Editing Objects - help please

Hello

I bought some shoes in SL which turned out to be about 5 sizes too big for me (I have small feet)

They are modify-able, so I clicked on edit , saw a horribly complex window full of tabs and buttons and backed away quickly.

I have tried googling for a user guide to the edit window, with very little success.

Can someone advise me please, or point me to decent guide.

Are there any books available which give this sort of detail?

Thanks as always

FH

can you make a copy of them, if so do that first, keep the original seperate and edit the copy.

ok click edit and don't worry, first thing to try is select 'stretch' (not stretch texture) you will see small semi transparent white boxes all around the shoe, click on one of these boxes and drag it, dragging in towards the shoes will make it scale smaller.

when it looks about the right size, you will see the shoe has moved out of place, so now uncheck the 'stretch' box and you will get the three coloured arrows for direction movement, click on one of these and drag and move until you get the shoe aligned once more with the foot.

Using a pose stand helps a lot, otherwise your feet keep moving around. You should be able to pick up a free pose stand at many places in SL, actually there is probably one in the Library section of your inventory.

I am pretty good at editing small complex objects and editing shoes can take me an hour to get just right so it's not something that can be rushed.

A bonus here is that while you're editing the shoes, the tools you're using are the ones you use to build stuff from scratch too - so if you haven't built anything before, you're paving the way!

http://lindenlifestyles.com/?p=113 talks about hair but it's really the same for any attachment .

If the shoes are copy, make copies before you do anything (Ctrl-C to copy, then Ctrl-V to paste for every of the two attachments).

If they're not copy, pick up a freebie hair somewhere and experiment on that for a while.

If you're stretching/moving you can "usually" undo through Edit / Undo but it's not that reliable so don't count on it always being available.

(One thing you might run into is that you're shrinking and it'll just snap back to the original size no matter what you do. If that happens the usual cause will be that there's a linked prim that's 0.010 in any dimension which will prevent you from reducing the size of the entire linkset. While it's possible to resize the small prim a bit so you can shrink the entire linkset, it's generally too much of a pain especially if there's more than one)

first off, hopefully the item is copy permission? Make copies of things before you mod them in case something goes horribly wrong.

When the edit window opens, in the upper portion, along the left side is a list of the different modes. Choose the "Stretch" option.

The item should change from having red/green/blue arrows to have two red/green/blue dots and a bunch of white ones. Click one of the *white* ones and drag it inward, this will keep the item in it's natural shape and scale the whole overall thing as one.

Enjoy!

(eta: damn I type too slow )

I'd recommend creating a plain plywood prim and having a play with the edit window with that first. That'll give you an idea of what all the boxes and things in Edit do first without working on something you care about.

I just want to say I like Flutterby's attitude Other newbies- myself included- you should see how much crap I had to toss long ago - would have run screaming and walked barefoot thru eternity faced by ill fitting shoes- so Flutterby - rock on and enjoy your SL

Learning how to use the Edit functions will add greatly to your enjoyment of SL. The best way to learn that is to go to the Library of Primitives and take the self paced tutorials they provide there. Its all free and the skills you gain will be very useful. You might even enjoy it so much you will start creating things.

No one mentioned the very first thing they should have asked this person - with the shoes may have come a "base", an object that looks like a little brown shoe. That base will shape your feet into something that will fit those shoes, typically.

As far as books, the Official Second Life Guide is great for lots of stuff, but gives a pretty good starter intro to what's on the build menu. In world, you might visit the Ivory Tower of Primitives.

or you can do what I did, get a few pairs of freebie shoes and edit them till you get the hang of it. I destroyed a few pairs completely