MandyOsho

Yeah video uaAKjx0DkYg isn't bad. As Quistessa noted, could be a bit more focused. Covers a lot of good info though. I found 2 other videos that I would recommend (other than the one that I might upload at some point : ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EpJ4Buqhbk Of all 3 I'm listing here, that one (_EpJ4Buqhbk) is probably the best in terms of the way the author presents the info. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdZm93R_U0s That one is not bad. I love that the author has a very pleasing personality - a very important thing to me just as an aside. However, drawbacks of that video as I see it is that its oriented a bit towards more knowledgeable SL users and with the goal of scrimping on L$. My video will not be concerned with how much L$ are being spent, and instead is purposely oriented with creating a really pretty avatar with cost being no object. I'm sure that aspect of it will rankle some people but the logic is thus: to get a really high-end beautiful look, you'll spend $50-60 USD total maybe. As opposed to spending $10-20 while being focused on spending as little money as possible. I would say, if you really want to tool around in SL for years with a high-end looking avatar, at least for me it's worth a one time up front $60 cost rather than $20. (Especially when you consider the fact that everyone routinely spends anywhere from $40-100 every month just on their cell phones!) And, for all 3 of the above videos: they all use the genus head. This is why at one point I mentioned earlier that I thought about having two sections in my video, one for the Lelutka head and one for the Genus head. I had already gone through the learning process with Rowan on the Lelutka head and created my avatar's initial version of body/head/skins using it (that I am totally happy with), and then as I was researching saw everybody and their sister using the Genus head. But now I think it will be just fine to stick with what I've got for my video because it also seems as if the Lelutka head and Legacy body (none of the above 3 videos use the Legacy body either) are fairly popular options. Note that In a way it is quasi-addressing the critiques in terms of, well, you're only doing one combination of components (which these other videos could be criticized about that too, couldn't they?). I.e., I would be adding to the "tutorial video ecosystem" the combination of Lelutka head and Legacy body, which I don't see in any other tutorial videos. And, **I** have already accomplished my own personal goal of creating a beautiful body/head/skins and I really don't even have any interest in taking the time to learn how the Genus head works or any other body. Remember that my goal - like a lot of people who try out SL, I would expect - is not to become an SL guru, but to just get an attractive, polished avatar created and then go hang out and chat and go shopping for clothes with my friends in SL. That's it. Yes I'm taking time to work on this super-duper tutorial video of mine but beyond that, that's all Mandy is going to be up to in SL. The point still being that my video will be very carefully constructed and tightly focused to being appropriate for people starting without any pre-existing knowledge of SL. After successfully getting through my video, they'll have a glimpse of the "big picture" if you will, and if they then wanted to plow their way through these other videos (perhaps to switch their Lelutka head for a Genus head, for instance), they should totally have the base of knowledge to accomplish that. ** One final word before I leave this discussion and go about my bidness. A persistent problem in the tech industry is that people who are tasked with producing tutorial/instructional material about complex subjects, vary widely in their ability to do so, for one reason and one reason only: as an instructor, one needs to have the ability to perform a kind of Jedi mind trick and erase the part of their brain that contains the knowledge that they are trying to teach, so that they can analyze every sentence that comes out of their mouth for how it sounds to someone who doesn't know the subject. Now that might sound elementary to some people, and really difficult to others. But I tend to think that people who are really good teachers/instructors have a kind of natural talent for doing that. IOW it's one of those kinds of things that would be hard to just teach someone how to do. The second problem is that whether with people who are tasked with producing tutorial/instructional material, or just anyone who is trying to help someone learn something (or someone who is commenting on the topic of people learning something), it is a fairly common aspect of human nature that once someone already knows some topic really well, it becomes really hard for them to do something like the mind-wipe thing, to go back in time and put themselves in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about that topic. Now I've met a lot of co-workers over the years that were great at explaining stuff about anything to anyone right off the cuff. But we've all also met a lot of people - software developers are famous for this - who are pretty much completely incapable of explaining a technical topic to other developers even, much less technical info to non-technical end users. The type of syndrome where they know it all and it becomes impossible - or, in many cases, they don't have the patience - for them to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about and teach it to them step by step starting from a state of zero knowledge. This is something I have specialized in doing many times within company environments and in formal teaching environments. Wanna have a challenging experience? Try teaching a mixed class of 19 - 50 something year old adult learners, who have no prior computer programming experience, Programming Fundamentals in C++ 101. In a night class from 6pm to 9pm, after they've worked a full day of work at their regular jobs. It takes a lot, presenting the material in a particular way, just to keep those students awake, much less teach them a very challenging technical topic in a way that they will understand it. So just a bit more info on why I think I can do what I am talking about here and produce a video which will add value to the info that is already out there. At this point I will adjourn from this discussion. Latest news is that it may take considerably longer for me to get this project done, because I was on a sort of break for awhile, but a new job just popped out of the woodwork unexpectedly and I start full time on it on Monday 4/6. Everyone take care and be well. Mandy

