Helping Hands: Free Cake in this Topic

Hi guise, new resident here.

Well when I say new, I mean someone who has made a new start. I was a user for two years or so, and I can say from those two years the first year was very productive. I was building, I was scripting, I was educating and I was even rated well when the ratings were around. The second year was awful. I made the game into a social thing, which was a bad mistake. I dwelved into the world of virtual dating only to realize long distance relationships only end up in a lot of heartache. (Please don't start a debate with me on these issues like netdating, because I'm not open for that. I've wasted enough time as it is on them.) But that's old shit now and six months later I'm doing a fresh prince of bel air start, and now I want to focus on the more creative and constuctive side of SL which is building and making lulz on my freetime.

I also got a job while I was away in a museum working as an "assistant graphic designer", meaning I design anything a lot of graphics to the museum, plus I'm administrator to their website and work as an assistant in many areas. Simply put, I can do a lot with the adobe programs from Photoshop to Illustrator and beond. Pooping websites is also very easy for me.

I was around when sculpties were the big new thing and never got myself to actually use them. Now I've managed to get my hands on 3d max software and want to start creating some awesome products, new ones, because my old ones on my old account, probably are too old right now. This is where I need your help. I hear you can't simply upload them without addons or somesuch. I'm looking for a 3d max guide for SL basically.

Now I stand in SL a few hours a week, realizing I can't do anything without some currency in my pockets, and I know there's camping and moneytree whoring you can do, but I'm wondering isn't there anything I can do with my actual skills to gain some money? Should I make a female avatar and whore away as an escort? Making an attractive avatar is a piece of cake, it's just the RPing to some fat losers is what I can't bring myself to do, unless it's for lulz and pedobating.. 4lulz. Aren't there any companies who need a helping hand building or people who need a custom texture made or anything of that nature? If so, how do I find one? I don't suppose there's much request or need for builders with basic prims is there? I really don't want to rape the CPU of my computer by bringing my avatar next to dozens of others and overheating the darn thing and crashing before I can even earn a single linden. And moneytrees are generally a lie, they say they have cash in it, but even in wireframe mode there's no cake in it.

So hey, got any tips?

Well in fact it is quite easy: put either a credit card or a paypal account up, and inject a few real life dollars into the game. You would be surprised how long 10 dollars can last if you are not a big spender.

As for scripting, I do have a nice idea I want to have worked out, but it will depend on how much you wanna charge for it. I could do it myself but I have even less time then I have linden dollars

Greetings, Marcel

If you haven't already, check out the content creation forums, in particular Building Tips for info about using various packages to make SL sculpted prims.

But if you mean sculpties have usurped other prim types, with "I don't suppose there's much request or need for builders with basic prims is there?" that's not the case at all. I can't remember the whole sculpty frenzy that clearly, but I know we had much greater hopes for these things back then. Even though in principle one could use them for all kinds of things, their bounding boxes still aren't related to the sculptmap, so they're pretty much "ornamental"... and (as if it could have escaped your attention) texture downloads seem to be much slower now, so if one had a build full of different custom sculptmaps, it would become a "halting problem" for the viewer to decide if what s/he's seeing is what was built. Anyway, the point is that people who really know how to build and texture are in demand--if perhaps not quite the same demand as in the crazed boom when every corporation needed a sim built yesterday.

Might be worth a look at the "Employment" (and maybe "Products Wanted" forums, to see who's looking for what. (It's my impression that escort services aren't quite as lucrative as before--that being an escort has become more popular than paying for their services--but I'm sure there are exceptions.)

Scripting, well neh I can do it, if I have something to study from. Thing is, I'm not too good at it. Expect laggy but working scripts from me. Not much of an uber coder. Used to be when I was still a teenager, wasting his golden youth infront of Qbasic and QuickBasic (Darn comput0rs looked so interesting!)

And using mah own money, yeah I was planning to do that. I herd u liek can upload things in the beta grid (or was it called preview grid?) basically for free since you get some spending money, like 5k lindens? If so, I could go there and test mah sculpties first, before I upload them to the main grid. I don't wanna charge mah own money too soon, before I have some actual good products at hand.


Ok!


Najs... Good to know. 'Cos I'm like a hacker on steroids when it comes to using basic prims to build.



You mean, they look crappier than hoped? Or just crappy?



Can you prove that? I mean, do you have any official linden report on that? I remember when they had to limit the size of texture resolution, because people were uploading crazy size textures.



Will do, and yeah don't fuck the whores seems to be the new motto, unless you're gorean. Poor whores tho.

max texture upload is limited to 1024 x 1024, but they would rather you use 512 x 512 or lower if it works for you.

Marcel

I have a friend who is a scripter, who likes a bit of a challenge for the practice. Am sure he wouldn't charge too much. If you want me to put you in touch drop me an IM.

Joss

No, I don't have anything other than my subjective experience on which to base this, so I could be completely full of it. Maybe I was just so overwhelmed by everything at first that I didn't even notice standing around for five minutes while textures loaded. (I'm not being sarcastic; I remember being mightily impressed by everything at first, and the decline of my naive excitement correlating strongly with perceived slowing of texture loading, but if there's a causal link it's not certain which was the cause and which the effect.) I *have* seen somewhere on the wiki some plans for how to fix slow texture loading, and I sure think I've seen lagging sim performance statistics shift from mostly physics to mostly network and image downloads (even before H4), but didn't keep data to really prove that. So, if others' subjective experience is that texture downloads were always this slow then, yeah, I'm just deluded.

Well hey, being deluded is fine, lots of people in SL do that and they are somewhat revered for it too. Just check out welcome areas, like Ahern for instance. Those people there who are constantly chatting on voice are so COOL in their mubmling-attention-whoring and deluded world ideas, they are very well known.

Dicks for the inbutt, you were very helpful indeed. I mean, *thanks!

Darn word filters...

Following on from what Qie said, I find one of the main drawbacks of scultpies (from a builder POV) is that you can only texture the surface with one texture - ie even if you have a sculptie that *appears* angular, you can't texture the different 'faces' differently.

I guess I *could* do this by creating custom textures in Photoshop (and I believe some do) using a grid to work out what to put where, but it'd be quite time consuming.

You should also limit the number of sculpts in a build/area as for users with slower computers, they can take a long time to load, and they may not 'get' the visual effect.

So that is part of the reason why they are better for decorative items like columns or tree sections rather than parts of a building, and that is why "basic prims" are not yet dead

Having said all that, there is a reasonable market in SL for full-perm sculptie textures; if you are interested in making them you should look on SLX to see the sort of things that people are making/selling.

Question! SLX means Second Life Exchange? I heard it's a third party website, supported by SL users. Now I'm fine with that but I also happened to hear becoming a member at that site can be complicated, if not even hard. I know you said to search things, not become a member, but help me out here a bit Valentino... is there a easy way to become a SLX user? Can you be without an extra account to SLX to sell? Is SLX completely free, or do they charge you or take a % of your income?

Just curious.

EDIT: Also, you do need land to actually sell things in SLX right? Like a box that contains your products somewhere in the world (1 prim) amirite? Also, if I manage to get some cake, which way should I head to get mah own little parcel of land or window to rent for mah products? And thanks again for all the help.

You could do custom building. I'm not sure whether there is a market for that, but I can't see why not. Anyway, I've sent you an IM