T-Shirt Dispenser

As we slowly move into Teen Second Life (while retaining many of our activities in the Sims), I find myself experimenting with new ideas on the main grid to see what can be done once we become fully operational on the Tech Savvy Isle.

Today’s project was making a t-shirt as a give away, promotional item for our opening celebration.

The first step was making a t-shirt. I’d never created clothing in Second Life before, so I went in search of tutorials on the subject. The best beginner’s guide to the making of a t-shirt seems to be in Robin Wood’s collection of Second Life Tutorials. This guide is written at two levels, one for the absolute beginner (who knows a little about Photoshop) and one for the experienced Photoshop users, which makes it particularly useful. You can pick up a lot of the basics about Photoshop from just reading this one tutorial while working on a piece of clothing. I grabbed the TSG logo that the girls had made for our presentation at GLS this summer, slid that onto the correct image layer, saved the image for the web, and was in business!

But that got me only as far as making the 2-D texture for the t-shirt. This image then had to be uploaded to my account (for L$10) and used as a texture for a new shirt. That is not difficult, but the process may not be intuitive to all people. You need to go to your avatar to change its appearance, chose to make a new shirt, and use the texture you uploaded. Save the shirt with a descriptive title, especially if you will be selling it or giving it away!

Once saved, the new t-shirt was an item in my inventory that could be given away! I was half-way there!

Next step involved creating a dispenser. I know there are a lot of sophisticated vendors and dispensers out there to copy or buy, but I wanted to figure it out for myself. So I took what I knew about the notecard dispenser I made earlier and adapted it. It had to give out a piece of clothing instead of a note card. Fortunately, from Second Life’s standpoint, there is not much difference between objects. The same script worked for both dispensers (with the minor change of name)! Embolded, I added a second script to put a bit of floating text above the dispenser to announce what it did.

Just to be sure I didn’t have a problem with permissions, I had another member of our team stop by to test it out! It worked perfectly, as you can see in this snapshot.