Packaging products for Korii

Korii Tiger dumped a lot of sculpties on me the other day and told me to sell them for her. My heart sank a little. I go through a lot of complex steps to present my products to the general public as well as creating documentation and images.


I got a little smart this time with her products. She didn’t need all of that fancy stuff. She just needed a quick and dirty way to sell things. I created an image for her product presentation indicating the name of the store, the permissionson her objects, and a photo of her tiger avatar. The rest of the image was transparent. After I uploaded the image into second life, I slapped it on a primand attached it to the center of my hud. I was able to navigate around with alt-zoom through the transparent portions of the image. I took a snapshot and immediately uploaded it as a 512×512. The products looked great and there was no post-processing involved.


I did run into a few problems along the way. Windlight acts funny when uploading a snapshot when trying to work with 512×512 images. The “Keep specified aspect ratio” seems to be the problem. It takes the actual 512×512 pixel size seen on the screen rather than resizing my snapshots to 512×512 from the full screen. I had to take all of the snapshots with the regular release candidate viewer.


The prim attachment was fairly simple. I have a widescreen laptop, so I couldn’t stick with a simple prim of 1 meter square. I made it two meters by one meter and then tapered it 50%. I made the extra sides black. They are not seen anyway since I used the aspect ratio checkbox and the center face was an exact square. I had a bit of problems with the texture trying to wrap to opposite sides as well, but I ended up just setting both the horizontal and vertical repeats per face to 0.98. Otherwise a little bit of white from the tiger on the right hand side would show up on the left edge.


For each product, I rezzed it in a light box made of three prims. Each prim was set to white, a blank texture, and full bright.


In no time at all, I had 20 objects packaged up with pictures all taken in-world. Preparing images for my own products usually takes about an hour with all of the post processing work. I wish I had thought of this sooner.


Now comes the hard part. Determining how much these things are worth. Most are simple one-prim sculpties. I believe it is time to do a little research.