Prim Perfect

We've already given you hints on what prims are (and not to buy too many of them) and poseballs, and why they are important in furniture. Now, let's imagine you've bought your dream home (like this one on Tuscany Island) ...

Beautiful, isn't it? But a little bare inside, don't you think? Yes, time to go shopping!

And you bring home your first item of furniture in your bag ... I mean your inventory ... to start to decorate your home.

So here you are in your room and here is the piece of furniture (we're using a relaxing rug as an example) in the inventory. How do we combine the two into a pleasing whole?

The first step is to 'rezz' it in the world. If you are a member of a landowning group, make sure you are wearing the correct group tag. For example, I am wearing the tag "Tuscan Farmer" because I am doing this in Tuscany.

To check that you are, click on yourself, then click "Groups". Scroll through your list to make sure that the correct one for this land is activated.

Then, simply click on the item in your inventory, drag it to a convenient spot in the room and drop it there. You should hear the sound of the object rezzing (maybe, if the grid is behaving) and a moment later (sometimes a minute or two if the grid is slow) there it is!

If the object fails to rezz, and you are sure that the grid is running fine, you may need to contact your landlord or the person who sold you the land to make sure permissions are set correctly.

Now you are ready to start editing the rug into position. Right click on the rug, so that it becomes surrounded with glowing edges, and then select Edit from the pinwheel menu that pops up.

You will now see the edit menu - and the three most imprtant elements for you to use when placing furniture.

1) Position: This allows you to move the piece from left to right and backwards and forwards (or, if you prefer, from east to west and north to south). It also allows you to move the piece up and down - but this last is a element that you must be really careful with - if you're not, you could find your piece floating in the air - or disappearing beneath the floorboards!

 

The edit position default appears as little arrows, red, green and blue.The easiest way is to use one at a time. If two are two close together, move around until they are separate.

2) Rotate: This allows you to rotate the piece in any of three planes. Again, when moving furniture, you need to be really careful. If you start to work in a vertical plane, you can find your piece suddenly slipping sideways through the floor, or tilting at an alarming angle.

The edit rotate default appears as circles, red, green and blue. Click to select the one you need. Be careful to select just the one you need, or else you might find yourself operating in two planes at once!

Finally, there is:
3) Stretch: This one can be extremely useful in editing items like clothing and hair, but is unlikely to be as useful when it comes to editing pieces of furniture, unless it is something that can be easily scaled, like a plain rug. This relaxing rug, for example, has limited scaling because otherwise it could distort the positioning on the poseballs in relation to the furniture, and you could find youserself adopting a wholly unnatural position, or floating a foot off the rug!

The edit stretch default appears as small white squares that you can click on and drag.

Another set of tools that are invaluable in moving furniture are the camera controls. Moving the camera around allows you to inspect angles that it would be impossible for your avatar to get into.

For example, you can get down to floor level to see if the rug is flat on the floor. You can squash against a wall to make sure the picture is really flush against it.

And then there's one of the most useful angles of all that you can obtain with the camera controls - the overhead shot to make sure that your piece is aligned and positioned perfectly.

After that, there's nothing more to do than to relax and enjoy your new piece of furniture. Hmmm ... I think I'll join the Treasure Hunt ... I really could do with that jug of Ally Geer's refreshing fruit punch* right now ...

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* A jug of Ally Geer's refreshing fruit punch was a clue in the Summer Treasure Hunt!