TUTORIAL ONE – HOW TO MAKE A VASE (OR BOWL)
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to rez (produce) a shape, texture it, colour it and resize it. You’ll also learn how to save your shape and how to find it again.
You need to be in a sand box (place where you are allowed to build.) Here is a landmark for one of the Open University’s sandboxes. Open Life Sandpit, Open University (52, 110, 21)
It helps to understand camera controls. There is a basic introduction here: http://titihaystack.wordpress.com/tips/
Right, here we go.
1. Click on the blue ‘Build’ tab at bottom of screen. The Buiilding menu opens and you get your magical wand.
2. Can you see the little rows of shapes near the top? Select the sphere and then click on the ground. Hooray, now you have ‘rezzed’ an object.
3. Select ‘edit’. Yo do this by making sure the 4th square on the top is highlighted. (PICTURE 1) or by right clicking your sphere and choosing ‘edit’ from the pie chart.
4. Before you do anything else, click on the tab labelled ‘General’ and rename ‘Object’ to ‘myvase’ or similar. Otherwise you’ll have hundreds of ‘objects’ in your inventory and you won’t know what they are. I usually prefix anything I make with ‘my’.
5. To make sure you don’t lose it, you need to ‘Take’ it into your Inventory. You right click on it, and choose ‘More – Take’ from the pie chart. Now go to your Inventory and find it. It should be in the ‘Recent’ tab this time. Drag it back out.
6. Before you start playing around with size, texture and colour you need to be able to move your object around. (Make sure you know how the camera controls work too. See my Tips page.)
Your sphere will have three 
coloured arrows attached to it. These represent the three axes along which you can move objects. Today we’re looking at how objects are positioned in relation to the Second World grid we’re standing on. (Another day we’ll look at how to move things like wearable items, using a different reference system) To make sure that we’re using the correct system you need to find the drop down menu labelled Ruler. It’s just above the Objects tab. Make sure the ‘World’ option is selected. Now we’re off.
The red arrow moves things along the x axis (left to right)
The green arrow controls the y axis (front to back)
Blue controls the z – up and down of course 
Notice the black tab at the top of the screen. This lets you know where your object is. (PICTURE 2)
Back on the Building menu, in the lower left bit, you can type in exact positions if you want. This is useful for detailed work, but we’ll leave this for another time.
It’s worth remembering that when you enlarge an object it will grow from the centre outwards, so if it’s very large the bottom part will be buried underground. You will have to pull it up by the blue arrow.
6. Now to make the vase! Find the row of tabs about a third of the way down on the Building menu again. Go to the second tab (Object) and do the following
set Hollow to 95
set Dimple End (E) to .700 Leave Dimple Begin (B) alone (PICTURE 3)
7. Go to Texture Tab. Click on the first big square with the wood grain texture. It’s labelled texture. You’ll get a floating box with a choice of Default or Blank. Change it to Blank.
There’s a search box at the top of this floating box. Click on Library- Texture – Wallpapers and select ‘vines’. (Or just type vines into the search box) When the texture appears underneath you can drag it on to your sphere. (You could just choose ‘select’ instead.)
I’ve chosen this texture because a) it’s quite light toned, and b) it gives you a chance to play around with the pattern by changing the amount of times it’s repeated on your surface. If you choose a dark texture you won’t be able to make much difference to the colour as the default colour over rides your tint. See PICTURE 4. (The dark vines are not really affected)
8. Still in the ‘Texture’ bit, double click on the second square, labelled ‘colour’. Choose one of the default shades from the grid at the bottom, or select your own choice from the large square area. (Make sure you select it in the vertical bar. I’m always forgetting to do this.)
9, Now we can play around with sizes. There are several ways to do this.
Click on the Object tab, and find the Size tab on the left hand side. Just change the x, y, and z settings. If you want a symmetrical vase make sure X and Y match.
Here’s another way to resize. It’s quick, but not that accurate. Skip this for the moment if you want to.
Reset your vase to its original size of .5, .5, .5
Select the ‘stretch’ radio button on the top left of the Building menu.
Make sure ‘stretch both sides’ (top right) is selected or your shape will be wonky.
Now if you pull out the white handles the whole vase will stretch, and keep its proportion.
Pulling the red, green and blue handles will stretch the selected axes only.
And that’s it, folks. You have a vase, urn, bowl or pet dish. Whatever you want.
Next time we’ll look at joining two or more prims, and we’ll make some furniture. In the meantime, experiment with the various shapes, and see what you can make. It’s important to get used to using all the controls, so get practising. Cheers, and see you inworld.
