Tutorial: Making your own pose stand

Pose stands are useful things, simply because they lock your avatar into a static ‘starjump’ position, which makes it easier for you to adjust prim items such as hair and attachments without your avatar’s head following your cursor, or your AO moving you around so you can’t grab hold of small things such as jewellery, to edit them.

You probably have lots of pose stands (sometimes called ‘posing stands’ or even ‘adjustment stands’) in your inventory (although I do urge people to search inventory regularly and purge these; you only need one of them!) but if you look at them you’ll see they all have one thing in common: they’re advertising the store you got them from. And it’s perfectly understandable that a store owner will want to put their store logo onto pose stands that they give out.

Making your own pose stand, however, is simple and fun, and you can put any textures on it that you like. Hop behind the cut to find out how.

First of all, you need to be in a place that allows building. This may be land that you own or are renting, or you may be using a sandbox. I recommend Kaemi Sandbox and Skybeam Sandbox; I’ve used both, and they’re good ones.

Start off by rezzing a new prim. Right-click on the ground, select ‘Create’ from the pie menu, then left-click in the same place on the ground, and you’ll rez a prim:

Squish it down a bit, and change the size of X and Y to 1.000m. That will make it big enough for your avatar to stand on:

Taper the box, as shown:

Click the Texture box and add a texture. I like this blue coral one from the Library:

Before we go further, just look at that last pic. See how the texture is distorted on the sloped sides? Thats because you’ve ‘tortured’ them (a rather horrible way of saying that you’re used one of the deform tools, in this case the ‘taper’ tool).

To clear that, click the Texture radio button at the top of the edit window (not the texture box where you pick your textures!), hold down the Shift key, then click each of the four sloping sides. You probably won’t see anything (selecting a prim face with the texture tool usually puts a white target on it, but these faces are distorted, so you won’t see the target). Then, change the Mapping (arrowed, under the texture box) to ‘Planar’ and the Texture Repeats (second arrow) to 1.000 each, like this:

Much better!

Now it’s time to make the pose stand script. In your inventory window, click Create > New Script:

The new script will pop up at the top of your Scripts folder, waiting for you to give it a name, so do just that!

Double-click your new script to open it. This is what you’ll see:

All new scripts will have that “Hello Avatar!” written in them, but you don’t want that. You want a nice, blank script. So click to place your cursor anywhere in the script’s text area, hit CTRL+A to select all the text, then hit the delete key on your keyboard.

Now you need the script text itself! Here it is. Copy the following text and paste it into your blank script, then click the Save button. (If you find this text hard to read or select (I’m afraid WordPress makes preformatted text very small) then visit my Useful Scripts page, where it should be much easier for you to copy the text.)

//Note: this code was adapted from someone.

//

key mkLoungingAgentKey = NULL_KEY;

integer miPermissionsAcquired = FALSE;

default

{

state_entry()

{

//overriden sit target

//lower them a bit

vector vLoungeTarget = ;

rotation rX;

rotation rY;

rotation rZ;

rotation r;

//build rotations

//Note: this is broken out like this to simplify the

//        process of finding the correct sit angle.  I

//        use the following form until I have the rotation

//        that I want perfect, and then I simply

//        hardcode the perfected quaterion and remove

//        this mess.

//

rX = llAxisAngle2Rot( , 0 * DEG_TO_RAD);         //cartwheel

rY = llAxisAngle2Rot( , 0 * DEG_TO_RAD);       //sumersault

rZ = llAxisAngle2Rot( , 0 * DEG_TO_RAD);       //turn in place

//combine rotations

r = rX * rY * rZ;

//override 'sit' on pie menu

llSetSitText( "Stand" );

//override default sit target and rotation on prim

llSitTarget( vLoungeTarget, r );

}

changed(integer change)

{

if (change & CHANGED_LINK)

{

key agent = llAvatarOnSitTarget();

if ( mkLoungingAgentKey == NULL_KEY && agent != NULL_KEY )

{

//changed user

//cache new user key and request their permissions

mkLoungingAgentKey = agent;

llRequestPermissions(mkLoungingAgentKey,PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION);

}

else if ( mkLoungingAgentKey != NULL_KEY && agent == NULL_KEY)

{

//user is getting up

if ( miPermissionsAcquired )

{

//restore anims

llStopAnimation("turn_180");

}

//reset the script to release permissions

llResetScript();

}

}

}

run_time_permissions(integer parm)

{

if(parm == PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION)

{

//set permission flag

miPermissionsAcquired = TRUE;

//cancel the sit anim

llStopAnimation("sit");

llStartAnimation("turn_180");

}

}

}

If that doesn’t work for you, or you don’t want to create your own script, I’ve also put it out for free at my little stall in Baileya, which is here (follow the red beam to get to the stall) –

Now drag the script into the contents tab of your pose stand:

Give your pose stand a name!

Right-click > More > Take Copy:

And voila!

Pose stands don’t have to look like this, though. Once you have the script you can put it into any prim. Don’t want a pose stand in your home? Try putting the script into a nice, one-prim rug!

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