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CHAPTER 2: INVENTORY, OBJECTS, ENTITIES

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now that we can move around and navigate the UI, its time to confront some deeper second life stuff.

knowing your way around the inventory early will make avatar creation a lot easier.

SL inventory is a little strange compared to most games.. this is where a lot of new residents get stumped.

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open the inventory with the briefcase icon or CTRL+I
as you can see, the second life inventory functions much like a file system

these are the default folders.
you don't want to delete these,
you can add your own folders ontop or inside of them later.

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let's understand the inventory menu..

at the top, we have the search bar. you may find yourself using this to look up items quickly.

there is also the 'collapse' and 'expand' buttons which close and open all the folders respectively.

next to it is the Filter, which is useful for limiting what type of item is visible in the inventory

and under all that we've got three tabs, 'Inventory', 'Recent', and 'Worn'

the 'Worn' tab shows only what your actively wearing, and the 'Recent' tab will only show objects from a recent time frame (which you can change)

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onto the bottom part, we have a cog button with access to various settings, and next to it a plus button that allows you to easily create new folders and new entites

there is a briefcase button here too, which will open a second instance of the inventory menu.
there are many cases where it is useful to have at least two of these open, and you can open more than two

'x number Elements' simply tells you the amount of stuff in your inventory

most people will have a big button that says "Recieved Items" right here in the lower bar.

this is actually just a folder in your inventory, but its only filled with things you recieve from the second life marketplace.
more on that later.

i have Recieved Items set so that it appears as a folder in my inventory.
you can do this too, though it may be confusing for players not used to finding things in their inventory

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LETS LEARN ABOUT THE DEFAULT FOLDERS & OBJECT ENTITY TYPES

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1.) Animations
animations do what you think they do!
these are loose animations, you can click on one to open a small menu that allows you to play it

the idea is that you can insert animations into Scripted Objects, and from here we achieve things like animated furniture, animation overrides, dance huds, etc.
you can also just play the animation on its own

animations are often passed around groups of users, so i have many accumulated throughout the years, but there are also animations you buy from animation stores

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2.) Body Parts & Clothing
these two folders contain things that are connected

before there was mesh in second life, avatars all used the same base mesh, customizing it with items that became known as 'body parts'
so skins, tattoos, eyes, pants, shirts, were all objects of their own category, and function as baked textures

nowadays, systems are in place so that these can now be used with uploaded mesh.. thank god!
for a while these were useless to modern avatars, but now they are compatible,

everybody wears their skin textures, tattoos, and more through this system

to avoid getting overwhelmed, lets just remember second life is strange and old, the features tend to be 'stacked' on top of eachother

for now we can just focus on ONE item type that resides in this folder called "Shape",
Shapes are items that will determine the slider proportions of your avatars body, and you can only wear one at once.

everybody has a shape, it's not possible to have no shape on
you can edit your current shape right clicking yourself, Appearance > Edit Shape

you can save that for later if you want, we'll be returning to shapes in the avatar section anyway..

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3.) Current Outfit
a folder containing whatever you are currently wearing, the same things you see in the 'Worn' tab, except everything in here is a 'link' to the original

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4.) Gestures
a social entity used for chat
this is another type of thing that gets passed around a lot, you willl accumulate a small collection with time

gestures can activate sound, text, and animations in a given sequence in response to either a shortcut or a text-command
you'll notice gestures are used a lot and they're pretty fun.

there is a term called 'gesture spam' that refers to when players either play a gesture repeatedly or spend an extended amount of time doing nothing but playing gestures.
its less amusing as years pass playing the game, but we all still like to have a good gesture spam every once in a while.

an example of a gesture that prints a bunch of text! these are known as 'club gestures'..

CONEJO has a free collection of gestures you can get here

now for a quick detour about the gesture menu
..see, in order to use gestures they must be 'activated'

right click a gesture, and click 'Activate'.. you must do this with every gesture you want to use

it may seem inconvenient, but there is a reason..
gestures all come with their own 'triggers'..
if gestures all activated automatically you might find yourself wondering why hitting the spacebar is activating a punching animation or fart sound.

it can be a little embarassing to mindlessly activate a gesture only to realize it causes you to make an undesired sound when you press a common key or say a common phrase
of course sometimes you like the gesture and keep it on.. its just good to check first.