Hi Sam, I think you have a lot of things wrong in terms of how you assess what my experience is. Not sure what the box thing is about, I'm pretty familiar with that. Maybe you misinterpreted something I said. In any case, you seem to have a pretty negative and hostile attitude in relation to what I'm trying to do where my only motivation and goal is to produce something that will help what I suspect is many new SL users who are unable to either initially, or in a lot of cases probably, even in a longer term, figure out how to make themselves a really good looking custom avatar, or at least a first version of something that looks amazing compared to their initial default avatar. I would disagree on a couple of points, first I honestly think that more people have a lot of trouble with this. Do I have proof? No. It's not like I have conducted a scientific survey, or a marketing survey or a focus group exercise blah blah. I'm just basing my feeling about this on my own experience. I imagine a scenario in which Linden Labs did conduct a focus group exercise where they took 10 random people (but who expressed some interest in learning a VR game) and put them in front of computers, had them sign up for Second Life, then after they have finished the exercises on Orientation Island, said to them, "OK now we're going to have you create yourself a custom avatar so that you don't have to tool around with this really basic default avatar. But we want to see how you do trying to figure that out on your own. So go ahead and use everything at your disposal - google search, youtube, all the help facilities within SL, etc but you can't have someone, such as your fellow students here, or other people you could contact online, help you in real time. We might suggest you start by googling the phrase "Second Life custom avatar" and doing ctrl-f within SL and searching for "avatars". Ready, go!" And the focus group starts Monday morning and goes from 9am to 5pm the whole week. Then, on Friday afternoon, the focus group leader goes around to each student and sees how much progress they've made. I'd be willing to bet that at most 5 or 6 of the group would have been able to figure out how to actually create a good-looking custom avatar. And, most importantly, that there would be 3 or 4 of the group that would have "tapped out" at some point and completely given up. That 30 to 40 percent of the people is who I'm targeting what I'm doing to. "After all most avatar I see in-world managed to get out of their noobie look rather quickly." On this particular point I just wanted to make the observation, yes but how many people do you not see who are no longer in SL because they gave up trying to create their custom avatars and quit SL? : ) I also disagree that there is something exactly like what I am going to produce, already out there. But we will have a really good metric for that after I actually get it done and you are able to check it out. Sometimes it's hard to see what someone is aiming at doing, and if I haven't done a good enough job of explaining it I apologize. We each of us forget that people can't read our minds and see all the little cogs turning. If I didn't mention it before, yes I have bothered to look for other youtube videos. There are a handful that do something similar to this but I just feel that I can make a more comprehensive and detailed, yet still concise and focused version of this type of thing that is much better than what is out there already. In addition to being in the tech industry, I have done a fair amount of actual classroom teaching on the side at the community college / tech school level; there is a real art to producing an instructional video/tutorial for stuff like this and I think I'm really good at that (have done some other youtube videos in the past on some tech topics). In any case, I'm going to continue with this effort because I think I will be able to provide something of value to a goodly number of people. One interesting thing that has happened already is that I have found while pursuing this particular goal I actually have boosted my existing knowledge of SL a lot. That's been nice (something that always happens when you decide to teach any topic, of course). And I've gotten some great help from a couple of people so far, Rowan and Laurel. Kudos to them.

Aha. Just got some advice from someone who is fairly knowledgeable, with respect to the Genus heads. Won't go into detail about that advice, but in any case I'm canning that idea and keeping the video even simpler from the standpoint of just showing the usage of the Lelutka head.

