WARNING: This article is a DRAFT. It is very uncomplete and will be revised on a regular basis. Please post comments and suggestions on this post. Most of the named places will have to be Searched in SecondLife itself, but I’ll try as quick as possible to include SLURLS properly. Theres many sections missing of course, please feel free to suggest.
Since I’m relatively newcommer to Second Life, I’d like to give a few tips that could help you get a quick start into the metaverse. I’ll skip most of the technical parts because most of it you’ll have to figure out yourself. I’ll try to give a few tech tips anyways that could be really useful. It is still a work in progress, it will become eventually a really good starter guide.

General Tips

The inventory

The SecondLife Inventory can be dreadful to manage expecially if you pollute it while doing your first metaverse explorations. But if you manage it intelligently the invent is your best friend for managing your place, clothing changes and sex sessions.

• Damn the freebies: first thing you should be to create a FREEBIES directory into your root directory. Carefully put in there all items you got for free after a shopping binge in freebie stores. You should keep them separated for sole purpose of knowing the value of your invent. But also because theres lots of them and they contaminate your very useful everyday stuff, causing lots of confusion over whats good to wear.
• Add a COMMERCIAL folder on the main tree. Put all the new stuff you buy in there, apart good clothing you want to wear fast.
• Create a WARDROBE subfolder in your Clothing directory. Put all your good complete outfits in there.
• Create a ATTACHMENTS subfolder in your Clothing directory. Put all the useful attachments you wear almost all the time.
• Create SKINS, SHAPES, SHOES, HAIRS, LINGERIE, TATTOS directories in your Clothing subfolders.
• Put all eyes in the Body parts folder.
• (to be continued…)

This section when completed will resume of one method I use simply to keep inventory tidy and for quick access to commonly used items. It is not per se a real classification method. I strongly suggest you visit the following page detailing a very nice method of classifying Inventory for very quick retrieval of your items:

http://www.styledisorder.com/blog/2007/01/inventory_a_mes.html

Tips for Girls

If youre going to play a girl avatar youll have lots of details to figure out by yourself on how to look good. Here’s a few unordered ones, en vrac.

The Skin

The most important piece of gear in SL are skins. They dictate the level of photorealism your avatar will get. Since good ones are pretty expensive you better choose carefully. They will determine your character traits pretty intensively so choose wisely. Personnally I did’nt find that many good photorealistic skins. There 3 or 4 places I visited but in the final I was tired of shopping for them (took 2 days), and bought what I tought was the best looking no matter what the price was. So I settelled for a skin model from RaC costing 4000L$. It was a wise investment because it gave me a high level of photorealism, minimally realistic genitals, and a very natural skin tone.

Conributed suggestions of places to look for cheaper skins, apparently as good or better than RaC:

• Naughty Designs
• Tete a Pied
• Celestial Studios
• Lovey’s Boutique
• Gala

Shapes

Suggested by Dakota: “I’d like to recommend Lemon shapes in Imogen. All the shapes are copy/mod so you can just use it as a starting point for creating your own look but they make it easier to look realistic and proportionate (ie: Boobs not larger than head, not 7 feet tall, womanly waist instead of insanely pinched in at the waist and of course stunningly pretty faces).
They have shapes for men and women and even have shape demos so you can try the face and most of the torso on. (The demos are no mod and have stumpy arms and legs, the idea is that you can see the face in 3D rather than just the photo).”

Personnaly I custom modded to my own taste, and did’nt care that much to look proportionate. And well the results are there after some efforts, I did’nt get too much bad comments. But if you are a beginner, and if you can afford custom shapes, I strongly suggest to follow Dakota’s suggestion to buy a premade shape. But DO custom modify it in the Appearance tab, or else you will just look like everybody else, too perfect to be true.

One problem I ran through is that SL designers, especially hair designers (trough many started ajusting), did not consider the possibility of wanting a strong or plus size woman avatar. If you have large breasts and want to keep proportionate, as Dakota pointed out, you will need to ajust your head not to look to small. The problem is many hair models do not fit on a bigger head, the prims will gets through the skull and give an awful look.

The same goes for feet too. No woman in SL can have proportionate looking feet, unless modding 2 separate avatars, 1 for wearing bare feet and one for wearing high heels and most prim shoes models. It’s why my usual avatar has such tiny feet for such a large woman, and there’s not much someone can do to correct that, apart starting to make decent plus size shoes, hair, and also many prim clothing and items that sunks under your skin directly.
(more to come)

The Wet Look

If you observe my photoshoots you will remark that on some pictures I’m rather matte, and on some other I’m nicely shiny. This is my best newbie trick for SL. If you want to look good, hot and sexy on the right occasions, this 200L$ item is worth every Linden. It is called Nyoko’s Bodyoil. You would think it is the skin that shines. But it’s not. The Bodyoil is in fact a complete set of transparent invisible shiny coating. You can assemble the different parts to fit what you’re wearing.

While it is probably a question of personnal taste, this type of shiny wear should be worn on the right occasions. I use it for photoshoots, beach, or sometimes everyday casual wear. But you should probably not wear this type of wet look with formalwear. This will be left to the personnal good taste of the avatar owner of course, personnally I use it on much occasions where I should not, and sometimes get stunning results.

The Pinup Nylon Shine

Consider the next picture. This is another very nice trick using Bodyoil. You can give that shiny pinup style stockings look to any regular pantyhose or stocking simply by wearing a layer of bodyoil over or under the nylons, as you wish, it gives different effects. But it’s definitely delicious, I did not see a guy or girl yet to tell me it did’nt look nice.