Bitsy Buccaneer

Check out the Builders Brewery group and site. They offer classes and advice for beginners and more intermediate builders. Mesh has some advantages, prims have others. Learning prims is easier and will help you gain useful skills which will help if you decide to take on mesh. You can definitely make a house out of prims. We did it for years before mesh came along. The land impact will probably be higher, depending on what you want to do, but there won't be worries about physics or visual collapse when you step away from it. Creating mesh is all about compromises too. I do alright with creating mesh, but it's something I like to have done more than I like doing. With prim building though, it's a delight watching it take shape and then come to life with the right textures. The process itself is as much fun as finishing it.

/me changes display name to Bitsy O'Buccaneer

Rule of thumb - if the mesh is already uploaded inworld, it should be pre-rigged (for clothing). If it's a DAE file, you'll have to do the rigging and weighting yourself. I've never encountered it different to that but this is SL so there's always the possibility.

GIMP is commonly used for texturing. It's a bit awkward to learn but it's free and there are a ton of tutorials. You'd need to find a way to hook your tablet up to your computer to use as an input device but that's probably less bother than moving files from computer to tablet and back all the time. There are tablet-based alternatives (use a search string like 'GIMP Photoshop Android alternative' to find them) which might suit your needs better though. Two basic ways to texture your own mesh - - use one of the Render functions in Blender to create a texture with shadows etc (the downside to this is that you'll have to Render each variation individually, which can add up to a lot of computer time if you want to make it in different fabrics or colour ways) - make a shadow (ambient occlusion) layer in Blender, then take it into software like Photoshop or GIMP to add to your fabric textures Whatever software you use for the second method, it will need to support layers. Generally speaking, the AO/shadow layer goes on top, set to Multiply (GIMP terminology, don't know if other programmes call it something different), with the opacity adjusted to suit your preferences. Then trims and small bits, then the base fabric layer(s). If you're using GIMP, use the Export command to make a single layer version. Open that version up, remove the alpha channel (unless you need it for sheer clothing) and Overwrite to save the non-alpha single layer version. (You can also Merge all the layers once you're done and export that, but it's WAAAYYYY too easy to forget to save a pre-merge copy and pre-merge copies are very useful for making adjustments and using different fabrics.) Inworld, you can try out your texture without paying the upload fees through the Local Texture option. Beta grid is also good, especially if you like some quiet for concentration. Local Textures is really cool because any changes you make to your texture will show up shortly after they're saved/exported in your graphics software. It's like magic and gives some instant gratification when trying out things like how opaque to make the AO layer. That's the gist of it. If there's some reason why you need to work just on the tablet, then it would probably still be useful to start with GIMP or PS first because more of us will be able to help you with any questions while you're learning.

I love it when it's direct, but if I need to use Area Search to find it I'll just do that. Updating direct SLURLs after a move or rebuild falls into Life's Too Short territory imo, even if it is someone else's life.

Giant hands and feet used to be the norm for shape demos, no mod of course.

I've edited my post to step away that specific wording, which came from the article. I'd been thinking about some semblence of fairness in the prizes and neglected to consider the wild west, guess work nature of pricing in SL. What I really wanted to talk about was how a no-trans policy would create a different loss of value.

Conversely, if they can't be traded then the value of repeats declines. In a system like SL, duplicate copies have zero value to the owner (if it's no transfer, it has to be copy). If it's transfer, at least it can be given to a friend or alt. Perhaps the only way to reconcile these two poles is a gacha system without rares, where items can be transferred but all have approximately nominally equal value. (edited from: equal market value) I guess it would be different for a game environment, but only for consumables where duplicates still have use. I'm glad I don't have to decide these things.

It sounds like anyone building a forced landing point entry needs to be really careful what they're doing then. Good use of texture repeats and mesh instances on an entry hub for an RP sim would be ok enough, but that whole thing about making us walk through a shopping mall of things we're not interested in to get to the main store is just causing problems.

An easier route than Blender would be texturing pre-made items others have made. Texturing is a good skill to have anyway, it's far simpler and quicker to learn than mesh, and there's free software like GIMP to use for it too. Try an MP search like "full perm hat" to see what's available. It's harder to track down things inworld, but the quarterly Full Perm Fair at the Old Europe Village is a good place to start collecting landmarks. If you do want to have a bash at Blender, you don't need to learn rigging for accessories unless you need them to move with animated parts of an avatar. Also rigging an item means the wearer can't adjust it at all. As for starting with Blender, pretty much everything I might write here I already put in this thread. And since it's Friday evening and some of the other posts might be helpful to you, I'm just going to be lazy and link to it Good luck and welcome to the best part of Second Life.

The best way to get gachas to change is to vote with your lindens. Avoid the ones whose creators do things you don't like. Reward the ones who do. It's not like there's a shortage of the things to choose from.

I rest my case.