Skell - I appreciate the intent of your sentiments (and your tutorials are very good btw), but I'm not that concerned about the aspect of all those variations. The primary intent of the video that I would make is not to address all of those. It would be to cover one or two basic combos of things (the only way I have even considered varying it would be to have everything else the same and show the use of a Lelutka head vs a Genus head, since those seem to be 2 of the most popular head choices at the moment, from what I gather). The basic BIG issue I'm trying to address is that even me, someone who used SL for 10 years fairly extensively up until 2015 or 2016, when it came to creating a new account now and sitting there with one of the basic, default avatars, had NO CONCEPT WHATSOEVER what it took now, 6 years later, to simply accomplish the one task that most people will want to do the moment they get off of Orientation Island - ditching that default avatar and creating a nice-looking custom avatar. (Realize that the last time I did that was back in 2005!) When it was me, I looked around a little bit, initially with the idea of just refreshing myself with some fundamentals, but noticed very quickly from looking at all the info out there that the process of creating avatars, shapes, bodies, heads etc etc seemed to have radically changed since 2016 (note that I did create several custom avatars back in 2015 time frame). And, when I tried to go through the process of replacing my default avatar with a custom one, even me, with a LOT of prior SL experience, couldn't make it happen. So I got pretty frustrated about that, as you can imagine, but of course it also made me think, if **I** can't do what one would THINK should be a fairly straightforward and simple thing to do in a VR world that touts itself as being a great 'ol place for everyone to come on down to and do all manner of socializin' and schmoozin' - simply upgrading how good-looking your avatar is - then what chance would the average person who has never even seen SL before but wants to give it a try, have? Not a very good chance, it seems to me. And given that, I thought of all those people who have tried over the last few years and will try over the next few years ad infinitum, and simply had no idea how to go about it because of its (as you so amply demonstrated in your post) almost ridiculous complexity? And I thought, wouldn't it be great to at least cover the absolute basics - starting with ok y'all you need to 1) get yourself a body, 2) a body "skin", 3) a head, and 4) a head "skin"... and here, watch me go to some actual stores and what it looks like to buy all 4 of those things, and put them together. Yes, using one particular set of all of the possibilities, but at least the "noob" would be able to, by following the exact, detailed instructions for that particular set of those 4 components, see what the big picture is and how they fit together, ending up with a really (in the female case) pretty custom avatar. Which would then give them a successful task under their belt, boosting their confidence, and giving them a good starting point for subsequently learning more of those different products, variations and combinations (not to mention having a pretty avatar). INSTEAD of not having a clue as how to even attempt creating a custom avatar, or in a lot of cases, I would wager, trying and miserably failing and saying, stuff this. THAT'S the objective. It's like when you have any other complicated thing that you want to teach someone and you start with the basics. Basics, which, in THIS particular case of Second Life custom avatar creation (unlike maybe some of those other complicated "thing" examples), are in and of ITSELF pretty gory and near impossible to grok by people who are absolute beginners. What is needed for the absolute beginner, especially, if you want to look at that way, is a limited amount of information to start, but yet that are complete, comprehensive, start to finish, detailed (every single step, every single mouse click) instructions accompanied with a sprinkling of concepts and general-idea-here-is-what-is-happening, "quick start" or "fast path" video that they can follow along with to SUCCESSFULLY create a custom avatar. That even someone who has never seen SL before might at least have a shot at actually following and completing, instead of miserably failing trying to figure it out on their own. And as far as what Chic said (hi Chic!), I think it is entirely possible to create a limited-option, quickstart type of video showing that (purposely) limited scenario click by click, and that there would be many people who would be able to follow along. Of course I'll make the observations about, hey I'm using the default SL viewer. There are other viewers and if you decide to use one of those, you may not be able to get this tutorial successfully. Blah blah. But the point is that, with any software or tutorial about software one can only do the best that one can do. And my contention is that the LACK of a video of the type I am describing is NOT doing the best that can be done for SL noobies. Now of course such a video needs to be kept current such that if things change in SL that invalidate specific instructions in the video (remembering it's limited focus, for one thing, but...) I am willing to sign on to review my video several times a month to make sure that I make any edits to it in accordance with such changes. Will THAT turn out to be too big a job to deal with on an ongoing basis? Hopefully not. But even if that did happen and I gave up on it after awhile and even pulled the video, at least it would have helped a lot of people get over that initial hump in SL while it was up. End of book

