Penny Patton

I personally use 3D Studio Max to make all my sculpts, but that's because I do design work outside of SL and it's always good to have broader skills using pro tools. Blender, I believe, has the most SL tutorials and other resources so it may be easier to jump into. One bit of advice I would add, tho, is something that even most of SL's best content creators overlook. Do not use your own shape to build around. Create a shape specifically for building. Perferably a shape with adult proportions that is as small as you can possibly make it. I use a shape that is 4'11" (actual height, not Agent Height), tho I'm pretty sure I could make it smaller still. The reason for this is that it's absurdly easy to scale up an attachment to make it larger for larger avatars. Making a large attachment smaller, on the other hand, can be almost impossible without practically rebuilding the item from it's base prims. When most people build attachments, they often use prims with the smallest possible dimensions to add detail like belt holes, spikes, piping, etcetera. An attachment with so much as a single prim at the smallest size cannot be shrunk any smaller unless the owner finds that one prim and resizes it. This is rarely easy, especially if the attachment has many such prims. So work small, your future customers will thank you for it. You also broaden your potential customer base, especially these days as more and more avatars are shrinking down to realistic sizes.

Lithelfys, I'm not saying anyone needs to shrink down. I'd like to see LL address the issue at it's source, correcting the height displayed in the appearance editor, providing new users with properly scaled and proportioned avatars as well as building with a better sense of scale for Linden maintained environments like the welcome areas. That's not the same as demanding everyone break out the yardsticks and start scaling themselves down. As for your question, tthere's a multitude of reasons to work by a set scale but I'll just repeat the most basic and practical reason which I stated earlier in this thread. If you are the average over-sized avatar in SL, you are paying about four times as much money for your land, per square metre, as someone who builds to scale. Larger structures also require substantially more prims, meaning you're using the amount of prims you have far less efficently, meaning less detail, less content, per square metre. That one reason has nothing to do with opinion, aesthetics, or point of view. It has nothing to do with being pouty, and the numbers are every bit as real as the numbers in your bank statement each month. Admittedly, much of that is the additional up-scaling one has to do to compensate for SL's terrible camera placement, however all else equal, the average SL avatar would still need to pay at least double what I pay in tier for the equivailent in-world experience. Whether you're talking a small, simple house, or a sprawling, full sim estate.

Everything in SL is measured in metres. When you rez a prim, the cube defaults to 0.500m, half a metre, or 50cm.So if you stretch a prim up from your feet to your head and you get 2.180 for the prim size, that means your avatar is 218cm tall. I still recommend using a pose stand to get the most accurate measurement, very few AO stands have you standing perfectly straight, and it's a pain to get the default stand up straight as it likes to look all over the place. Also, remember to take off your shows and hair to get the most accurate measurement.

Yus. Actually, a breast size in the 70's on the slider is probably already in the range of DD's if not larger. Just like in drawings, people tend to have an exaggerated idea of breast size in SL. I've seen people sporting what were probably H cups proudly stating they were D cups. I think a part of this is the lack of shading to define the shape. Cleavage enhancing clothing/tattoo layers, as well as skins made with curvy shapes in mind, can help with that a lot. Then again, I've also seen people who were 8' tall declaring themselves to be 6' even in their profiles.

If LL were serious ab out imitating Facebook they would have taken groups, profiles and land back to the drawing board and made a serious attempt to boost SL's uses as a social platform. They'd probably add in an "area chat" system which allows people to communicate so long as they were in the same zone (sim/parcel) improved group chat as well as tying it into to a "group panel" that acted itself like a social hub. At the very least they'd address SL's long standing scale issues, considering avatars tend to be about 1 and 1/3 the size of a regular human and envrionments are built to double scale, that 20m radius for chat winds up amounting to a 5m radius for all intents and purposes. This makes it all the more difficult to socialize in SL. Groups, profiles and land would all be far more useful for socializing, profiles themselves allowing for status updates, listing one's friends in a Facebook style manner, and probably listing their most visited locations in-world (default to off, opt-in for this feature). Instead, we get only the most superficial mimicry of Facebook. Keep in mind, there are some very good ways inb which LL could be inspired by Facebook. They don't need to be a Facebook clone, they need to take the best FB has to offer and see how well it applies to something like SL where the emphasis is away from the real and more focused on entertainment,

