with (although an equally strong argument can be made that 'but if I have 200 bottles in a room and I'm not looking into the room, there's no need to fully render them all' - though personally I'd shift that issue primarily to furnishing and region design; too much clutter is never good for performance and should be kept reasonable). Lower-poly models become more important with larger and more intricate objects, say a building's facade where you have a lot of detail that won't be necessary from a far vantage point, where you might just want the general structure to be drawn. L$10,000 for two bottles, at that point I'd expect them to come with a decent beverage inside.

Wisdom is the ability to recognize that there are things which one does not understand.

Now I'm curious about those offers. In SL (as well as to a large extent, RL), price doesn't translate to quality. Making a mesh bottle or two and a texture each is a fairly quick job (unless you want a very intricate design); for SL you generally don't want the kind of mesh that comes in "100% realistic detail" since, well, we're talking clutter objects - they should have as few triangles and as low resolution texture as possible to avoid unnecessary lag. When a creator approaches you, always check their portfolio to assure yourself that their quality is up to your expectations - and as far as pricing goes, be reasonable. L$2,500 is 'roughly' a minimum wage by US standards, but to most people it's not employment but a hobby - if you want to hire a professional asset creator the hourly charge should increase, but they should also be able to work more efficiently. Also, it's a question of what your commission entails - for you to own the mesh and textures and be able to redistribute them however you see fit is one thing, for an item with M/C/NT where they keep the product to distribute themselves, is a wholly different matter. You can't, but if you flag it for deletion a moderator will get to it eventually.

Shy should I? There are no electrical appliances.

... ... Maybe?

Rawr?

A skin is the layer of your avatar where the textures depicting skin goes. As Fritigern said, this is generally speaking a collection of 3 skins - though for some mesh bodies there are more textures, depending on how the mesh has been UV-mapped. For some other avatars, made from mesh or prims, it may also be fewer textures.

Oh, oh, I could totally see myself preforming a ceremony in a dark, towering structure of pointed arches and spires with a slightly leaky organ (oi! the musical instrument) playing a wheezy march that could as well be for a funeral. *ahem* Dearly beloved, we are assembled here in this twisted congregation to witness the unholy union of these here carnal lunatics. Life is full of moments of joy as well as moments of disappointment; regardless of how those who now stand before me shall proceed, whether with success or failure to uphold this matrimony with dignity and passion, at least we may remember today for what a lovely cake we will be feasting upon once the completion of this ritual. Remember that everything that is born must also perish, and that until we meet with the inevitable, the best we may hope for is that everything doesn't totally suck. Perhaps, you may help each other stave off such distress and instead turn the challenges ahead of you into opportunities to grow stronger together - considering the expenses of today's arrangements I should hope so! Again, no refunds. Should anyone have reason to object to this union, I ask that you sit down in silence, as we've no time slot in the schedule for drama. In fact we've failed to take into account any time for asking whether you consent so I'll cut this short - you may now snog the bride.

That sounds great and all, but when do we get cake? Just kidding - congrats again!

Oh. "all", not "turtles". Makes sense! Anyway, when I kitted my female alt up, I went with the same philosophy as when I made my male avatar - whether I'll be using it or not, I'd like my avatar to be 'complete'. I was advised to get for the VAW one, and I think that it works very well - however, I'd suggest the "inner only" option (both options come in the same pack), as the outer parts may clip when you move, and can be iffy to get in the right skin tone (essentially it's the same issue as with neck seams - even using skins supplied by the same skin creator, how they appear on the mesh may differ depending on the brand - and in that area, it can be pretty much just one big neck seam!). Can't really say much about it's functionality though as I never tinkered with that (there's a pun in there-- But I don't think the forum rating would allow it!). As with anything though, I'd advise that you demo as much as you can, to get a first hand experience.

I'm afraid we're quite out of luck on the fashion front. But you may want to look up ContraptioN (some Victorian/Steampunk apparel) and ColdAsh.