double click a Gesture in your inventory, or right click one and select 'Edit' and you will see the following menu

here you can see what the chat 'Trigger' and Shortcut Key are (if there already is one), you can also Preview the gesture before activating it with the button below, and if you make any changes.. click 'Save'!

note what activates the gesture and if you think it should be changed, you can change the trigger and shortcuts of gestures how you like.. just keep in mind these effects will carry over if you transfer the gestures

a lot of times we may end up disabling certain gestures altogether because they interfere with conversation tone,
for example, you could eventually you realize you don't want that 'OK' sound gesture playing each time, so you can simply deactivate it. this is just one of the many ways you can fine tune expression in SL

accidental gesture activation becomes a rite of passage, and you won't be shamed for accidentally playing gestures during conversation

now you can access the Gestures menu with CTRL+g and see all your gestures!

this menu provides a reference for how the gestures you have active are triggered, and here you can do all the gesture dealings

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5.) Landmarks
landmarks contain coordinates to a place (SLURL), and you can use these to go back to places or share them with friends.
you can make a landmark of any place any time, and landmarks you recieve will begin to pile up here

there is a menu for managing landmarks, called Places, which we can access through the toolbar or with 'ALT+H'

here you can see all your landmarks, create new landmarks, set favorites, share them to others, etc

you can also see your teleport history here, but keep in mind that these are not landmarks, so you cannot transfer them and they may dissapear

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6.) Lost And Found
in the case you rez items in other peoples land or in a sandbox, things may be returned either by the owner or automatically
anything returned to you goes into the lost and found
you can periodically clear it like so:

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7.) Materials
part of a recent second life update, materials are PBR shader texture settings that you can add to objects.
this is the most recent 'feature stacking' kind of thing.
i myself dont have a 100% grasp on PBR yet but luckily its not something a beginner needs to know

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8.) Notecards
pretty much just textfiles

they can be a way to share information..
notecards are usually given inside of products for explanations, elaborations or manuals, but also used for other things, like communication & event notices.
notecards are often also crucial part of some scripts

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9.) Objects
the main type of item, can be mesh or second life primitive

objects go into object folder by default, unless they were given to you as a folder
this goes for all items actually, but objects in particular is a folder that can become unruly if left unsorted.. these make up most of second life after all

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10.) Outfits
link collections of objects, you can use this to save what you have on and wear it later

this is how people change avatars or outfit
usually we are not interfacing with outfits through the inventory, but this is where they are stored and you can right click > replace current outfit to wear a saved outfit from here

the outfits menu makes it easier to manage and change outfits though, and we can access the appearance menu with the T shirt button in the tool bar

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11.) Scripts
scripts are written in the LSL programming language, and are responsible for a variety of things in second life

HUDS, furniture, animated objects, are all dependent on scripts
there are many pre-made scripts you can use/edit, or you can learn to make your own.
most objects you find in second life contain a script inside them!

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12.) Settings
a somewhat misleading name, it refers to different settings for the Sky, Water & Day Cycle

in second life, you can change the look of the enviroment in various ways, and a couple years ago the enviroments became their own items in the inventory. this is one of the things i will save for a later lesson

there are some free Settings you can try out from the CONEJO lobby..

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13.) Sounds

sounds are incorporated into gestures and scripts, and are not much use on their own, but you can play a sound outloud by clicking on it
sounds can only be 10 seconds max, and are uploaded as wavs

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14.) Textures
textures! they are self explanatory. present all over second life, for everything.
max 1024x1024, but theres a recent option to upload 2k textures

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15.) Trash
anything you delete will go in here. you should purge the trash regularly, just make sure theres nothing in there you might want back.

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okay.. so thats all the item types and default folders.

there are also the'Library' folders, which contain a number of default objects.
these are seperate from your inventory, but you can make good use of them, and there are some useful things in here i still use all the time.

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THE PERMISSIONS

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all the objects in second life have three permissions:

COPY, MODIFY & TRANSFER

you will see (no copy), (no modify), (no transfer) next to the objects name depending on the permissions

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COPY refers to the ability to make copies of the object
MODIFY referes to the ability to modify the item through the edit menu
TRANSFER refers to the ability to give objects to your friends

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these permissions are important to be aware of, and pay attention to when you are buying objects or when you are making them.

for example, in many cases its best to avoid stuff that is NO MOD, because then you can't change the color or texture.

if something is NO COPY but still TRANSFER, then giving it away or deleting it will have it gone for good. things like that..

