I'm new

Im new to this just started today, I want to make weapons as my main thing (Im facinated with melee weapons, so I want to make exotic weapons for all to enjoy ^_^ )

But I have questions, what programs should I get for making items

How do I make animations, I want to make poses for my weapons, a little bonus thing for my future customers to enjoy

Can weapons be used in fighting, Im new as I said so I dont know anything yet

Any advice for a noobie XD

Also are there any places for japanese/medievil fans to go? I want to make a 1 story house with a smithing building right next to it and would like to build in a like minded neighborhood ^_^

you might enjoy elven glen & darkwood for a medieval feel. i'm not sure about any japanese builds. there are also some good weapon-makers and shops in both those places.

haha sounded like me when i started....you don't need programs to make things you just find a sandbox in the game and start building right there. Just go to find and put in sandbox once your in there your free to build there.


havent done much with animating, you'd have to learn about scripts to animate your weapons like having lighting effects and things.

Ah so its all build in, thank you, and when I say animate I mean packaging my swords/axes/staffs with stances

Also an unrelated question, how do I change my sex...

Welcome to SL, Andric


Well, all except for textures. You build the geometry in SL, but for the texturing, you need to use an outside program like Photoshop. Photoshop is best if you can afford it, but GIMP is almost as good and totally free if you can't. Pantshop Pro is also quite popular and will work, although I'm not personally a fan of it.


Animations are another thing that is done outside SL. They're done in Poser. To answer your question, yes, you can package the animations right in the weapons so that the avatar appears to use them properly.


Right click on your avatar and select Appearance. Click the Shape tab. You'll see radio buttons for male and female shapes.


I'd highly recommend you read the Help Guides. Most everything you need to know to get started is right there. Well, except for the scripting guide. If you're not already programming savvy, you won't understand it. The Starter Guide and the Fashion Design Guide are both good.

Instead of photoshop ill fireworks work?

Fireworks might work, depending on what it's capable of exporting. The best textures for uploading into Second Life are in Targa (TGA) format. Opaque textures may be uploaded from 24-bit TGA, JPEG, or Windows BMP formats.

If you want to include transparency (see-through bits) in your texture, it must be uploaded as a 32-bit TGA. Different graphics programs have different levels of success in exporting TGA files with transparency that SL can understand. You may need to experiment a little with Fireworks to see if it can export something that will work.

If it turns out that Fireworks can't export a proper 32-bit TGA with transparency, there is a free image converter called ImageMagick that can convert between a wide variety of image formats. I've written a brief tutorial on using ImageMagick to get transparent textures out of Photoshop Elements; it assumes you're saving images as PNG and converting them to TGA, but it might help you out if you're attempting to convert something that Fireworks can produce.

Fireworks can't export tgas by itself, you'll have to find something out there that can convert pngs to tgas. There're a few out there if you look.

caugh, the gimp