Returning scripter, Phantom avatar?

Greetings all!

I've been gone over a year I believe, I left when they reorganized the land and I ended up losing my home build, AND the land it was on with no compensation.

Of course, by quitting for a year, I've now lost all my money and my inventory as well, so I'm working to develop an income... L$50/week won't even cover my uploads once I get active!

I have Poser on order, and have been looking around for a market. I'm amazed at what can be done with "prim" based costumes now. I've seen spaceships, flying birds, huge robots, etc, all build out of prims, and apparently animated by the poser animations of the avatar.

I have an idea for one of these, and started work on it, but there's one MAJOR problem...

I don't understand how people make their avatars dissapear. Some of the prim based creations I've seen are mostly see-through, or are far too small for an avatar to fit into, yet there is no avatar visible.

My idea has very thin spindly arms and legs, and I've already discovered that if I build the headpiece big enough to cover my head, the entire thing will be scaled up to a much bigger size than I wanted...

Can anyone point me to the proper functions, or a tutorial, that will tell me how to make my avatar small enough, or invisible, while it's wearing the costume?

Ingot

Ingot,

try searching for "Invisoprims," "Prim Invisibility," or the like. That will normally point you to the right thread.

Cloaking script:
Instructions:
1. Make script in user inventroy name
2. Drag and drop script onto prim you want to hide.

//strife onizuka (c)
//string cloak = "e97cf410-8e61-7005-ec06-629eba4cd1fb"; //simple cloak
string cloak = "38b86f85-2575-52a9-a531-23108d8da837"; //uber cloak, hides 95% of prims

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_TEXTURE, ALL_SIDES, cloak, <0,0,0>, <0.475, 0.5, 0>, 0.0, PRIM_BUMP_SHINY, ALL_SIDES, PRIM_SHINY_NONE, PRIM_BUMP_BRIGHT]);
        llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName());
    }
}

How it works:
The two textures are used by the client to do various interesting things. One is used for generating the texture on the ground. It takes two textures and blends then in an almost random fashion. The textures are really gradiants, they don't have alpha channels. When the it sees either of these two textures keys it interprets the image as an alpha channle and continues with the rendering like it was a solid texture. Setting the texture face on the prim to be semi tran, the renderer treats it as an alpha, disabling the effect. By setting shiny, it prevents the renderer from hiding most prims.

It is likely come the next generation of renderer, we will need to come up with a new way to make av's invisible.

Another trick is to use a custom animation to contort the avatar.

For instance, if you're making a bird, you could fold your arms inside your body.

One popular animation out there is "meatball" I think, which basically folds your avatar into a little ball

This sounds promising as well...

I'll admit to being a bit confused as far as invisiprims go. While i can see the utility of having a prim that is invisible, I'm not sure how I would use that to conceal the part of my face that is poking out of the cylinder that is attached to it for my costume...

I've also heard that there is a command you can use to shrink your whole avatar, or to set your body parts to be very small. Is this the "meatball" technique you're talking about?

Ingot

Ingot, The invisoprim is more then a mere invisible prim. It basically erases avatars and shiney objects from being rendered.

This is done by useing the texture key of a special texture that isnt accesable any other way.

So, your saying I would build my "prim based costume", out of attachments, then get the positions set on all the pieces, then put a big invisoprim around the whole thing?

Ingot

link invisiprims into the attachments so they only hide the parts of your av you want hidden.

So if you were to make an arm, you would build your arm then link to it an invisiprim that would cover up that section of the arm.

IM me ingame, i'll show you it in action.