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GOOD INVENTORY HABITS

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~MAKE COPIES right click.. copy & paste! copy things any time you edit them. it will save you. copy objects for different avatars. back up originals.

~CATEGORIZE AND ORGANIZE don't let your inventory become a mess. i had to dedicate so much time later on to organizing, and it's not even 100%. it just becomes unmanagable after a while. start early.

you can use my categories as a guideline. if you have folders with themes and categories, you won't forget you have stuff.

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CHAPTER 3: BUILD AND EDIT

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for this next section, you can either go to the CONEJO sandbox where rez is enabled, or a public sandbox like MORRIS

it doesn't have to be these places. you can find yourself any rez enabled place for this next section..

but whats rez mean, anyway?

rez is the word used in SL for an object loading into the world, 'spawning' in.
when you drag something out from your inventory into the world, you rez it. when you log in, you rez in. objects can de-rez, etc.

most places have rez off because there are limits to how many objects can be placed on any land

with rez on, there is all sorts of possibilities for things to get lost, take up a huge number of limit, lag the sim with scripts, and other types of stuff that isn't good intentional or not.

but there are places with rez on, be it the small sized 'rez zones' scattered through roads or regions, or 'sandboxes' which are larger parcels of land with rez enabled (paired with an auto-return & time limit)

sometimes a place just has rez enabled anyway, in these cases its okay to rez a thing or two, but you might want to clean up after yourself.

is rez enabled here? look at the top bar, this icon means rez is disabled.. if its not present, then you're good to go

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before we get into the rabbithole of avatar, its good to know how to rez your own objects and edit them
you'll be ready to edit anything you recieve.. or make your own prim items.. really, modifying and editing things is one of the best parts of second life!

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BUILD & EDIT MENU

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we can open the 'Build Menu' with CTRL+B,
this is actually just a portion of the entire edit menu, which can be accessed right clicking anything and clicking "edit"..

lets start with the building part, you'll see the cursor become a magic wand and this menu with shapes will appear

click on the rez enabled ground and watch a cube appear

these are the primitives, or 'prims' of second life.
in the beginning these were all residents could work with.
eventually mesh upload was added ontop of this, another in the trend of feature stack..

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anything generated from this build menu is prims, and everything else is uploaded mesh.

you can do a lot with prims, and i've built many buildings with them.
when we Right Click and 'Edit' the cube we rezzed, we can see the edit menu's 'General' tab

first of all, text thats easy to ignore but important to note: land impact

land impact, previously or sometimes referred to as "prims" or "prim count" is the amount of load the object has on the land.

due to the changes and additions to second life, it is no longer as simple as each single prim being equal one prim out of a total count.
with mesh in question, the counts are considered differently.

for prims, you can expect each individual primitive to count towards one,
and nowadays if you link prims together, you may get a slightly lower count.

these are things you'll only really be concerned about if you own or rent land.. still, it is useful to see the capacity of the land you are rezzing in

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continuing on, we see inputs for object Name and Description
you can set this for your own objects, and you can modify the names of objects you own as well.

below these inputs are the Creator, Owner, and Last Owner.. you can right click "edit" objects you dont own and see who placed/created them this way.

and below that, we have some options regarding the way people interact with the object..

here you can set and edit permissions, and set what happens when someone clicks the object, or set the object for sale.

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TIP: you can mouse over value input boxes and scroll to increase or decrease the number

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..EDIT MENU OBJECT TAB

here we have some number-heavy settings, the position of the object, the size, rotation etc.

the 'C' and 'P' buttons can be used to copy and paste values between objects

there are also some deformations you can perform on the prim like slice, hollow, skew, shear, taper, twist which i recommend you play with later in your own time.

also note those check boxes,

Locked makes it uneditable (even by yourself),

Physical makes the object behave with physics allowing it to be pushed and thrown around,

and Phantom makes the object have no physics, allowing anything to phase through it

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..EDIT MENU FEATURES TAB
this one has less to talk about right now, but contains the option for a 'flexible path'
which is how flags, hair, and more are made.

you can also make the object a light here, which i think is important. lights are useful.

