Creating Your World

Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life will explain in detail how to create and use Second Life content, covering such important skills as building, texturing, clothes making, scripting, animating, and terraforming. The reference and tutorial will feature a light-hearted, fun, conversational tone, and each chapter’s discussions will be reinforced by tutorials to engage and empower the reader. An included CD will be packed with resources, including before-and-after files for the tutorials, clothing and character templates, machinima, relevant software demos, and other resources provided by Linden Lab.

Co-authored by noted residents and expert content creators Catherine Winters (Catherine Omega in Second Life) and Alyssa LaRoche (Aimee Weber in Second Life), this official, exclusive guide follows a logical progression that builds upon a reader’s skills so that new and intermediate content creators will quickly become experts. The book begins with an overview of Second Life basics, including movement, inventory, and the client/server debug menu before discussing the basics of working with primitives, Second Life’s building blocks. A chapter on advanced building techniques is followed by detailed information on the art of texturing and lighting. A clothing and accessories chapter then discusses everything from fabric and button choices to adding wrinkles and shadows for attaining a high level of realism. A scripting basics chapter is then followed by advanced scripting information so that readers will learn how to create scripts to communicate with residents and other scripts as well as manage data and interact with the world. Third-party editors, script testing and debugging, and specific scripts for vehicles, weapons, games, animators, particles, motion, and inventory are also discussed. The book then discusses global factors for creating a great user experience, including build scale, accessibility, Uis, and ease of use before discussing terraforming and land tools, estate tools and how to import terrain.Creating animations is covered next, including useful tools and their conventions as well as creating complex animations, including gestures. Dealing with performance issues and lag through efficient builds, scripts, and precaching techniques is discussed, and then the authors discuss everything needed to make movies (machinima) in Second Life. Finally, an uber tutorial (creating and texturing an airplane, scripting it, creating poses for pilots and passengers, and adding sound effects) reinforces everything learned in the book. Appendices include building, scripting, animating and miscellaneous resources, and the book’s CD features tutorial files, textures, clothing templates, machinima, demo software, and  resources and references provided by Linden Lab.