XStreetSL Currency Exchange Tutorial

For those doing business in Second Life the Currency Exchange is a tool that can improve their profit margin when they are taking L$ out of world to RL currencies. One just has to understand how it works, which is what this Second Life Currency Exchange Tutorial is about.

If you are a resident that just needs a few Linden dollars on occasional bases to purchase something, you can still gain from understanding how the Currency Exchange works and knowing what it is and how to use it. You won’t need some of the more esoteric information I’ll provide. Knowing the basics will save you a few L$.

The Exchange

Exchange
XStreetSL Currency Exchange

XStreetSL has a Currency Exchange, which is now owned by Linden Lab. This is a place where you can easily buy and sell L$ as well as other stuff. It is a fun place to shop also and has loads of free stuff. There is no StreetSL fee for moving funds between SL and PayPal. Using PayPal is the only way to take cash out of XStreetSL.  URL: https://www.xstreetsl.com/

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Land of NoR XRPS Tutorial

Land of NoR WARPS/XRPS

Land of NoR (LoN), a Second Life RPG, has been working on an improved combat and RP system meter. The one in use is called WARPS, standing for Weapons and Role Play System. In July use of the experimental XRPS version of WARPS started. There are several changes being tested and several questions have come up.

You can follow the discussion in the Land of NoR forum.

Update 7/31

If you have not noticed, going into SPAR (/9 spar) forces a save of meter stats. That is important to know as the meter only saves every so often. A SL or viewer crash or other forced relog can possibly force your meter back to the last saved status. Going into spar and back to combat status does a save and reload of meter stats.

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Skin Design Tutorial

Base Skin Color

This is a research and learning project for me. It will be a multi-part series as I work my way through it. The series will have the best of the information I find and the information I feel is important for a new skin artist, much of what others have left out as they covered the basics in their tutorials. The first article on skin design is: Skin Design – The Windlight Age

For a skin design it is often easier to work with a larger canvas/image. A 2048×2048 is reasonable. The templates others have made are mostly 1024×1024. You can save yourself some effort on you first attempt working at 1024. The larger sizes are easier to paint, IMO, and mistakes and paint strokes are minimized when reduced in size for use in-world. Reducing can help.

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Skin Design – The Windlight Age

Skin Design – The Windlight Age

Nomine SKin – Raw Viewer Picture

I recently got interested in skin design… well facial tattoos really, that sort of forces one to look at skin design. This article is about the basic concepts and where to find great information on skins. It is my basic research work and learning as I begin to explore skin design.

When it comes to understanding skin there is the Ruth skin, the default skin one has when they first come into SL. It is pretty bland. The Ruth skin makes one look very cartoony. There are enough free skins around that anyone that cares about AV appearance can upgrade. Just takes a little looking around. Some great free skins are older models made by top designers. So, you can look good for free. Check out Freebies Beach for a good free or cheap skin. For those that want an anatomically correct skin look around Zindra. Many of the dance clubs have good free skins for their dancers and new patrons.

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Facial Expressions Tutorial

This is something I found interesting. I’m sure many of us in Second Life have facial expression HUD’s (If you are new that is Heads Up Display – the control panels one attaches to their screen). Those work for some situations and photographs.

If one wants more expression, and sublte expressions, that can be done with changing your shape. Sound a bit scary? If you have tweaked your shape like I have for over a year now, making changes may not sound like fun. However one can back up their shape. There are several ways to do that. The two easy ones are copy the shape in inventory and via Appearance save it as a new shape. I use a name and date so I know which is the latest.

If you want to expreiment, check out Melanie Kidd’s tutorial on Grid Expectations: subtle facial expressions for Second Life

Dress Making and Color Matching

Showing Prim and Clothes Color Mismatch

There are lots of tutorials on dress making. Yet, one of the things most have left out is color matching between prim clothes and … I guess AV clothes, the clothes one sees in the appearance menu. The image from Meara D shows the problem. Getting the two to match and blend together since Windlight has been a problem. While this may be old news to some of you, I just found it. What The Fug has a tutorial on just this problem. Also known as ‘WeHateWhatYourWearing’ blog. Snarky but fun.

I have loads of tight miniskirts (you know the ones) with a prim panel that does not match. Other prim skirts have the same problem. There is a fix. Even better there is a tutorial See Tinting Prims for Windlight.

There are lots of broken images on the page, at least for me. They are there, they just may not display. You can click most to see the larger image.