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..EDIT MENU TEXTURE TAB
this is the tab i spend most time using

its become less newb-friendly since they added the PBR tab, but i'll briefly overview it. i'll speak mainly of the 'Blinn-Phong' since its just how objects were edited until now. it looks a little different, but SL is still adjusting to the addition of PBR anyway.

well theres a lot of information.. its less scary if we break it down

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lets start here.. the 'Diffuse' box is where we set the selected areas main texture (this is the diffuse map in 3d terms)

when you click the texture boxes, you will be prompted with a texture picking menu

with this little menu, we can access a version of our inventory that is only textures and pick one for the object.. you probably don't have textures accumulated yet (though there should be some in the library folders!), but don't worry about it for now.

CONEJO, among many other places offer free and cheap texture packs to use with prim creations

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observe this portion of the texture Pick menu
there is a big eye dropper tool.. this can be used to sample textures from other objects if the permissions allow it

we also see the buttons 'Default', 'Blank', and 'Transparent' .. which set wood, white, and transparent textures respectively
for now, just click 'blank'

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now close the texture Pick window, and click on the 'Tint' rectangle next to the Diffuse.. this should bring up the color picker!

straight forward. you can enter hex codes/rgb values, or use the sliders.. and there are preset colors below, which you can edit/add your own colors into. of course, if you have a texture set, it will be affected by the tint!

next to the tinting and texture options, we have Full Bright, Glow, and Transparency

Transparency does what you think it might, and under it we have some alpha settings that apply to textures with alpha channels

..below are examples of Full Bright (left) and Glow (right) effects.

Glow is nice in lower numbers. FullBright makes the object become unaffected by shadow, light, enviroment.. bright, like the name suggests..

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now, lets observe these two texture input blocks below, Normal and Specular..

if you already know about 3d, then this is self explanatory..
if not then heres a short intro

Normal Map ~> 3d bump detail without adding polygons
Specular Map ~> determines the shininess, can be tinted with 'Color'

here is a cube i messed with, see how a normal map with blank specular makes it look:

i usually set specular to a blank texture, and use the 'color' input to change the color of the shine if i need

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take a look at the very bottom where you see all those number input boxes

these are for editing the texture's dimensions..
Scale, Offset and Rotate.. H for Horizontal and V for Vertical
note the tabs that show you if you are editing the Diffuse, Normal or Specular map..
'Repeats per meter'determines how many times the texture is tiled

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if you look in the upper right of this menu, theres these two buttons that are kind of hiding.. these are copy and paste buttons, so we can clone our texture settings easily

with the cubes texture params copied, we can open the edit menu of ANOTHER object, and press the 'paste' button to apply the same parameters!

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if you want, you can take a look at the PBR tab, but i will not be detailing it. as you can see this makes use of Materials mentioned last chapter.. there are differences here, but also some similarities..
investigate this any time. its not crucial to our beginners lesson.

lastly the 'Media' tab!.. simply turns the selected prim texutre into a browser allowing web pages to be shown :)

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..EDIT MENU CONTENT TAB

this is the 'inside' of the object.
you can drag anything into here.

content is turned into a folder when an object is set to give/sell contents
it is also where scripts are put in order to have effect on the object, and where the textures/notecards/objects the script may call for are put into.

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now, lets dig into the manipulation part of the edit menu, which is the middle button out of the five here

here we can manipulate objects while they are rezzed, but also while we are wearing them.

move, rotate, stretch! note the shortcuts, you can do stuff quicker using them.

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we also have select face, which allows us to edit only one face of an object

with Select Face selected, each face of the object becomes highlighted like so:

and in the menu, little arrows appear ~>

selecting faces with clicks isn't always convenient
you can use these arrows to cycle through the faces.
its a little slow though,
CTRL . and CTRL , can be used to scroll through faces!

a prim after individual faces have been edited..

as you can see up there, a check box is present called 'Edit Linked'

when this is enabled, you can scroll through all the linked parts of an object (if our object is linked to begin with)

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now please rez another cube

hold shift and select both cubes

we can duplicate the cubes by dragging with shift held down

while you have two or more of your cubes selected, you'll see these two new buttons 'link' 'unlink' light up

you can click Link and see the cubes become one object

and if you need to take a linked object apart and you can click Unlink

you can do this while selecting only part of the whole object to Unlink only that,
or simply do it while the whole object is selected in order to turn all linked parts into seperate objects

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textures, sounds, mesh models can be uploaded by going under Build > Upload in the top bar
it costs 10Linden per upoad..

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thats pretty much all there is to editing for now.. whew now we are primed to become an avatar in this world