Useful Tips & Tricks

Second Life may often seem to feel very complicated, glitchy and frustrating. However, there are some tricks that you should know. I'm going to talk about some of them.

Not all SL users are using SL Viewer or Firestorm Viewer, many people are using other and less common 3rd party viewers, so it's impossible for me to describe these tricks and workarounds that apply to less common viewers. I personally use Firestorm.

Avatar is a cloud

That can happen. You and/or others may see your avatar as a cloud. If your avatar will not load (rez) in a few minutes, then you will have to reset your avatar, and then reload an outfit back on.

Go to the menu: Avatar --> Avatar Health --> Character Tests, and there you can choose a default female or male avatar. Once it's been loaded (replacing the cloud) you can open your outfits folder or window and load an outfit back on.

Grey avatar body (or its parts)

Press Ctrl+Alt+R to force rebake your avatar. It usually helps. If you see others fully or partially (more common) grey, then you can suggest them to do the same rebake by pressing Ctrl+Alt+R.

You can also right-click on the avatar or any texture that's grey, and select "Texture refresh" from the menu.

Clothes and accessories replace each other when worn, or just poof from your avatar

You put your shoes on, added their alpha layer and everything, and now you want to put a mesh top and/or pants on, and suddenly your feet look very ugly. Shoe alpha is gone. You put it back on, and your clothing looks ugly. Clothes alpha is gone! WTH?

In Second Life you can ADD worn items instead of just "wearing" them (double click acts as "wear the item"). Adding means that you can add many layers of the same type of clothes, or several accessories to the same body parts without automatically removing (replacing) the previously added item on the same body part.

Right-click on the item you want to wear, and select "Add" from the menu. As simple as that.

You can actually adjust your hair, shoes and accessories!

If your hair looks too big or small, looks like mispositioned, then you can fix it, and the changes will be saved so you wouldn't have to do this all over again next time you wear the item.

Some hairs do have resize menu included, just click on the hair, and it will pop up. Otherwise right-click on your hair and select "Edit". A small window will pop up, there should be "Move" selected on the left. Now you can change the position of your hair by moving those red/green/blue arrows you see on your hair. The same trick applies to the accessories as well.

Note: some items (usually clothes, and often mesh hairs) are rigged which means that you cannot change their position and/or size by editing them.