When you just start with Q-Sims you are like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island with an empty Inventory (kind of hostile world isn't it?).
Don't worry, we can very quickly get into a much more friendly environment with the guidelines below.
Avatar customization
For basic about avatar customization refer to Q-Sims_-_Introduction.
Once you have added different items to your avatar such as:
Body parts
Shape
Skin
Hair
Eyes
Clothing
Shirt
Pants
Shoes
Socks
Jacket
Skirt
Gloves
Undershirt
Underpants
You may want to have more realistic clothes or body parts. To do so, one have to stick texture on these items. each avatar item may receive a texture. There are lot of website offering free textures to customize your avatar.
The avatar skin may use 3 texture files for the head, the upper and lower body parts.
Editing your avatar appearance
NOTE: You may find an XML file to "shape" your avatar. Hippo is no able to import XML shape file but realXtend can. Edit your avatar appearance and import the XML file. realXtend is provided with an avatar customization utility. I played once with it but I did succeed to make it run again.
Uploading textures
Textures are useful for both your avatar (eg. clothes) and the prims (basic forms to build objects). Different images are supported such as PNG, JPG, TGA formats but not the GIF one. It cost nothing to upload textures. The monetary system will give you some information about the costs but it costs 0O$.
Once you have uploaded a texture with File/Upload image (free), a dialog box with the image to upload will prompt you for a description. Validate the upload. Open the and locate the texture params to drag and drop the newly uploaded texture into it.
Upload texture
Adding Gestures to your avatar
You avatar has some predefined gestures. To make them available, you must open your inventory, go under the OpenSim library, open the Gestures library, select all the entries, Copy/Paste (right click) all the items under My inventory gestures, reselect all the entries and right click and select Activate.
Now your avatar can replay the gestures either from the Gesture drop list (click Chat button to display the command bar on the bottom of the screen where the gesture drop list is located) or by typing the shortcut in the Chat box (eg. /wave to say hello)
Avatar predefined gestures
How To create clothing
There is two kind of clothing:
predefined clothes can be wore or not. They can be gathered into different sets for a quick changes of your appearance. These clothes are:
Shape: adjust your avatar shape, change the gender
Skin: adjust the skin and use textures for realistic rendition
Hair: basic hair adjustments
Eyes: choose your avatar's eye color
Shirt: is place over the skin and undershirt
Pants: enables long pants, short pants, trunks, swimsuit
Shoes: is used for basic shoes and texturing shape for advanced shoes
Socks: not much used
Jacket: is place over the other layers
Gloves: for basic gloves
Undershirt: can be used for underwear, bras, tattoos
Underpants: can be used for underwear and tattoos
Skirt:
attached objects: that are used to add new clothes like belt, jewelries, glasses, neko-mimies, tails etc... These objects can be attached (only one object attached at a time) to your avatar:
Chest: to be used with battle shield
Skull: to attach hair
Shoulder (right & left)
Foot (right & left): to attach shoes
Spine
Pelvis
Mouth
Chin: to be used with jewelries (collar)
Ear (right & left)to be used with jewelries (earring)
Eyeball (right & left)
Nose: to be used with glasses
Arm (upper & fore / right & left): to attach gloves, weapons
Hip (right & left)
Leg (upper & lower / tight & left)
Stomach: to attach neko tail
Pec (right & left)
To create clothing, you will need a "pattern" for the 2D flat projection of your 3D clothes. There are 4 patterns for the avatar's head, upper and lower parts as well as for the skirt. You may download the open source SL Clothes Previewer at sourceforge
Four avatar's patterns
SL Clothes Previewer
How To create gestures
Gesture is crucial to express feelings and induce affect in avatar behavior. Quickly you will need to create your own gesture as part of your avatar temper.
There are tools to help you to create quickly the correct gestures.
Use the viewer menu (Edit/Gestures/New) to create more complex animations with your gestures and add sounds. You can add shortcuts to play these animations.
Customize animations
Builing and Terraforming
Click the build button on the lower tool bar. The building is very intuitive and does not need much explaination.
For basic about terraformation refer to Q-Sims_-_Introduction and to shape your terrain see also Q-Sims_Terrains
Building and terraforming
Once you object is created you may want to link several prims together (Tools/Link).
You can also:
locked : to avoid to drag or delete an object
physical : to apply gravity on the object. (Warning, building may collapse, some object may sink in the ground according to the parameters - this is not easy at start to master)
Phantom : to enable avatar to pass through
By default we enable Q-Sims to handle the physics (gravity, hurt objects, etc...) this may be disabled too if needed.
To add texture, select the texture tab and drag and drop the texture you want.
They are lot of parameters to enable object to be:
flexible (flexible path) such a flags
bright (light)
transferable or not to other users
interactive thanks to script (eg. open door, rotating objects, etc...)
Creating complex shapes (Sculpties)
To provide complex shapes, OpenSim simulator manages Sculpted Prims or sculptie. They are prims whose the shape is determined by an array of x, y, z coordinates stored as RGB values in an image file.
Once the sculpty is created, a texture can be placed on it to create the final object.
More about sculpties can be found at Second life.
Linux Tux mascot as a sculpty
Sculpty Space (previewer)
Available for Windows, Sculpty Space helps you to preview your sculpties.
Sculpt map dimensions shall be a power of 2 (2n pixels).
