where's the overview? how many different object types are there? how do I make stuff?

Ok, I'm totally new to Second Life but in the past few hours browsing all the tutorial videos, I heard mention of meshes, so I'm guessing "prims" aren't the only object that everything in Second Life is made out of. I'm starting to get really confused here. I guess the video tutorials aren't going to answer this question. There's too many different sections, none of which really seem to be comprehensive. There's a wiki and a knowledge base and the videos and forums and ... I don't know.

there's... "prims". (I'm guessing those are just simple geometric shapes. I saw the menu for making stuff in the game. No mesh there.)
and sculpted prims which... have something to do with images... and the technical details ( http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_Technical_Explanation ) says... they have X,Y,Z data of 255 units, which doesn't sound very detailed... I mean each vertex is located on a grid of 255 units? no decimal places. Unless it's 25 units with a single decimal place. Again, small. You divide everything up into little pieces?

and it looks like you can't make anything unless you pay to import it.

you can make things for free in sand boxes if you get hold of free textures and scripts

Welcome Awesome - you are eager to build and make and do! You don't have to import a single thing to get started. Your first move should be to get to the Ivory Tower Of Prims. There you will find all your questions answered and more you haven't thought of yet. Search inworld then tp there. It is a self paced hands on learning and there is a "sandbox" - a place you can play with your prims - so you can practice. In your Library - in inventory - you already have tons of textures you can use on your creations. Enough to get you started and whet your appetite for more.

Above all- Haven Fun!!

Enjoy your SecondLife. I wish you well.

ETA: Sent you a LandMark inworld.

The Ivory Tower of Prims, already suggested, is a great resource. There are also free classes offered several times a week in world. Just use your Search button and look under Events >> Education to find one that meets at a convenient time for you. Also, visit any of the hundreds of very helpful tutorial sites scattered all over SL. Use your Map, for example, to find Virtual Ability island, which just won the Linden Prize for its terrific approach to helping newcomers in SL. Make friends with someone who's been in SL for a while and ask questions. Not everyone is a master builder, but most people who have been around for even a short while know the basics. Finally, experiment. The building tools in SL are pretty simple and almost intuitive, but it does take practice, imagination, and patience to start making things that you can feel proud of.

Welcome aboard!

Faedyne

If you wish to know how to build/texture and even get into making sculpties then as mentioned the Ivory Tower is a great place to start.

I am willing to give you a few tips/lessons if you contact me inworld.
I think i have a fair knowledge of most aspects so should be able to answer most of the questions you are likely to ask

PS welcome to SL

Alright. Thank you. I checked out the Ivory Tower. I never really did everything described there before when I used 3D Studio Max long ago. But I still didn't find any information on meshes, or about creating avatars. I mean, it's nice to learn about prims, but is there anything that gives comprehensive info about Second Life like what everything is made out of?

Everything is made of prims, just about.

Avatars are meshes. Avatars are frequently covered with prims to become an animal, say, or a robot.

In the future perhaps one will be able to upload meshes, but for now, no.

Sculpties are prims with a kind of optical illusion applied - a sculptmap.

I do not exactly understand this ? Let me write down, what i think they are:

For me sculpties are a very special sort of a mesh with a list of well defined constraints. The mesh topology is basically a plane with 1024 faces (organised in 32 rows of 32 columns each). The mesh topology (the way how faces are organised relative to each other and the number of faces) can not be changed. But the mesh can be bended arbitrarily. There are basically 2 derivations from the plane: namely cylinder and torus.

Cylinders have been made out of a plane by wrapping the plane to 360 degree and "stitch the" matching columns (the first and the last column) of vertices together (thus removing duplicate vertices at the seem).

Torus is made out of cylinders by wrapping the cylinder by 360 degree and stitching the matching rows (the top and bottom row) of vertices together (thus removing duplicate vertices at the secnd seem)

If you wonder, where spherical sculpties enter the scene, its here :
spherical sculpties are "bended cylinders with closed caps" where the closing of the caps is done by the SL-viewer. In fact the spherical objects have to be considered as "open at the poles"!