I generally put ceilings for average size rooms at about 3m high, poossibly as high as 3.5m. Rarely higher than that unless it's the kind of room that calls for it, like a warehouse, barn, auditorium or something along those lines. Jo, I sent you my scripted camera HUD some time ago, yus? It makes living in 1=1 scale sims easy. Just the other day I dug an old steampunk zeppilin out of my inventory, I used to not be able to do anything inside the cabin, it was too small for the camera to fit, my old 6'+ shape barely fit in it (I thought I was shorter due to the agent high confusion), but now, with my 5'7" shape and my improved camera I was able to navigate the entire cabin with ease. The cabin was only like 3x5m! The ceiling has to be under 3m. It's astounding how little game design sense is employed by LL, camera placement is not only important but critically so. It changes everything! Regarding clothing attachments, yeah. These days I tend to build to a specifically created shape I made, it's the smallest adult shape in my inventory, under 5'/152cm tall. I use this shape to make attachments because if I build them to that scale then pretty much any avatar should be able to scale them to their size with no problem. Content creators should be aware that it's always easy to scale an attachment up, but it can be outright impossible to scale one down without practically rebuilding it prim by prim. When you build large you are building for only those avatars who are your size or larger. When you build small you are building for the entire grid. There's really no excuse, any content creator worth their prims ought to be building attachments small for this reason. It can also be considered "future proofing" one's products in case LL ever decides to get serious about marketing SL and decides to address SL's presentation issues by providing better shapes/avatars to new users among other fixes.

There are scripts that are pretty close to accurate. They use math fudges to take agent height and translate it into avatar height. Thwey're not entirely accurate, but they're about as close as someone would get standing in front of a measuring prim. The most accurate way is to hop on a pose stand that leaves your avatar standing straight. Take off shoes and hair then stretch a prim from the bottom of your feet up to the top of your avatar's skull. My own avatar is about 5'7"/173cm tall. This is taller than average for a woman in the physical world, but it makes me a midget in SL. It's worth noting, however, that this has a huge advantage if you own land. Combined with better camera placement I'm able to fit four times as much content into a given amount of land when I build to my own avatar's proportions/camera. That saves me a substantial amount of real money by making land more useful overall.

There are two ways to get "Age verified" for the purpose of accessing adult rated sims and content in SL. One is the way Claireschen gave. That is to provide LL with some government ID number in order to have your identity verified. The other way is to attach a payment method to your account, like PayPal or a Credit Card, and use it, at least once, to have it verified. Doesn't matter how much. Can be a dollar, could be ten. Up to you. Both methods grant you access to adult rated sims and content, however there are individual sim/parcel settings the owner can set to block out those who have not used one or both of these verification methods. A very miniscule percentage of sims do this, and the majority of the time it is because the owner was confused by the option (which is very understandable because LL does not make it clear).

More than likely the hair you saw was attached to the glasses by the person wearing it to save an attachment spot in the pre-multiple attachment days.

I don't think newbies get dropped in the Welcome Areas anymore. Instead, when they get to the end of the "here, have some signs that tell you how to walk and fly instead of a proper orientation" area they wind up in a room with a bunch of billboards. The billboards all have locations, mostly resident made sims like pteron, Insilico and others, rotating to a new batch every minute or so. The result is that most newbies these days are likely being tossed into empty, or nearly empty sims. I understand the idea behind this, but I don't believe it was thought out well enough. On the other hand. I've been wandering a lot lately, and when I can't think of anywhere better to go I sometimes drop in on Ahern, Waterhead, and some of the newer welcome areas and infohubs. They're definitely the ugly side of SL, and I'm not talking about the builds. Just tonight I was at the main Zindra infohub and a couple of 8' tall skinheads with typically ill-proportioned broad-shouldered/wasp-waisted tiny-carney-handed avatars starting going on and on about how awful and freakish my avatar was. Apparently I'm a fat midget. They spent some time trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be. When I left they still hadn't worked it out. A few days earlier I'd wandered past Ahern and got a similar welcome. For LL I really don't believe there's any way around it, they need to actually have employees who keep an eye on these areas if they ever revert to using "Welcome Areas" as new user hubs. Which I actually think they should do, provided they take several other steps...like building impressive, well thought out Welcome Areas that set expectations for SL high and turn them into the resident resources they're supposed to be.

