The Advanced menu in Second Life is one, often ignored and misunderstood, incredibly useful tool. There are so many things at your disposal with just the click of a button including: turning that annoying camera sound off when taking snapshots, disabling your camera's constraints, making your avatar's lips move when using SL voice, turning various parts of gameplay off (such as particles, trees, sky, water, etc), damning the man and flying where flight has been disabled, even enabling in-world shadows. So many things that can be of so much yes, yet because it is housed under the "Advanced" name, it is considered very intimidating to a lot of people.

Today I'd like to take the time to point out a few of my favorite choices in the Advanced menu and what they do. But first, let's start by activating the Advanced Menu. For the sake of this tutorial, I will be using the latest Second Life Release Candidate viewer.

I'd like to use our time today to show you a bit about the Freeze Frame checkbox in the Second Life Snapshot tool. This little checkbox has saved me a WORLD of headache, allowed me to catch exactly the frame I want, made it easy to catch my avatar in a blink or smile, and many other things.

What You'll Need For This Tutorial:

1. Second Life's Snapshot Tool

2. About 5 minutes!

3. Patience. Remember, practice makes perfect.

A couple of things I'll be showing you in this tutorial is how to use the freeze frame (where it is, how to turn it on and off, etc), an explination of how to use freeze frame to catch your avatar in a blink (another method is slowing animations, but I'm not going to cover that in this tute), and demonstrating the effect of freeze frame on moving prims and particle effects.

Using Freeze Frame to Capture a Blink:

1. Open the Snapshot tool and tick the Freeze Frame tickbox.

Welcome back! I'm sure some of you remember my Avimator tutorial which I used to teach you how to create your own poses in Second Life. I'd like to take this opportunity to teach you how to use Qavimator,... basically, Avimator's "big brother". It is slightly more user friendly and much more fuller featured than its Avimator counterpart, and as a bonus, can also be used to create simple animations!

What You'll Need For This Tutorial:

1. Qavimator, downloaded and installed (WIN / MAC)

2. Second Life

3. About 10 minutes. ;)

If you are lost at any time, feel free to check out the Qavimator Wiki for more information and help. Enjoy the video! As usual, I'll do my best to answer questions in the comments section.

Today, we'll be learning how to create your own tattoo using Photoshop and/or GIMP! The techniques described in this tutorial will also work when creating clothing or other transparent textures, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be making just a simple tattoo. :)

What You Will Need For This Tutorial

1. Photoshop or GIMP

2. The upper or lower avatar PSD files (if you do not have them, you may download them here). For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be working on the upper avatar layer.

Please choose which tutorial you would like to read: Photoshop | GIMP

Creating Your Own Tattoos Using Photoshop

The first thing we'll need to do is create our tattoo in Photoshop! To do this, open the avatar PSD file you'd like to work on. Upper or lower, it is your choice! For this tutorial, we will be working on the upper avatar layer.

I'm sure we've all wondered at one point or another how to get rid of those stupid jagged edges around our snapshots, yes? I know I did when I first started taking Second Life pictures. My photos always ended up with these ridiculous jagged lines that looked completely un-anti-aliased (is that even a word?) when I opened them in Photoshop. This always added hours of work for me because I just couldn't STAND having those jagged edges in my snaps! Well... I'm about to teach you a way to minimize them, if not eliminate them completely.

An example of the jaggedness (you might need to click the picture for a larger view to see):

As you can see (when you click on the picture) the jagged edges in the left picture are pretty pronounced... where as the picture on the right, the only jaggeds you have to deal with are due to the avatar mesh (which is a WHOLE other tutorial in itself - we'll get to that later). These edges can make extreme close-ups pretty trying, not to mention annoying.

There are endless ways to optimize Windlight settings for SL photography, not to mention many tutorials for preferred settings and premade Windlight skies to download (Torley's skies being a perfect example). Today, I'd like to share two of my favorite Windlight settings with you for when I take in-world photos. One will be most useful for general picture taking when patrolling the grid, the second will be useful for those of you who are seeking to take pictures using a green-screen skin (which can later be removed).

Things you will need before beginning this tutorial:

Today is going to be a humdinger of a tutorial - learning to paint directly onto the avatar mesh using Photoshop CS4 Extended!

Please note: This tutorial will ONLY WORK with Photoshop CS4 Extended users.

This was a challenge to me when I was first learning how to do it, and to all the squirrels I've loved before, you're all the best for helping me conquer my CS4 avi-painting fears and issues. Now, here I am, explaining it for the masses - so that you guys don't have to beat your head against the wall like I did! At least... hopefully not MUCH. Saving frustration, that's what I am to do. As per usual, click on photos below to view larger versions.

What You Will Need for This Tutorial:

1. Photoshop CS4 Extended (ONLY THIS VERSION will work specifically for this tutorial). A free trial can be downloaded at the Adobe website here. Please note, you will need to create an account to log in and download the demo.

I am often asked the question of, "OMG Ryker, where did your skin smoothing tutorial go?! I MUST SEE EET, GIMMEH!" So... for this week's tutorial, I thought it might be fun to redo that tutorial that I did over two years ago now, and repost it for the masses here... in my weekly tutorial post. Enjoy the video!

This is a Photoshop-only tutorial, however, I am sure with a little poking around, the technique can also be applied in GIMP rather easily!

In keeping with last week's bikini and t-shirt contest, I thought I'd take it one step further before continuing on my regular photo touchup and photoshop/GIMP tutorials! Today we are going to learn one of the things I just KNOW clothing creators get asked most often: wrinkle creation.

Now, this is just one method of wrinkle creation, the one that works best for me. There are a million ways to create wrinkles in fabric, but I am going to show you the one I have found simplest.

To do this tutorial, you will need:

1. Photoshop or GIMP

2. A Photoshop/GIMP clothing file to work on (I have provided the one I will be using for this tutorial - download here). NOTE: This tutorial assumes you have some basic knowledge of Photoshop and GIMP, such as what a layer is, how to create a new one, and how to apply filters.

3. The willingness to learn! Remember, no one starts out at the top.

Please select the tutorial you would like to read: Photoshop | GIMP

I apologize in advance for this being a Photoshop-specific tutorial! I am still very much a GIMP newbie, but, as soon as I learn the lay of the land for how to do this process in GIMP, you bet I'll be posting another tute for it! For now, Photoshoppers, here we go!

Today, we'll be learning how to combine a depth snapshot with a color snapshot to create the illusion of "depth of field" in your Second Life snapshots!

Let me define the term "depth of field" quick, just to give a frame of reference for those of you scratching your heads right now! The term "depth of field" refers to the portion of a photograph (or in this case, snapshot) that will be in-focus (i.e. not blurry!). What we are going to do here is make an attempt at mimicing real life photography by combining a depth shot with a color snapshot to immitate depth.

An example of a real life depth shot (we will be trying to mimic this effect with this tutorial):