All other content:
Newbie Tutorials
Second Life resident Natalia Zelmanov has a lot of great tutorials for new SL residents. We've picked a few great choices here, but a few minutes spent searching around Natalia's Mermaid Diaries site will serve you well.
- Natalia's Getting Started in Second Life Guide - One of the best beginner's SL guides on the net.
- Movement, Camera Control, and Interaction Guide - Natalia shows the basics of looking around, moving around and interacting with people and objects in SL.
- Teleport, Finding Places, and Landmark Guide - Information about moving around the SL grid, and about using the Search button to find points of interest!
- Inventory, Clothing, and Objects Guide - A great tutorial from Natalia about working your SL inventory and all it contains.
- Also, you can see the clothes tutorial and attachments tutorial that we have here on our site.
- For you online videophiles, there's an SL inventory management tutorial done by Torley Linden available on YouTube.
Building Tutorials
If you can view YouTube videos on your computer, there are some great how-to videos that display the basics of building and editing Second Life objects.
This Second Life construction tutorial is a great video guide to the basics of using SL's build tools. If you view it several times, you can mimic what you see in your own SL and get the hang of it.
Editing Attachments: the Fine Art of Edit Linked Parts
Eventually you'll have a need to customize an attachment to fit your avatar. Designers of attachments like shoes and prim hair have gotten more and more savvy about designing for various shapes than the first days that we were in SL. Still, you very well might end up in a situation where there's just this... one... little... thing... that you want to fix up.
A great common example is a hair that works perfectly, but that has a single prim that "cuts" through one of your ears in a weird way. We'll use that as an example here, but the skills you develop here will be useful for customizing your attachments in millions of different ways!
Note: Before editing any attachments, it's a good idea to make a copy (if it's a copiable object) so that you can always delete any mistakes and start with a fresh, unaltered version.
Here I am wearing some prim hair. No comments needed about my fashion sense with the color choice here, people. This is for demo purposes only and I wanted high contrast. ;) As you can see, a bit of the hair is sticking through my ear. It's a simple enough fix. I'll right click and edit the hair.
Now that looks like a mess. Every prim in the attachment is outlined with a wireframe mesh. I just want to edit that one little part! So, I check the box marked "Edit linked parts." Then, I just click on the part I want to edit.
There we go. Now the wireframe is only highlighting the prim I want to move. If I use the standard build tools now, they'll only effect this one part of the attachment. So, I move it around carefully until I'm happy with where it is.
Looks good from this angle. Now, to finish up, I uncheck "Edit linked parts" and exit out of the edit window. Note the Gemini cuteness in the background there.
All done! Now you're a pro at editing only some parts of an object in SL's build system!