There's a few things you can do. You can find the answers here in the Answers section of the commuity site, but I really think SL needs an FAQ guide of some sort. This question appears nearly every day. First, the simplest fix. Press ctrl+alt+r. This "rebakes" your avatar's textures, meaning it refreshes them, like you'd refresh a website. Not just for you, but for everyone around you. This usually works. If that does not work, try moving to an empty sim and trying ctrl+alt+r again. Return and see if it solved the problem for your friends. If that is still not working, you can try logging out and logging back in, that will usually solve any avatar rezzing issues. If you'd like to avoid logging out and you have your current appearance saved as either a folder or an Outfit in the Outfits panel, then open up your Develop window by pressing ctrl+alt+q. That will make the Develop menu appear at the top of your screen. Click on it and go to Develop>Avatar>Character Tests and select Test Male or Test Female, it does not matter which. This will force your avatar to load as one of the old SL starter avatars. Once it loads, simple return your avatar to it's usual look by either using the Outfit panel, or dragging the folder you stored your appearance in onto your avatar.

Better windlight settings, definitely. Windlight settings make all the difference. A bit of haze also helps to create depth. Really, with good windlight settings you can make SL look completely different. Anyways, disclaimer, the following suggestions are only ideas for getting more realistic images out of SL. Other than that, if you're really intent on going for realism I'd recommend going over avatar shapes with a fine toothed comb. Most SL avatar shapes are anything but. I don't mean that they're too "idealistic" either. With no proportion guides in the appearance editor, unintuitively skewed proportion sliders, and poorly proportioned starter shapes nearly every avatar in SL has arms that are too short, legs that are too long, heads, hands and feet that are way too small and other proportion foibles which cause SL avatars to look "off" no matter how detailed the skin, clothing and attachments. Fixing av proportions also helps to make poses and animations look more natural. Most SL animations, especially those made using mocap, are made using models or people with correct human proportions. Apply animations made with correct proportions in mind to an avatar shape where the proportions are way off and you run into issues and awkwardness. Avatar arms poking into your torso, or floating awkwardly in space when your hands should be on your hips. Feet sinking into the ground or floating above it. Multiple avatars in a group pose? Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Definitely running into issues there. Also, most of the pictures shown here are of avatars standing and not directly interacting with the environment in any way. That's really the only way to get much realism unless you build your own scenes.(And I know you build fantastic scenes.) if you want to build some scenes for taking screenshots in with the intent of trying to make it look realistic, try to scale everything consistently with your subjects, and try not to have multiple avatars in a scene if there's 2-3 feet difference between them (common in SL where "human" avatars range from 5' tall to almost 9' tall). Not saying the avatars themselves have to be properly scaled, just consistently scaled with each other and the environment. The most common scaling issues in SL, aside from lack of consistent avatars, are that even when furnishings (chairs, tables, etcetera) are scaled around avatar sizes, environments (houses, office buildings, even vehicles) tend to be scaled up much larger, making even SL's generally gargantuan avatars seem like midgets in comparison. Sometimes people wind up unconciously scaling up furniture and other decorative items too to match the environment. The reason people don't scale down environments is due to the SL camera, which kinda forces larger rooms on us. Also, I'd play with the depth of field effect more, try not to abuse it and use too much blur in your photos. Often, just a touch is more than enough. Especially when you combine it with good windlight effects to build on the sense of atmosphere and depth to the image. Again, I am not saying these are things you should or need to do, just things that could help in getting more realistic looking screenshots out of SL.

