HOME / AVATAR CUSTOMIZATION / APPEARANCE MODE

You're now living your Second Life as an avatar. "Avatar" comes from a Sanskrit term referring to the descended incarnation of a deity. Your avatar is essential because a lot of what you'll do in Second Life involves him, her, or however you choose to identify yourself. You may have already found how central your avatar is to in-world interactions and getting around. Each Resident of Second Life is a real person represented by an avatar.

Appropriately enough, you have the ability to customize yourself your avatar in an infinite amount of ways: change the shape of your body, instantly swap one set of clothes for another, give yourself a tan and buff physique without needing a gym pass, and there's an assortment of finer things you can adjust with easy-to-use sliders. Whether you want to bulge an eyeball or bulk up your bone structure, it can be done.

How you appear is how others see you, and being an avatar, you're not constrained to a single look. You can edit your appearance just about anytime you'd like!

EDITING APPEARANCE

Let's get started!

  • Right-click on yourself and from the pie menu select Appearance or choose Appearance from the Edit Menu.

The Appearance window will show up and you'll see your avatar spin around, ready to be customized!

On the right, you'll see thumbnail previews of what happens when you move a slider to the extreme left and right. Go ahead and give it a try: drag the slider next to Height, and watch the live changes! You can also click the preview squares to move in increments of +/- 10, or enter a number from 0 to 100 if you prefer. Dragging the scroll bar down shows you more things you can change; in this case, Body Fat is at the bottom. These are general principles which apply to all panes in the Appearance window. As with many things in SL, you'll learn by doing - don't be afraid to experiment.

On the left-hand side of Appearance, you'll see it's divided into two sections, Body Parts and Clothes. Think of this as a "big picture" view. Clicking any tab on the left will show a different pane so you can dig down and get to the good stuff.

CHANGING YOUR BODY PARTS

SHAPE: Body, Head, Eyes, Ears, Nose, Mouth, Chin, Torso, Legs, Male/Female. In other words, lots of stuff to play with! This tab is about your overall form, including the big things (like height) and the little (like chin cleft). Lots of physique-warping controls, and then some. Remember, there's no law that says you have to be "realistic", so be who you want to be. This is your Second Life!

Also, unlike in some online games, selecting a gender will not technically limit what you're able to do. SL is much more open than that. The Male/Female buttons are meant generally, and you can fashion yourself as androgynous, alien, or otherwise as you wish. Apart from appearance, the only other difference between genders will be the sounds you make when hurt in a damage-enabled zone.

SKIN: Skin Color, Face Detail, Makeup, Body Detail. Give yourself a few freckles, add tone to your cheeks, or even stamp on a daring tattoo. Speaking of, the three Tattoo boxes (designated by gray X's if you haven't applied anything) can be clicked on to bring up a picker, so additional textures can be layered on your head, upper body, and lower body.

It's important to mention replacement skins with enhanced detail, created and sold by other Residents, are very popular. You can click the Search button > Places tab, type in "skins" as a keyword, and browse around. Also, if you see someone wearing a skin you like, don't be shy: compliment them and start chatting, avatar-to-avatar. You may make a new friend this way too!

HAIR: Color, Style, Eyebrows, Facial. There's a Texture box to change the "weave" of your hair. For fun: click the box to bring up the picker, find and select any texture in your inventory, and watch your hair change wildly. Crazy, huh? Push Cancel if you don't want to keep that. The Facial button will only be enabled if you've selected Male under the Shape button.

Many Residents have made "prim hair" which are artful arrangements of the primitive building blocks used to build all objects in Second Life. Prim hair are attachments, and aren't hair in the same sense as the Hair body part.

EYES: The eyes have it! Just one Iris box where you can change the texture in a similar way to the Hair and Tattoo boxes. Again, many Residents have made their own eyes as upgrades for the stock ones. This may sound strange, but avatar body parts are abundant inworld: there are many freebies in addition to those for sale, and the quantity and quality continues to grow as Second Life does.

Style Tip: There's also a Randomize button for each of the body parts, which is great for laughs or if you're in a creative bind. Keep clicking it for spontaneous results, you may come across something inspired!

CHANGING YOUR CLOTHING

Shirt, Pants, Shoes, Socks, Jacket, Gloves, Undershirt, Underpants, and Skirt: These are different types of clothing which all have a Fabric box (Jacket has Upper Fabric and Lower Fabric boxes) and Color/Tint to adjust the hue. Clothes without copy permissions won't show the Fabric box to protect the texture from being copied.

