Noob building question

I built a hot tub for my 1st building project, but I am stuck on 1 part: The water. I have no idea to add water to the tub. Any advice would be helpful. I will be adding pose balls to the tub later on, but it is pointless without water.

Create a box slightly smaller than the tub, and texture it with a water texture. Set transparency to 20 or 30 or so, and give it a smooth texture animation. I'll send you a texture and script in-world.

The only problem with that is how do i make it so you can sit IN it?

make it phantom

...and your next question will be, how do I click on the pose ball. The water is in the way. I see two choices.

1. Make pose balls that have a really low sit target, so that the pose ball can be above the water, but when you sit on it you go below the water.

2. Script the water so that it goes up and down, maybe at the touch of a faucet. Touch, water down, sit on balls, touch again, water goes back up.

If you make it phantom, you can't link the parts.

Correct! The water in all tubs and swimming pools is NOT linked to the rest of the pool, for that very reason!

The best bet, when designing a tub or pool, is to have a scripted command or control that causes the pool to rez the water plane after the tub / pool is rezzed or moved.

Create a water plane object that is phantom, and which fits in the tub appropriately. This is just a flattened cube prim, textured to look like water.

Place the water plane into the contents of the tub, along with a control script that gives you some way to rez an object or de-rez the object. Check the Scripting Library forum or Scripting Tips forum for help on that script.

So you would position the empty tub and its pose balls, and then give the command to fill the tub. That makes the phantom water appear in the appropriate place.

Of course, you can also just select both the tub linkset and the seperate phantom water prim as a single inventory item, and they will be together when you place them from inventory. In that case you need to remember to select both parts when re-positioning the tub.

And as someone else mentioned, pose balls for a tub are positioned above the water line. Commercially available poses already account for this. If you make your own pose balls from scratch, adjust the sit target to be below the pose ball by about half a meter.

Where can I get a script like that, for cheap? remember, i am poor...

Look in the LSL Library.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal

If you want the water to fit IN the tub...I think that's what you're asking...you'll want to create an alpha texture, which is the shape of the tub (top view).

Look down on your hot tub and take a snapshot or better yet, print screen on your keyboard. Open PS (or alpha-capable PS-like program). Draw out the shape of the tub, making it a little larger than the water, but less large as the tub's outer edge.

Now, make an alpha from this. Now you can use this as your viewable water, without it being larger than the tub...you're not stuck using a rectangular shape this way.

Did that make sense?

I have just sent you the freebie hot tub whose full perm script moves the water up and down at a button press. (one of the 3 buttons on the tub). The script is quite old and I think its menuing system has issues, but the button pressing/water moving part of it works great.