Hi Torley! I've been bouncing between a few games right now while putting off picking up Dead Space 2 due to financial constraints and lack of time. I'll get it eventually, I loved the first one lots! Once I get some back pay from one of my clients I'll probably pick it up. If you like my camera HUD you should definitely check out the in-viewer camera settings I put together. Once I figured out both sets of camera settings you need to adjust I was finally able to get my scripted attachment's camera placement right in the viewer itself. Since scripted attachments lose camera behaviour features and subtly alter movement controls I've found the in-viewer fix to be much better. For the Insilico image I did try to adjust the glow settings via the debug panel first. However, I found that in order to reduce the overpowering glow of the background elements enough I would lose the desired glow of the foreground elements. That is why I resorted to Photoshop trickery. I actually did reduce the glow via the debug for one screenshot, and another screenshot was taken with the glow strong enough for the foreground elements to look right. I then combined the two images. This was a little tricky as the animation used for the character pose was not static, Regarding the logo, for actual promo materials I'd probably go with just the "hand" logo or just the text. Overlapping them like that was a quick attempt at trying to make a more compact, aestehtically interesting logo without changing anything too drastically. I think you might be right, tho, it is maybe a bit too busy, especially with both elements being translucent. Although that might be taken care of by making the text less translucent and the hand more translucent. Perhaps starting with the text at 100% opacity and the hand somewhere around 50% opacity, merging them and then reducing the end result to the opacity level I went with for these images. That way you don't have the hand showing through the letters where they overlap. Might be fun to play around with some ideas and see what works best when I have some free time. When I have the chance I may post the results to this thread and see what people think.

Interesting thought, I wonder how many people in SL have been curious enough to actually figure out their cup size? Using a series of 10cm prims as a makeshift tape measure to do all the measurements I checked out my own avatar's bust. A tedious, frustrating, and humiliating process, just like in real life! Admittedly, I use prims and realism was not something I was going for as a cowgirl. I kmew my avatar had a large chest, but I was surprised to find the numbers added up to 34HH. I started over and measured myself three times, coming to more or less the same measurements. Bust: 115cm Waist: 74cm Hips: 114cm And on a 5'7" tall avatar. Eep! The few times I've seen people give cup sizes or measurements for their avatar, which is not often at all, I've been skeptical of what they gave. The actual polygons tend to look much larger.Just as SL men tend to run around with 10" or more between their legs, I think SL's women have a skewed idea of chest size. "Natural looking" in SL likely amounts to DD's or larger for many.

The Intuos line are the pro models. They're absolutely fantastic but a bit pricey. The Bamboo line is more for students and hobbyists, I've number of friends who have Bamboo tablets and they love them. If this is your first time trying a tablet this is probably right for you! It takes a bit getting used to working with a tablet, but keep at it! Once you get the hang of it it is SO much easier than trying to use a mouse for that kind of work.

We've all seen the images Linden Lab uses to promote Second Life via their advertisements, the marketplace and the Second Life website. When I'm not running around SL I do graphic design for a living, so I decided, just for a bit of fun, I'd take some screenshots around SL and pet together a handful of my own SL promotional screenshots. My goal was to make the screenshots as true to SL as possible, while showing off the upper end of what's possible. To that end I tried to limit image editing as much of as possible.The one bit of editing I couldn't get around for any of these was brightening the images a little as SL seems to take screenshots that are darker than what you see when you're actually logged in. I also added my own touched up version of the SL logo. I didn't want the logo to be too "in your face", but more like a watermark. Visible, but not intrusive as far as the overall image goes.I was going for desktop wallpaper style promotional images like you'd find distributed by videogame publishers. This first image is of my own avatar in the sim Verdigris. I did cheat a little with the blur effect. I added that in Photoshop. I kept it in only because that effect is possible using the mesh beta viewer. I just didn't want to take the time to switch viewers when I could do the exact same effect in a fraction of the time. These next two are of Sveid Heidenstam in the sim Doomed Ship. Neither of these screenshots were edited beyond a bit of brightening.These were also taken on the stock release viewer, not the mesh beta. Any fuzzy/blurriness is due entirely to the windlight settings used and the glow used in the environment. This one I kinda cheated on, too. Not to add effects, but to try and reduce some. I LOVE Insilico, but one problem is in some spots they went a teeny bit overboard with the glow and turning off shadows somehow makes it worse. So I did some Photoshop tricks to try and reduce the glow so I could use the environment for this image. Anyways, this is Sera Pronovost at the hospital in Insilico! (There's also a couple other people behind her, but you can't really see them.) And finally, the one I made tonight which inspired me to make this thread, Myself again, this time in the sim Cap Estel, a great African style sim. I cheated a bit here. There's only one bird flying around but I took multiple screenshots so I could fake a group of birds overhead. That's all I did, tho, beyond brightening the image and adding the logo. This one was also taken with the mesh beta to get the depth of field blur. Anyways, there's my little collection of SL promo images.