.. My Spanish-- Or Portuguese(?) is a little bit flaky... Did you just say 'Hello turtles'?

A concept that ought to be common sense. Alas ...

... ... See, that's a penny I may never see again!

Mmhm, I think we just discovered why that is!

I did get one with a demo from... Blueberry, I think. So it appears to be possible. The AO in that one wasn't quite "me" though.

Silver... You know that's for slaughtering those pesky dogs, right? Against the undead, it's no better than a butter knife. This isn't some Hollywood B-movie!

No, I don't think BOM will have any effect on how legs and long skirts/dresses play with each other. It's mainly because of how animations move the bones and how the apparel is rigged to your body; if you've got an animation wherein you cross your legs (like Syo in the post above this one), and you're wearing a long dress/skirt, the dress will implode on itself and clip through itself. The best way to deal with dress/skirt implosions is to avoid such animations whilst wearing them. I'd suspect/hope that there's some sort of leg or animation overrider-overrider that either locks your legs in place or just make them move very slightly when your avatar is moving - if anyone know of a good one, I'd be very interested to know!

No, no, I'm not looking for friends with their online status hidden - this might end up a bit of a rant, but I do have a point that I'd like to make. I frequently do look up the profiles of people who post in the Make Friends forum to see if they appear interesting and, most importantly, whether they're online. Sometimes, when a person appears interesting to me but appear offline, I'll write them a little note card to introduce myself and let them know I saw their post and decided to contact them - and I drop it at them, and they receive the item just fine; they're online! I might as well have put this in the pet peeve thread, I suppose, but I also figured it might be relevant for people who are indeed on the look-out for friends; I highly suspect that some people may well skip you over if they look you up and are led to believe that you're not online. They might check in again later, and still thinking you're offline assume that you just don't share their online hours and pass you (at least, I do!). Whether you post in these forums, or if you sign up at some in-world venue for finding friends or partners, your hidden online status might just be what causes you to miss out on potential friends! I get that people, for different reasons, may want to hide their online status - but if you just tick that box because "privacy", well, you may well be getting more of it than you asked for. And if you do post here to try finding some friends, at least toggle it off temporarily for a few days? </rant> I'm curious though, is it just me or does seeing the red 'offline' notice in a profile turn you off from trying to reach out to that person in that moment?

I'm not sure what help you're offering, but feel free to ask if there's anything you need help with.

Now then, let's see if we can't find a quick and easy way to bring this argument to a conclusion.

I'm not quite techy enough to be able to get behind how exactly the calculations work or how precisely they preform, but from my experimenting with complexity tolerance I've noted that fully rendering an avatar with 200K complexity does indeed appear to have a larger impact on my FPS than fully rendering someone who clocks in at 80K does (by toggling "render fully" off and on on random avatars with different complexity values whilst in an already taxing setting). I know that it might be a bit of a primitive form of experimenting, but since FPS is usually the go-to measurement for graphical performance, unless my results are just totally random chance - it appears that avatar complexity is at least somewhat on the right track. I do prefer to see the people around me, as that sort of feels what clubbing in SL is largely about - but if a person doll up their avies to the point that they alone can cost me an absurd FPS loss, not caring about the performance of people around them, I think that jelly dolling them is only fair. It feels all the more pathetic when someone with well over 200K complexity IM me something like 'nice avi'; I usually tell them that they have 'a nice colour to their jelly doll' - some don't understand what I'm talking about, others get pissy about me not wanting to render their trainwreck of an avatar (especially if you scan them and find that they're running around wearing their high-scripted, highly complex genitalia hidden in their trousers). The one thing with the current system that I think might need improvement is that you should get a warning when you attach something with an extremely high amount of complexity. It's easy enough not to notice the complexity prompts when you have your inventory open and focus on picking out an outfit - suddenly you're just way over the top, and don't know why. Often it can be as simple as a single attachment having a few hundred thousand complexity to it, and removing that one thing (usually it's shoes, hair or sculpted jewelry) would put you well within a reasonable complexity level.