Have you ever wished you could adjust prim items on your avatar on-the-fly, but you can’t seem to grab hold of them to do so? (I know that some third party viewers have a great ‘edit’ option direct from inventory, but other viewers don’t have that.) Invariably, it’s in a place that doesn’t allow rezzing, so you end up having to teleport home where you have your pose stand rezzed, or you teleport to a sandbox so you can rez a stand.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could go into the classic ‘star jump’ adjustment pose without all that hassle? Well you can, and to that end here’s a little illustrated tutorial showing you how to make your own wearable Pose HUD.

Hop behind the cut!

First of all, you need to be somewhere you can build, so do this at home or in a sandbox; anywhere you can rez for a little while. Even absolute beginners should be able to make this HUD in just a few minutes.

Right-click on the ground, select ‘create’ (or ‘build’, depending on which viewer you’re using) then left-click on the ground. You should see a cube appear. Whenever you’re working with small objects, such as HUDs, it’s always a good idea to work on top of a cube, because you always know where the HUD is. Some of them can be extremely tiny, so it’s easy to lose sight of them if you rez them on the ground!

Right-click on that cube and choose ‘edit’ , then – while holding down the Shift key – drag your mouse upwards. Another cube should pop up above the first. Click this cube to select it. In the ‘Object’ tab set the sizes as shown in the image below:

Below the next tutorial picture you’ll find a texture that I’ve made for this HUD. Save it to your hard drive (make sure it saves as a .png file!) and then upload it into Second Life (this will cost you L$10).

Once the texture is uploaded, find it in your inventory, and drag it onto the left-hand image in the ‘Texture’ tab. Don’t worry that it looks stretched on the top of the HUD. You won’t see that bit once you’re wearing it.

If you don’t have any money
If you don’t have any L$, then just click the ‘Texture’ tab and look for the image on the left (it will be the plywood texture that the cube also has). Click that image and, in the extra window that pops up, click the ‘Blank’ button and then click ‘Select’. This will make the HUD entirely white, so you don’t end up with a plywood cube on your screen!

Here’s the texture:

Go to the ‘General’ tab and give your HUD a name. I suggest putting your own name in it somewhere, so a quick search of your name in inventory will pull it up when you’re in a hurry!

Now go into the ‘Content’ tab and click the ‘New Script’ button (arrowed in the image below). You’ll see a new script appear in the contents pane, and some ‘Hello, Avatar!’ text appear in chat. However, you want a nice, blank script for this, so double-click the script to open it, and delete all of the text inside it.

Now go to my Useful Scripts page and find the Pose HUD Script. Select all of the text inside the box and then paste it into your new script. Click the Save button.

You’ll notice that the HUD will offer to animate your avatar. Click ‘yes’ to allow this. The HUD will also turn green, as below:

Take the HUD into your inventory, then right-click on it in there and select ‘Attach to HUD’ and find an unused HUD position. Click that position and you should see the HUD on your screen.

Tip: If you can’t see it then it may be off-screen. Edit any other HUD that you’re wearing and roll the scrollwheel of your mouse towards you. This will put an overlay on your screen and you’ll be able to see any wayward HUDs. Click the missing HUD to select it, and move it within the white lines that show the outside of your normal view.

When you’re not using the HUD it will be green:

However, when you want to go into pose mode in order to adjust items, simply click the HUD. It will turn red and your avatar will be in the ‘star jump’ pose, ready for you to adjust your attachments. To come out of the pose, just click the HUD again to turn it green.

If you don’t like the HUD turning green or red, then you can easily disable that. Simply edit the script again and change the values in the top two lines so that all the numbers are 1.0, as shown below. Don’t forget to click the Save button on the script to save your changes!

And that’s it! I hope you find the HUD useful :)