I wonder how they arrive at the nominations? I'm always surprised by who and what doesn't get nominated.

These should get you started. I recommend peeking at the Shocase/Destinations Guide and websites like KoinUp. Saiwa Red Mines (Exploration) - A mine digging deep into the red planet. Caves and utility corridors connect mine shafts, personnel areas and the ruins discovered deep below the surface of Mars. Vanguard Research Base RN-339 (Combat) - A role-play/combat zone in the tundra of the south pole. Doomed Ship (Role-play) - A derelict ship found floating in space. Once aboard it soon becomes clear that something sinister is lurking in the dark halls of the vessel. Forgotten City (Explorations) - A once-great city now empty except for the rusted shapes of mechanical men left waiting for their creators to return.

It's not impossible to have a thin avatar at realistic sizes, however when re-sizing an avatar you pretty much need to re-make the shape all over again, this means finding and adjusting all proportions and sliders to work with the new size. As LL gives us default shapes that are around 7' tall it is relatively easy to adjust a shape while staying at that size but significantly more work to get the shape we want at a smaller size. If LL gave us properly scaled defaults the opposite would be true. People would complain that it's more difficult to create the shapes they like at larger sizes. Honestly, I think in addition to some improvements which could be made to the appearance editor LL should provide residents with a small selection of shapes covering a variety of sizes and body types to make it easier for people to create the shape that suits them, whether it be a beefy, 7' tall super hero shape or a skinny 5'6" bookworm.

What Void said is what a friend of mine had shown me a while ago. However, i haven't really played with it that much and LL has not made any statements about it. When my friend was showing it to me it seemed to work, no alpha rendering issues at all with the alpha textures created in this manner, but as LL has said nothing about this it may be a feature they were testing, in which case it could stop working at any time. I really wish we could get some word from LL themselves regarding this issue.

I doubt screen resolution has anything to do with it, however you've got a great point about the initial builds by LL. From the beginning right up until today the content users are exposed to, especially new users, defines their expectations for SL. This extends to the quality of content they are willing to support and the quality of content they are likely to create should they start dabbling with content creation. Really LL should be trying to "wow" users from the start. Really nicely made infohubs and Welcome Areas. Extremely polished starter avatars. A few nice toys in the Library. All in addition to some viewer improvements like better camera placement amd a "showcase" of only the very best builds in SL. I like the Destinations Guide they have now, with all submitted content getting 15 minutes of fame, but in addition to that there should be a more exclusive selection designed to show off just how high the bar can be pushed.