So, in case anyone is interested (okay if not lol) Rowan Amore was nice enough to walk me thru the absolute basics of putting the body, the head and the skin(s) together. I'm checking out a few more vids in youtube that I saw, other than the one suggested previously. I am going to assess, looking at it from the pov of someone who doesn't know ANYthing about SL, whether they could actually manage to get thru the 50 some odd mouse clicks that Rowan walked me thru (click only on this, don't click on that, you don't need that, "upscaled" = HUD, blah blah blah) without being walked thru it, or with any/all of the available info there is out there. I suspect that that will still be the case (highly improbable someone could just figure it out on their own). But I will check out those other videos. Following that, I will put together my own instructional video which CAN take someone with no knowledge whatsoever of SL and show them how to change from their brand-new default avatar, to one that looks good. And then there will be at least ONE freaking video of that type in the universe. (Unless one of those other vids does in fact show every detail of the process, step-by-step, in order, from start to finish. Then I'll admit that it was indeed out there.)

So I'm supposed to wear (click on the "Add" button actually) the [BODY] Legacy (f) (1.4) item and the [EDIT] Legacy (f) (1.2) (Upscaled) item? Which, if that is true, how exactly was I supposed to know that (seeing as how it's not in any instructions anywhere in this universe - just being snippy about that in general, not with you Rowan) Along with the [SHAPE] Legacy (f) "Starter Shape" item (I was unclear your directions on the shape)?

I know I don't really need to keep this discussion going necessarily (esp. if I get some paid help, which I have a couple of candidates for that). But I feel that this - the usability, user-friendliness and intuitiveness, but most important of all, the lack of detailed tutorials - is an important topic in general. It always has been an issue with SL and it amazes me that it still is. So I think it is instructive for everyone (hello, McFly - I mean, SL and body/head/skin vendors) to see how much people struggle with this stuff. So I'm going to turn off the shape item, even though that didn't really seem to do anything, and for everyone's edification, here is where I have gotten in terms of doing my custom avatar. And at which point I am pretty much stuck without getting some more detailed realtime help. ps. Hmm, apparently there's no way to take OFF the shape I activated now? And, was there supposed to be a HUD option in the items of the body folder? I thought there was one earlier, and now there isn't one... lol

and what about the eraser items? one person told me not to use them, another to use the body one. I think. You see the frustration.

so i dont use any of the shape or physics items in the body folder?

Really simple question. Are we supposed to drag the orange box to our floor and then do an "Open" after buying something? It seems like you used to have to do that everytime and now folders seem to be appearing by magic sometimes... Whatever. smh lol Thank you all for spending any time whatsoever on this, I'll now go the "paid support" route

i understand most of what is in the rest of the video. The critical parts are in that one section, and she DID NOT complete doing the body nor even talk about putting the head together with it. The bottom line is that it is close, but not as complete info as it needs to be. I tried doing other things with the other person i was messaging with (who was more knowledgeable) and we both together could not get thru the entire process. Yes, what is actually going to happen is that I am going to pay someone who is really good at this a bundle of lindens just to put together my stupid avatar. Which is totally fine as far as I'm concerned (paying to make that happen) because I frankly have no patience with software that is extremely non user friendly AND on top of that when they can't bother to put out detailed tutorials and one has to amass some type of 6-month learning curve to be able to use it as some kind of intellectual badge of honor. Not being snippy with you specifically, Sam. Thank you for at least trying to help. But I've been doing software development for 40 years myself and when someone like me can't even figure out how to create a custom avatar for a VR game, it's not a problem with me, it's a problem with that game and the people who design it and the products that go along with it, for not deigning to take the time to create the instructional materials that are needed. Oh, so why bother? Going back to the other topic, all I want to do is have a place to hang out with and chat with my friends. To do that, I don't think that I should have to expend 6 months of torturous effort trying to learn the gazillion intricacies of a ridiculously arcane process of constructing a darn avatar, for pete's sake. But that's just me. I can't help thinking how many more people would have used, and continued to use Second Life over the last 20 years as opposed to the (I would bet an EXTREMELY large number of people) who got so fed up with how hard it is to learn/use that they just gave up.