No need for exhaustive reading here, as you've hopefully got a hang of things now and learned by doing! Each type of clothing has unique sliders appropriate to its attributes. Drag each one to find out what it does. If you're not wearing anything on a certain layer, it will say "not worn" along with a "Create" button to make blank new clothes quicker than a weaver can work a loom.

OTHER APPEARANCE SETTINGS

At the bottom of the Appearance window are these buttons:

  • Take Off: Takes off the currently selected type of clothes. This doesn't apply to body parts. (Besides, it sounds freaky to remove your skin or eyes!) Rather, body parts are exchanged. To do this, simply find another body part of the same type (shape, skin, hair, eyes) in your inventory and double-click it, or right-click it and Wear.
  • Save: Saves the currently selected body part or clothes, recording the changes you've made. This will be dimmed out if the item isn't modifiable, and it'll also say so in the pane.
  • Save As: Saves a copy of the currently selected body part or clothes. This'll be dimmed out if the item isn't copyable.
  • Revert: Unhappy with how you moved some sliders since you started editing? Just click this and the settings to snap back to the way they were before. Note that this will not undo the recent exchanging of a body part or taking off/putting on clothes: you'll have to find the desired item in your inventory and double-click it or right-click and Wear it.

SAVING YOURSELF

As you've discovered, avatar customization is incredibly deep. You may find yourself immersed for a stretch of hours in making yourself look picture perfect. Please, take a moment to save yourself!

Look to the bottom of the Appearance window and let's continue:

  • Make Outfit - Brings up a new window containing an explanation of what you can do here. It's simple: make sure there's a checkbox next to all the items you want included neatly, type a folder name, then click Save and look in for the new outfit folder in the Clothing folder of your inventory.
  • The "Rename Clothing To Folder Name" checkbox is useful if you're making an outfit with matching items you want renamed automatically. For instance, a skirt previously called "work in progress" becomes "Formal Dress Ensemble Skirt" if the folder name is "Formal Dress Ensemble". Since non-copyable items obviously can't be duplicated, they'll just be moved to the new folder after the Make Outfit process.
  • Save All - One-click access to save all the changes you've made. This won't create additional copies; it just updates everything you've done since opening the Appearance window so your alterations are stored.
  • Close- When you're done saving, click this to make the Appearance window go away. You're now free to walk the grid again, comfortable being yourself!

While avatar is used in the singular sense as it applies to you as an individual, if you make additional outfit folders in inventory, each can be considered as a unique avatar. Some Residents collect avatars for fun and self-expression: you may come across someone who's humanoid one day, a robot the next, and an anthropomorphic bunny the day after that!

To easily wear everything in a folder and effectively change avatars, just drag it from inventory atop yourself, and watch as you morph from one form to another in the space of a few seconds! Changing clothes, let alone bodies, was never this easy before!

FOR THE ADVENTUROUS AVATAR

Now that you've come this far, you must feel pretty good about how you look! Wear yourself proudly, explore the world, and enjoy Second Life to the fullest. This guide merely scratches the surface of possibilities, so here are some pointers to beyond:

  • If your graphics card supports it, your clothes and hair can wave in the wind. To turn this on, go to Edit menu > Preferences > Graphics tab and set Avatar Rendering to Bump Mapped & Cloth. Relog and fly around and see if you can see the difference: it's particularly noticeable with long, poofy skirts and hairstyles.
  • If you're wondering what "Bump Mapped" means, it relates to the "Wrinkles" sliders at the bottom of some clothes. Unfortunately, it's been broken for awhile, so it won't currently (April 2006) have any effect.
  • If you don't want the view to zoom up close when going into Appearance mode, go to Preferences > Input/Camera and next to Camera Options, uncheck Automatic Appearance Camera Movement.
  • To easily see all the body parts, clothes, and attachments you've got on at a glance, search your inventory for "(WORN".
  • You can also make new blank clothes and body parts by going to the Inventory window and using Create menu > New Clothes and New Body Parts. Or, directly right-click on a folder and you'll see the same options.
  • You may have become curious about how you can create your own clothes and body parts. It's basically done by using a graphics program to design them, then importing the results into SL via File menu > Upload Image. On the Second Life website are templates. Some Residents have posted even better templates and tutorials on their own websites and the SL Forums. Just about everything you see in-world, including avatars, were created by your fellow Residents of Second Life!
  • Continue onwards to related topics of the help pages to learn more about avatars...