------------------------------------------------------- I think part of the problem is that people are taking the height measurements as literal. One thing I find very interesting is that while the basic building unit in SL is metric (we speak in terms of meters), we see Avatar heights listed in Feet and Inches! I wonder if all the confusion and issues about Avatar height would not have happenned if the basic unit of measure and building in SL had been called a "Linden Unit" rather than a "meter." ------------------------------------------------------- I don't believe this is the issue at all. The confusion stems from inconsistencies spawned by a lack of proper tools. It's as simple as that. Everything in SL is measured under the same consistent measurement system tied to the real world metric system we are all familiar with. This is only sensible as it makes it easy to recreate real world architecture in SL and provides a universally recognized system for us to all work with. Consistent scale is a hallmark of good design. However, LL failed to provide any built in measurement displaying avatar height. Few people ever realized they could just use a pose stand and prim so they instead turned to convenient, easy to use scripted height detectors. Unfortunately, people expected AgentHeight tto be avatar height (it's not) so most height detectors spit that out, giving people the incorrect height. So right off the bat you have people with no idea how larger they are, people who think they're smaller than they actually are, and people who know exactly how large they are. Inconsistencies everywhere as they each start making content based around their own perception, or misperception, of scale. Even if LL had used an arbitrary measurement system, you'd have the exact same inconsistencies because it is the tools relaying the information that are missing/broken. ?One person would think they were 1.5 Lindenunits tall, another person would think they're .75 Lindenunits tall and they'd argue about that AND had stupid arguments about conversion. In the meantime, the very same truths that make it simply practical to build to scale would remain true. Sims in SL are only so large. You cannot scale your land larger or smaller to match your avatar. If your avatar is huge you need more land than someone smaller. To get more land you have only one recourse, pay for it. In the current situation where both avatar size and poor camera placement dictate how most people build, most SL users scale environments up to fully double size. This means you scale your houses, shops, cars, etcetera up so much that they take up fully four times as much land area. In addition, I can only assume LL would have still placed limits on prim sizes, even if the units of measurement were fictional. If instead of 1 metre we called it 1 Lindenunit then we'd still be limited to 10 lindenunits to a size, meaning a 20x20lindenunit floor would still require four prims, where a 10x10lindenunit floor would only require one. This is simple gradeschool geometry. People with properly scaled avatars who fix their camera and build closer to scale can build bigger, more detailed environments while spending 1/4th the amount of money compared to the same build being done for giant avatars with poor camera placement. Whether they're called metres or lindenunits the affect on my pocketbook and how much detail I can pack into a sim is exactly the same and leads to the same conclusion.

Mega Islands can wait until AFTER LL fixes SL's scale issues. It's definitely a case of putting the cart before the horse to introduce larger, more expensive sims when people are already using the sims they have as if they were 1/4th their actual current size due entirely to bad planning on the Lab's part. That said, I think it's interesting that the new CEO and now the first new Linden announcement I've seen in a while both have videogame backgrounds. That could be a very good sign.

It helps to understand the issue. As otrhers have explained, OpenGL has trouble with overlayed 32bit textures. The work arounds primarily rely on a static environment, which simply does not happen in SL. The other problem is LL's lack of support for user generated 1bit alpha ttextures. A 1bit alpha is only solid or transparent, no in-between translucent texture area. This means it won't work so well for things like glass or water, where you want to see through a translucent texture, but it's perfect for things like walls, and many plants. A benefit to 1bit alpha is that it does not suffer the same rendering problems as 32bit alpha textures, so you don't get that texture flickering from overlayed alpha images. SL itself already supports 1bit alpha textures, these are the alpha images used by the Linden trees and plants, as well as the alpha rendering for the avatar itself, which is why you can hide parts of the avatar with an alpha mask but not suffer the 32bit alpha rendering issues. Now, to my knowledge LL quietly snuck in the ability for residents to upload 1bit alpha by creating a 1bit PNG file and uploading it, however they made no announcement and have provided no documentation. It seems to work, tho. So if you want to use an alpha texture that has no translucent areas you would be best off trying it this way to possibly avoid alpha rendering problems.

Alright, there are a couple issues here which have been made more muddled by the answers so far. This is not surprising considering the Lindens made it very confusing in the first place. Alright, first, there are TWO ways to "age verify". One is to do the "Identity Verification" through the website by providing one of the accepted government ID numbers. The second is through "Payment Method Verification", where you attach a payment method to your account. To do this you need to actually use the payment method in SL at least once. Buy yourself a couple dollars worth of Linden Dollars or something. Keep in mind once you do this you need to manually, through the SL viewer preferences, set yourself up to see all levels of content ratings. Once that is done you should be able to access nearly all content in SL regardless of the verification method you chose. Also keep in mind, however, that even though LL provides two methods of age verifying, they left in two ways of blocking unverified accounts. They left in the abiltiy to lock out those who have not ID verified and those who have not verified their payment information. You may run in to either, although both are extremely rare as they are practically useless to the person using them and only succeed in keeping out the horse of SL users who have verified in the way not accepted on that person's land. (Hilariously enough, selecting to block both those who have not ID verified and those who have not verified their payment info means you only allow in the miniscule number of SL users who have done both.)