I'm undecided as to whether I think it's just another spell of trolling or if the OP truly believes itself to be superior to the rest of us and is setting up various tests for us to fail

If you remember its name, try Area Search. I'm pretty sure Firestorm has it but it's been so long I'm not sure which menu it's in. A friend suggested I try Pathfinding as a more robust version of Area Search and it worked on our sim. For both Area Search and Pathfinding, it's just a matter of putting part of the name in the first box and letting it work its magic. The number of answers should give you an idea how common this is.... All it takes is one mistyped number in Position, or a misplaced decimal point and zooom, off it goes. Highlight Transparent can help sometimes too, if it has a texture with transparency in it. Highlight Transparent will make it glow big and red.

Are you talking about some sort of work on commission for a group rather than an individual? Finding this group of like-minded people who want the same scripted product (or close variants) could be tricky, especially if you're looking at niche, under-served markets. Do you or any of your co-workers have an established reputation or portfolio in SL yet? To be frank, I suspect that the best and easiest way of finding that group of like-minded people who want the same product is to just make it, put it on Marketplace and/or inworld and set about finding ways to market it. Commissions might come from that if your work is good.

Thanks, the help is much appreciated.

@Alwin Alcott @Phil Deakins Am very glad I asked now Just to make certain I'm understanding this correctly: if I go Premium, I won't be charged VAT. But if I pay for additional land, I will be charged VAT on the amount for, say, an additional 1024? /me wonders how responsible the building alt would be with a stipend....

Would someone in the UK please kindly help me with the approximate cost in £ for a year's premium including VAT? I understand that rates change, but if I go to Premium it will likely be within the next 2-3 weeks. Thanks in advance. I have to make some big decisions very quickly and my head's a muddle because of health problems. I think I have a figure but I don't trust my brain this week.

@arton Rotaru Very cool. And very helpful graphic. @OptimoMaximo I haven't made anything rigged yet, but you probably just saved me about three days of tearing my hair out when I do. Between the two of you, I think I understand this well enough to avoid mistakes. Just don't ask me to write an exam question on it Thank you!

Would someone kindly provide a short explanation of 'proper triangulation'? I just want to make sure I'm doing things as well as I can. I make all my LoDs by hand and don't use decimate or anything like that. Thanks x

I found the eBody dollarbies were harder to dress than my system av. Apparently Altamura breaks their gift bodies now so we can't alpha out their heads any more. That limits their usefulness for those of us who aren't keen on the way they do faces. So it's cheap and easy to own a mesh body these days but that doesn't make them cheap or easy to use.

You know, the smaller you make your av, the more you can do with a sim's worth of land and landscaping. But of course that won't work for you cause you'd still have to pay for the sim, right?

Buy one 256 sim. Place one build on the ground and 15 in the sky, connected by teleports. Voila, one 4096 sim.

Perhaps it isn't appropriate to make these comparisons in terms of single "cultures" then. Europeans are at least as old as Native Americans, even with glaciation-related displacement and repopulation. IMO it would be a more accurate reflection to consider it on the basis of "when was X first developed in Africa, in Asia, in the Americas, in Europe, in Oceania" instead. The best I can make of it is that Ceka is combining all of the Natives peoples of the Americas with the time of their ancestors' arrival and comparing that to politically-based groupings in a rather crowded and fractious Europe and Levant. It seems apples and oranges to me. I'm not for a minute trying to downplay the cultures and achievements of Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians or anyone else. I don't see this as a zero-sum game, where some have to be degraded in order to elevate others. But if we are going to make comparisons, it does seem sensible to me to make them on a fair and equivalent basis. I've added an edit to reflect this, Phil. I should have stuck to Ceka's language "I just said those other places were around about 2000,3000 years ago..A drop in the bucket compared to how long we have been over here.." Thank you for pointing this out. It doesn't really change the substance of my question though. 16,000 years is just a more specific way of saying the same thing. (And I'm going to leave off examining how good an estimate 16,000 years is right now because that's not my area of study and I really should get on with the rest of the day. )

I am genuinely confused by this, Ceka. You referenced the Romans being 2,000 years ago and the Babylonians 3,000 years ago and appear to be comparing this to early Native cultures in the Americas, circa 16,000 years ago. (Edit: Phil says it was someone else who put in the 16,000 years and I know that you, Ceka, will be all over the "I didn't say that" part and ignore the rest. Perhaps the question then is what kind of time frame are you using there then? How long we have been over here suggests something on par with the human re-population of post-glacial Europe.) Early modern humans were present in Europe 43-45,000 years ago. Glaciation pushed them downwards circa 22,000 years ago. Humans were moving back up into Europe about the same time as the movement into the Americas. There's evidence of human settlement and activity in Italy 12-13,000 years ago, including the Palatine Hill in Rome. There's a lot of history going into the people who became the Romans. I don't know how to make sense of what you're saying.