So and what is the sculptmap then ?

The sculptmap is a 2 dimensional map which contains spatial coordinates for each vertex involved in the above described mesh. The fact that the map is transported into SL as an image (i.e. as uncompressed lossless image) has practical reasons. There is no hidden visual clue with the sculptmap. It is pure data which happens to look estheticaly pleasant but is not intended to be interpreted by humans.

Maybe that helps to get the hold on sculpties and how they are related to meshes ?

cheers
Gaia

The basic answer is that with the exception of sculpties, which are a rather recent addition to the toolbox, everything in SL is made out of prims, using only the in-world building tools. That is, except for a very tiny percentage of objects you see in SL, NOTHING has been created outside and imported. As time goes on, we will probably see an increase in the number of sculpties in SL, but they will likely never be more than a small percentage of the total, simply because most content creators do not have tools like Maya, Blender, etc. to make them, nor are they interested in learning to use them. The fact is, you can create an amazing variety of objects with SL's native building blocks (prims) and the tools that every resident has available. That's one of the things that distinguishes SL from most other virtual worlds -- WE build it ourselves.

Learn to build inworld with regular prims before you start worrying about sculpties. They're very versatile.

If you develop a taste for 3D building, then move on up to sculpties, otherwise I wouldn't worry.

In short, a sculpty is a 3D model made in an external 3D modeling program and imported into secondlife in the form of a 2D image called a sculpty map.

to explain sculpty maps it is probably best to imagine a 3 dimentional cube with the usual X,Y,Z axis.

each axis goes up to 255 so that it corresponds with the 255 limit on RGB colours

imagine the top left corner of your object is a point inside the 3d cube and you would have a set of coordinates IE x=100 y=125 z=220

convert this to an RGB value and it gives you a colour

this colour is then transferred to a 2d image made up from a grid of squares
where each square on the grid coresponds to a virtice on the final sculpty the colour you have just converted is inserted in the square that coresponds to the top left vertice

So the multi coloured grid tells SL what coordinates to put each vertice on.


HOPE THIS SIMPLIFIES IT.

I did box/poly modeling in 3D Studio Max, so this is not that new for me. It's mostly the interface and how things work that I'm learning.


... are you telling me we can't make our own avatars?
wait... I remember hearing you could replace parts. body parts? All body parts or just extremities? So you can replace body parts with prims/sculpties. So... sometimes avatars aren't meshes?
Why isn't this basic info easy to find?

You can hide parts or even the full avatar mesh with little effort (using a special "invisibility texture" which is also used e.g. for shoe bases) and then "replace" the hiden parts with prims and/or sculpted prims. There are some more tricks which allow to bend the avatar mesh to some extremes. There are tricks to make tiny avatars and huge avatars. But you can not replace the avatar meshes by your own.

So, take the time to learn. Your experience with 3D Studio Max is great and it will be a wonderful help once you get going in SL. For now, though, spend some time learning to use SL's own basic building tools instead of fighting them. Prims are our fundamental building blocks and SL's built-in tools for manipulating them are surprisingly versatile and powerful, despite their simplicity (or maybe because of it). THAT's how things work. Once you get proficient at the basics, then you can draw on your experience with external modelling tools and do elaborate things. Until you understand the foundation you will just get frustrated and you will be ignoring a skill set that everyone around you can handle.

FaeDyne

Think of the Avatar as a skeleton. normally it has a mesh wrapped around it that can be textured to represent skin clothes etc. It is made up of sections ie hand ,lower arm, upper arm
shoulder, torso etc

Using the special invisibility texture previously mentioned you can hide the mesh so it becomes totally invisible.

you can then attach prims to the skeleton sections like putting on a suit of armour. they will move independantly according to which section of the skeleton they are attached to.

The reason there is no instant guide on how to do all these things is because they are quite involved and it would be a huge instruction manual. Also half the fun is in experimenting and learning how to do things. You get a sense of achievement if you manage to work something out yourself that you dont get from being taught.