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.

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):

Ladies and gentlemen, furries and nekos, goths and goreans, and everyone in between! The Greenies are here to stay!

The everpopular Rezzable Greenies will be celebrating their 2nd anniversary come this August 15th, and that means fun, fandom, and of course -- contest! And what better contest to have for the summer heat than a bikini one?! Oh, and t-shirts too!

Bikini/T-Shirt Design Contest!

That's right. It's time to brush up those Photoshop and/or GIMP skills and try your hand at clothing creation! In the zip file provided here, you will find two templates for your use (PSD format): a bikini template and a t-shirt template. Both are basic, include shading and wrinkles, and are fully free for your use in this contest (should you need them)! If you have never been to the Greenies home (omg!), clearly you might want to take a visit before joining in! You may visit by clicking here.

Welcome to the first of what I hope will be many tutorials to come. Seeing as how this is the question I get asked the most, I thought it only fitting to begin this weekly blogging with a green screen removal tutorial.You will need three things for this lesson:

1. A snapshot taken on a greenscreen (you may download the one I will be working on, or you may set up your own green screen - instructions below - and take one for yourself to work on).

2. Photoshop or GIMP.

3. Patience.

Ready? Great! Let's get started. First, let's learn how to create our own in-world green screen. For those of you who would like to skip ahead, I have provided two seperate tutorials in this post - one will teach you how to remove the green screen in Photoshop, the other will explain the process in GIMP. Please select which you'd like to read: Photoshop | GIMP.

Setting up your own, one prim green screen in world; step-by-step:

I was talking to Lokum the other day about training for models, and she suggested that we should host a training.  I was a bit sceptical at first as full training takes about 2-3 hours per person, and with a big group, people wouldn't get the focus they deserve.  So I thought, hmmm, I'll give doing a tutorial a try.  Well that has lead me down the road of frustration. 

I tried many, many different video capture programs (that are freeware), such as WeGame, and I found the best to be fraps.  The only drawback with fraps is that you are only allowed to capture 30 secs of video for free.  So back to the drawing board.  I finally decided upon CamStudio, which although the quality and voice syncing aren't perfect, they served the purpose well enough for this short tutorial. 

I spent my first 3 days in SL asking "where can I go to learn to build things?"- and I am eternally grateful to the kind stranger who pointed me to the Ivory Tower.  Everything you need to know about how to manipulate prims can be found here- in simple to understand 3-D diagrams and a series of notecards that you can save for later reference.

For those who learn best through independent study, this is *the* place to go to learn how to make things in Second Life.

Many thanks to Lumiere Noir for creating this incredible tutorial.

We make machinimas somewhat regularly now both in SL and our OpenSim-based Private Grid. People often ask how do you make these vids and what are some of the issues. (What is a machinima--Officer Dan explains here courtesy machinima.com)

above: recent short machinima where checklist below was helpful