Tutorial: Make your own Landmarks HUD

A while back, I made an inventory-management post in which I urged you to chuck out all of your old landmarks. At the beginning of that post I tried to find some free or cheap landmark HUDs that would hold the LMs you wanted to keep, because while storing them in notecards is an excellent idea it can take a while to dig out the relevant notecard, find the relevant LM inside it, click to open the window, and then finally teleport there.

Today, thanks to a fabby free landmark-giver script that I’ve found, I can give you this tutorial to make your own Landmarks HUD. It’s not the most perfect thing, nor will it rival any of the paid-for HUDs that are out there. The menu buttons where your landmarks are filed will not, for instance, be in alphabetical order (or, indeed, even in the same place each time you open it) but it’s free, and if you don’t want to fork over several hundred L$ for a professional HUD then it’s a good enough alternative!

Hop behind the cut for the tutorial :)

Tutorial: How to send someone a gift from SL Marketplace

I was browsing the search terms that led people to the blog, and I came across this one: why cant i send a gift to someone from the sl marketplace?

Good point! On the old XstreetSL site, before Linden Lab changed the code and it became SL Marketplace, the ‘send as gift’ option was right there on the item’s page, but now it seems to have gone. Well, it’s not gone; it’s just hidden a little bit and slightly more convoluted to get to (ie: more mouse-clicking!).

NOTE: You can’t gift a freebie item. Only items that cost L$1 or more can be gifted.

Hop behind the cut for a quick tutorial on sending a gift to someone via SL Marketplace.

UPDATE! Thankfully, Linden Lab have now sorted this problem out. There is an option to send a gift right by the usual ‘add to cart’ section now :)

Multi-purpose post! SF Design’s November freebie, dollarbie capris, plus a shoe-colouring tutorial

Phew! Talk about cramming stuff into one post! OK, let’s begin with the clothing first.

SF Design has a new freebie out for November: the snuggly-warm Cable Knit Sweater and Scarf in a lovely autumnal green. There is a free version in both the ladies and gents sections of the store, so boys don’t forget to pick up one for yourself!

Mar has teamed that sweater with a great dollarbie bargain from SL Marketplace: Double F’s Capris and Capri Shorts in Midnight. You’ll get two lengths in the pack: classic capris, and shorts.

Finally, Mar’s shoes are from the free Monochrome Classic Pumps set, by Plausible Body. She’s actually wearing the white pair here, but has used a nifty little freeware program to help her colour-match them exactly to the SF Design sweater. Hop behind the cut to see how to do that!

Tutorial: Make your own facelights

As I’ve mentioned before, both on this blog and on Mar’s Ponderings, I often travel through Second Life with Caliah Lyon’s Avatar Optimising Windlight Preset open. This changes the world’s lighting for the duration of my login session, and gives a very flattering light to my avatar. I use it for all of the blog pics, too. If you don’t mind having the same ultra-blue sky wherever you go, that preset will always make you look great.

But what if ultra-blue sky’s not your thing? What if you want to use some of the other presets, or you like to visit always-night sims? Of course, you can always have a shadowed face, but if you want to let people actually see you, then you need some facelights. There are some great ones available both in-world and on XstreetSL/SL Marketplace, but most of them tend to be scripted. With the potential script limits that may be enforced in SL, anything that reduces the amount of scripts you’re wearing is a good thing. So that leads us to traditional ‘local lights’ facelights.

Trouble is, we’ve all seen people in-world wearing facelights that look like aliens have landed, washing out everything around them, rendering our own facelights and any ambient lighting around us completely useless. I’ve even seen avatars wearing twelve facelights (the SL viewer can only render six!).

So you can buy one, or you can do what I do: make your own. Hop behind the cut, because I’ve got another little building tutorial for you :)

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.

Hints & Tips: Taking great photos of your avatar

Thanks to Marnix for sparking the idea for this post. In his post, Smooth Threads, he asked:

… and how do I get rid of those annoying jagged edges to clothing, particular trousers (pants, if you’re North American?)

I replied in a comment, but I thought a more detailed and illustrated version might be in order, hence this post. If your pics of your avatar always look like the one on the left (below) and you want them to look like the one on the right, then hop behind the cut to find out some tips and tricks:

Walk this way!

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 ;)