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Tag: make it yourself!

Mar’s Guide to: Making a little hideaway for yourself

Mar’s Guide to: Making a little hideaway for yourself

If there’s one thing a lot of us want in SL, it’s a little place to call our own. Previously, I’ve given you a tutorial to make a very simple little 10m skybox to get changed in (and live in, if you want!) but that method doesn’t give you much leeway for decorating the walls; it’s more of a one-texture-all-over kind of thing.

To that end, here is a slightly more detailed tutorial for building a small skybox home of your own. This one is adaptable to any size, although I’ve only worked with a 10m box. It allows much greater texture customisation of the walls, and I’ve included a really nifty little hint about how to save prims, which is something we all want to do when we own land. Every land parcel only allows you so many prims, so every few you can shave off here and there gives you more to put towards something else, like furniture :)

Today’s guide will show you how to make a bright spring hideaway, full of gorgeous colour. I’m also going to show you a few cheap (and free) decor items that go nicely with this spring hideaway, and over the next few months I hope to be able to re-use this hideaway, re-texturing and re-furnishing it to show you different ideas.

Hop behind the cut, and let’s get stuck in to building!

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Hints & Tips: Adding a bit of character with different hairbases

Hints & Tips: Adding a bit of character with different hairbases

One of the things about leading a freebie or cheapie life in SL is that, when a great new free/cheap skin becomes available and is blogged all over the place, you see a lot of people wearing that skin. And while it’s not as bad as turning up to a party where two other people are wearing the same dress as you, when a skin is quite distinctive and you’ve fallen in love with it and it’s just so you that you want to keep wearing it, it can be rather mortifying to find yourself looking at clones of you all over the grid!

The shape that you wear goes some way toward making that skin look different on you than it does on other avatars with different shapes, but there is a handy little trick that you can use to give yourself just a bit more individuality, and that is to try on different hairbases. Take a look at these pictures of Mar:

In each of those pictures Mar is wearing the same skin and hair, and no extra makeup. Yet she looks different in every one. Why? Well, in each picture she’s wearing a different hairbase.

If you’ve read this (or any other tutorials blog) you might know by now that hairbases get rid of the horrible default ‘grown’ hair (the stuff that looks like it’s erupting from your head like something you should go to see the doctor about!) so that it doesn’t poke through any prim hair that you’re wearing. But did you know that hairbases can also shape your eyebrows?

Most skin and hair creators include their own hairbases in with their wares, so if you’ve been trotting around the grid for a while you’ve probably acquired quite a few of them, and yet it’s something that many of us don’t think to change much. We were ‘born’ wearing a decent hairbase (at least, those of us who signed up after the old, original ‘grown hair’ avatars were phased out) and since it’s not an obvious thing to change, in the way that skins, prim hair, and clothing are, we don’t bother to try on different ones.

If you’re wearing a skin that a lot of other people are wearing, though, different hairbases can make quite a difference when teamed with unusual hairstyles and layered makeup; to the point where you can make the skin look totally unique! It’s worth having a go with different hairbases, just to see if you can give your avatar a bit of individuality and character. What’s more, if you don’t already have one you like you can even make your own hairbase!

There are, though, two things in Second Life that you will find called ‘hairbase’. Hop behind the cut for a guide to the difference between them and a quick tutorial for making your own.

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Tutorial: Make your own pose HUD

Tutorial: Make your own pose HUD

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!

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Tutorial: Make your own facelights

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 :)

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Tutorial: Make your own Landmarks HUD

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 :)

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