Thanks for the suggested vid, Sam, but it doesn't measure up. Watch it very closely, which I did from from 1:36 to 1:49 (along with a default SL avatar in my SL window where I was trying to change my avatar), and you will see that she basically skims thru the process. It is not detailed, step-by-step. She glosses over some things, doesn't even discuss heads, and starts to put a new body on but quickly aborts that demonstration. Watch it yourself and I think you'll see that if you were actually trying to put together a body, head and skin you probably wouldn't be successful. At least I wasn't. So with the info in that video, I still am unable, even with my prior SL experience, to get thru configuring/assembling/putting together the 3 things I have purchased thus far: [LEGACY] Meshbody (f) Special Edition (1.4) <== BODY LeLUTKA Lake Head 2.5 <== HEAD itGirls - Lelutka BOM - Eden DEMOS <== SKIN (note I couldn't even figure out how to buy the non-demo of this at itGirls store arrrrghhh) I believe these are the 3 things I need to get started. If I can just get past putting those things together and getting them actually configured then I could begin to dream about how things like hair and clothing work now.

Oh, I AM willing to learn HOW to do it, IF someone can actually explain to me HOW to do it. See there's a fine difference there. The question becomes, can someone who, like me, used SL extensively all the way thru 2016 figure it out on their own? Or, is it a complex enough process now that even someone with previous experience (you can forget about someone completely new to SL figuring this stuff out, man), needs HELP from someone to figure out how to do it. I just spent 4 hours reading the suggested virtualbloke tutorials AND trying, with someone trying to help me via text chat, how to create a custom avatar. Even with someone trying to help with only chatting via text here in private messages - TOTAL DISASTER. Couldn't even get the head to appear on the body I bought. The "instructions" that come with the products one buys (body, skin, head blah blah blah) are a joke. They don't explain hardly anything. And I reject the notion that there are very detailed youtube videos out there that explain how to do the current BOM stuff related to avatars, down to the last detail. I looked, and I couldn't find any. I don't think any tutorials like that exist. But I am TOTALLY willing to be proven wrong. You point me at those tutorials that can actually walk me how all this stuff works now and I'll be a happy SL'er. I really don't want to strike a negative tone here but one would think that this stuff would be better (more user-friendly) after 20 freaking years. Evidently not. To close this post, I would just pose the simple question: What kind of software is it, or stated more directly, how "user-friendly" and what is its ease of use is software in which the VERY FIRST THING ONE NEEDS TO DO, customizing one's avatar, is so bizarrely complicated that (I would bet) almost NO ONE who is trying SL for the first time can figure out what to do (beyond using the default chosen avatar)? Not very user-friendly, it seems to me. And would it be so hard for the actual vendors of the avatar components to come up with even ONE start-to-finish, detailed video showing how to put together an avatar? Seems like that would be a big selling point for them, and do they even care about making money or what? I'm serious. You buy one product, like a body, and open up the folder in your inventory, and there are 40 freaking items staring you in the face. What sequence do you activate them in? Do you do Wear or Add (the person trying to help me was saying that's important) and how do you know which on what? Which one of the 3 gazillion possible sequences through activating in some way, shape or form the dozens of components in the folder do you follow (and where if you get even one of them out of sequence you're stuck?). It's just crazy to me. Seriously.

"You are not only asking someone to put together a look for you but to take the time to educate you on the best shops and then walk you through how do it step by step with you having no idea what they are talking about. That could take many, many hours." OK Sam. How many hours do you estimate? What would "many, many hours" be? 10? 20? Just trying to get a ballpark idea.

Thanks for your reply Doris. Cost is not an issue. I will spend 5-10,000 L$ for high end avatars/shapes/accessories. Unfortunately, in my experience I haven't had much success asking people questions "in the wild" at places in SL. They either don't remember, or what you really need is details on exactly where they got something plus how to put it all on. That's the other part that I am baffled by now - when I bought the one avatar from one shop, I go to my inventory and open it up and there's 50-60 objects, and there didn't seem to be much if any instructions. It's just gotten to be too much and too complicated.