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Guess what, I’ve found myself a new addiction….and it’s nothing to do with buying more hair and even more clothing…  I’ve found myself becoming attached to my ’sculpties’…. in a manner of speaking of course (mind you, when SL isn’t quite behaving as it should, I do mean that last statement in a very literal sense).

I enjoy a wide variety of activities in SL, building being one of them.  I enjoy trying to build things with low prim counts, as low as I can make them anyway.  I hadn’t really experimented with sculpties before so I thought I’d give it a go.  I downloadedSculptypaint and messed around with it a little.  I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing or what kind of sculpty texture I’d end up with, I was just ‘going with the flow’ so to speak.  Anyway, quite unintentionally I might add, I ended up with a type of pillar/column thingie…. uploaded it into SL and voila!  I had made my very first ’sculptie’.  Not a very exciting one, but at least it was all mine.  Well, this got me thinking about ’sculpties’ in general and how they can help to lower prim counts on builds.

I went shopping for sculpted textures and I came across some really interesting ones, particularily from Cel Edman, who has a wide range of sculpted texture packs that can be put to all sorts of good uses.

So far I’ve made a nice comfy couch, a teddybear, some ballet slippers (not too keen on those though) and an extra set of dishes just in case I have extra guests for SL dinner….lol

Have any of you had experience with creating using sculpted textures?  If so, let me know useful you may or may not have found them….

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Creating your own items in SL is so much fun and can also be quite lucrative.  All it takes is patience and a willingness to learn skills that you have may have previously been unfamiliar with.  Before I joined SL, I did have some knowledge of photoshop and graphics but since then, I’ve learned so many new things.  Whether you’d like to create your own clothing, poses & animations..etc..  There is a cure out there for what ails ya! In other words, there is a tool somewhere out in cyberspace that can help you along your creative path…and the best part of it is that you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg on accquiring these tools..in fact, you don’t have to spend anything at all but a little of your time in getting to know them. 

I’ve been looking around and I’ve put together a list of some great free applications to maybe enhance your SL creativity.  Most of these I’ve tried so if you’ve any questions…really really simple questions that is…..please feel free to ask.  There are also a few that I’ve only gotten to the stage of downloading and haven’t really tried them out in any depth yet.  

GIMP

A free edit-imaging package that can be used to create clothing and textures etc for SL.  A bit difficult to come to grips with at first, especially for Photoshop users such as myself, but well worth sticking with it… (wish I could follow my own advice!)

SL Clothes Previewer 

Created by Johan Durant, this is a fantastic application that allows you to ‘preview’ your designs before you spend that hefty 10L$ on upload fees..lol

Blender 

This is a ‘content creation suite’… and it’s so jam-packed with features, it’s hard to know where to start.  I’ve been so busy with Photoshop lately, that I haven’t really had time to look at Blender at any in-depth level, but the site is very interesting and informative and there are loads of tutorials and fantastic examples on how to create with blender.  

Daz

A 3D modelling software programe …again, this one falls into the catagory of ‘just downloaded’ so I haven’t used it as of yet, but I did browse through the various examples of the possibilites of it and I have to say, this is one I’m looking forward to getting to grips with.  

Qavimator 

Have a go at creating your own SL animations and poses..

Audacity 

A free sound editing software package. Here you can edit and manipulate sound files and upload them to SL.  Very useful if you’d like to have you own custom sounds to accompany your animations. Of course, it can be used for a myriad of things, explore it and have fun..

As promised, here are some links where you can download some alternatives to the official SL viewer.

 Nicholaz Viewer

 OnRez Viewer (CSI style)

Able Viewer 

Dale Viewer 

Sculptypaint 

Using sculpted textures in SL can be a great way to reduce your prim usage.  With a basic 512sqm plot of land there is a limitation of 117 prims.  You can make the most of your prim allowance by using sculpties in your builds… Of course there are the ‘temp-rezzers’ that people use to kind of ‘cheat’ the prim system to allow them to have more prims than is allowed.  It may sound like a great and wonderful thing, but I personally wouldn’t advocate their usage as they can cause absolutely crippling lag.

Well, this should be enough to give you some food for thought.  The best thing is that all of these tools are free…. but you know what, there is another tool, and it’s probably the most powerful of them all, unlimited usage and potential, and you’ve already got it in your inventory…

YOUR IMAGINATION……..so go use it and make some SL magic!! 

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This is a very very basic little tutorial on how to create a rug with a poseball..  The same principles can be applied to any piece of furniture really.  This was done with nothing but freebie textures and scripts so there’s no excuse not to try it…

First of all…create a box prim !!

You can change it to any size you like really by clicking on your ‘object’ tab and messing around with the ’size’ values.  

Change the texture of the ‘rug’ by clicking on the ‘texture’ tab in your edit window… under the ‘texture’ tab, click on the window that says ‘texture’. A side menu will come up and you can choose the texture you want from that.  Click ’select’ and that closes the side window.

Next, create a sphere on top of the rug you’ve just made….as before, you can change the texture, size to suit you.

 Go to the contents tab, this is where you’ll ‘drag’ the sit script from your inventory into the contents of the sphere you’ve just made.

When that’s done, close your edit window.  Here’s where the fun begins.  Right-click on the sphere and choose ’sit’…. You may notice that you’re not quite positioned correctly…(pocket let’s out a slightly ‘evil’ chuckle). I kind of look as if I’m about to lay an egg… Well, you probably won’t want your poseball to use this particular position, so what you do next is to right click on the sphere and choose ‘edit’.  Choose the ‘rotate’ button and play around with the position untill you feel that it’s right.  You may also want to move the position of the poseball, same principles apply there too!

So there ya have it!  A nice little rug that you can use to meditate on after a long day at the office!!  

Try to think of other ways to give the item your own personal touch or other ways the sit script could be used..  If you need a copy of the script, please feel free to leave a comment here or IM me in-world and I’ll be more than happy to send one on to you…. 

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Not that I’m any great expert or anything remotely similar, but I have learned a few bits and pieces along the way.  One tip in particular I’ve found very helpful indeed.

Texturing a Build 

I nearly drove myself nuts trying to figure out how to change a texture’s properties on only one side of a prim.  I ruined so many builds because when I got one side just right, the other looked dreadful.  Untill some kind person told me exactly how to do what I wanted to do….

For instance, let’s take a cube or box….

If you want the entire box to be of the same texture, go into ‘edit’ mode and click the ‘texture’ tab.  Then select the texture you want your box to be. Hey presto!  

But what if you want the different faces of the box to be different textures???  You can drag the texture from your inventory directly onto whatever face of the box you’d like to change…

Great!…BUT…..what if you want to change the texture’s properties on just that side of the box, and not the others?  Believe it or not, this is a technique that is very often overlooked….

1. Go into ‘edit’ mode.

2. Click on the ’select texture’ option, it’s right there with ‘position’, ’stretch’ and ‘rotate’.

3. Go to the ‘texture’ tab.  There you can change a whole bunch of stuff…horizontal and vertical ‘repeats’.  You can change the ‘offset’…..you can ‘rotate’ the texture etc…and all this can be done on just one side of the box or indeed the entire prim.

This is very basic stuff, but as I’ve already said, it’s the basics that are often overlooked and knowing the basics can save you a lot of time and trouble in the long run.

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