Tutorial: Making a private space

(Well, as private as one can get in Second Life…)

One of the things that seems to concern many newbies (especially females) is the lack of privacy in Second Life. There are very few places where one can unpack boxes and try on clothes without other people walking by. Well, I’m afraid that the fact that anyone can use their camera to get into almost any place you might be means that privacy is something of an illusion, but nonetheless there are ways to maintain that illusion a little bit more.

One of those ways is to find a quiet sandbox and create a small, enclosed skybox that you can whiz up several thousand metres into the air, so you can open your boxes and get changed in peace. The higher you go, the less likely you are to be disturbed, although I can’t guarantee that someone won’t get nosey and start poking around. You can take your private skybox as high as you like, although the building limit is 4096m.

Hop behind the cut, where I will take you through a fully-illustrated complete beginners’ tutorial on making just such a private place.

WARNING: This post is image-heavy, and the images are quite large, to allow for the interface to be seen. I have optimised the images as jpegs, which should make them faster to load, but you might want to open the page and then go make a cup of tea while it loads ;)

First, you need to find a quiet sandbox. I suggest following this tutorial at a time when Second Life in general and the sandboxes in particular might not be so busy. So if you can get up early in the morning SLT you’ll find a lot less people at the sandboxes than usual.

I use Kaemi Sandbox. You can also try Skybeam Sandbox. Please be aware that your rezzed items and creations will not stay permanently in any sandbox. They will eventually be auto-returned to you (you’ll find auto-returned items in your inventory’s Lost and Found folder). The auto-return time could be three hours or more, and you’ll usually find it posted either around the sandbox itself or in its description.

I’ve tried to put all the instructive text on the images, to save having to type it all out above them as well. I find this way tends to be much easier to understand. Also, I’ve made this as detailed as I possibly can, so that even a complete novice at building should be able to follow it. So, without further ado, onward!

If it’s not automatically available in the menus of your Second Life viewer of choice, the ‘Tools’ menu is accessible by holding CTRL and 3.

Forgot to put on this next image: you need to left-click the TOP of the platform, since that’s where you want the new platform to be ‘stuck’ to.

If you ensure that ‘Stretch Textures’ is also checked, it will be less hassle later on, with setting texture repeats:

If you didn’t have ‘Stretch Textures’ checked when you made the main walls (and they now look horribly distorted and stretched upwards) then look at the Vertical Texture repeat. You’ll need to set that to one when you set the horizontal ones to four.

Before you’re completely finished, just edit the skybox again, click that Magic Wand button, and uncheck the Copy Selected box. Otherwise, if you started creating more objects, you might end up copying other stuff!

And you’re done! You can now rez this skybox in any sandbox, sit on the cube inside, and set the height to whatever you want, for a private area to open boxes and get changed. Just find a posing stand (sometimes called an adjustment stand) in your inventory and drag out onto the floor of your skybox, and hop on that if you want to stay still while you change and adjust items.

In the next tutorial in this series (already screencapped, but I’m starving and need to cook dinner now!) I’ll show you how to make a photobooth with lighting that you can place inside this skybox, so you can take good-quality pics of yourself for blogging, Flickr, or uploading to help you identify what all those outfits look like!