Second Life - Inventory Management 101

!!!!   TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR SECOND LIFE INVENTORY    !!!!

THE PROBLEM WE ALL HAVE
Whenever you get landmarks and notecards, they go into the base folder and you quickly end up with a mess.  With clothing you end up with a cube (an object with your items) or a folder off of your inventory.  Without organization it takes forever to find things and at one point on an ALT I had over 8000 items and had no idea what I had ... drove be bonkers.  So I created this system to handle it.

For clothes, it took about 3-4 hours to organize the 200 subfolders in clothing, jewellery and other things from the outfits I had at the time.  Landmarks took a little longer because I wanted to verify they were all still valid.  Notecards I generally just purged -- you seemgly get one everywhere you go.  So generally, I used the Recent Items Tab of the Inventory to save the once I wanted to keep and just get rid of the rest.

I have been using the system for 4 years and it works great.  I hope you can benefit from the result of how I dealt with my pain.


IN GENERAL
All of the three have a subfolder called “!!New!!” which sorts at the top of the list when sorting folders by name.  When get new notecards or landmarks I want to keep, they go into that folder and I purge the rest.  Once a week I purge, then move all the new notecards and landmarks into appropriately named sub-folders. 



CLOTHING
Clothing contains 14 subfolders named.  There are no other items in Clothing but for the subfolders, and if anything appears, I put it into “!!New!!”.

          !!New!!
          0-Glasses
          1-Hair
          2-a-Swimwear
          2-b-Everyday
          2-c-Formal
          2-d-Provocative
          2-e-Naughty
          3- Jewellery & Accessories
          4-Nylons & Stockings
          5-Shoes
          zzArchive
          zzCubes

The subfolders allow me to dress myself one element at a time, with glasses being first ... I only have one set and they get knocked off occasionally, I just want to find them quickly.  Then I move down the list selecting items as necessary ... a type of outfit, jewellery, nylons and finally shoes.

There are 5 different types of outfits (part #2).  Swimwear, Everyday, Formal, Provocative and Naughty.

For new clothing outfits, I initially drag the folder of clothes i got with a "Buy" into the “!!New!!” folder.  If it’s an object (got a Pay item), I create a subfolder with the same name as the object, and drag the items from the object (I call a cube) into that folder.  I then rename the folder with the main colour of the clothing in upper case. When sorting by name, it clumps all of my RED items together, all my BLACK and so on.  So I end with a name like "BLUE - Oriental Blue Dress".

I separate Naughty outfits from regular Outfits because based on how I feel naughty or nice -- since the naughty outfits can be rather skimpy, I don't want to have to accidentally put them on then have to take them off again.  These folders are then subdivided into more subfolders, organized around colour.  I have a "COLORFUL" folder for things that impossible to describe using one colour (such as 10 color combinations of a bathing suit) and a "MISC" folder for one to two outfits of a single colour, so I don't have dozens of folders with a single item in it.  As the color grows beyond two outfits, I create a folder for that colour.  This where the naming of the folder is really useful.  The reason for this is just to keep the lists tidy.  

Any notecards, textures, etc. I move into a folder called “zzOther” (so it sorts to the bottom of the list).  I move the Landmarks to the "!!New!!" folder under landmarks, and if I’m lucky to get clothes that are COPY, I move all the clothing elements into a folder called “**Originals**” and create outfits or combinations as subfolders copying the contents from Originals into the appropriate folders.   I just make it a habit to never modify the originals, make a copy and put it in as a combination.  

If the outfit has a number of combinations in it, I will figure out the combinations and subdivide them into the appropriately.  Combinations meaning different shirts, shirts with pants, shirts with a skirt, long shorts, short shorts, etc.  This allows me at a glance to know what options I have.  I don't bother with the incomprehensible descriptions some pieces of clothing have.  I use "Blouse", "Skirt", "Pants", "Party Dress", "Skimpy Outfit", etc.  For shoes, I generally take all the shoes I buy or get in an outfit and put them into their own separate folder so I can more easily mix-and-match.  I use common sense when doing this, because there are some shoes/boots that are really hard to mix/match with anything else, or the outfit would look bad without those specific shoes.  But in general this is what I do.  If there are no combinations and zzOther, I create a subfolder called "!!Wear!!", otherwise ... I just leave the folder of items unaffected.  No subfolders.

Finally, once I have set up the outfit, I drag it into the appropriately named color folder under Naughty or Outfits.  In the future, I know that once it is in the appropriately named color folder I know I have already done all this other work.  (btw, the best way to move the folder is to open another inventory window "File ::: New Window" and drag from one to the other.)

JEWELLERY
Jewellery is organized top to bottom with these subfolders:

    0-Ears
    1-Neck
    2-Arms
    3-Belly
    4-Waist
    5-Ankles
    zzArchive
    zzCubes

Within each of those, I use a color naming scheme similar to clothes above.


SOCKINGS
I don’t bother too much with a precise organization of Sockings because I have so few of them all.   I just create subfolders to indicate what combinations I have, and leave it at that.

SHOES
Shoes are organized by the name/type of shoe/boot.  However, one of the styles I own and recommend purchase is a "White Copy/Modify Pump style from BLAZE".  With White, I can make hundreds of new types to match my clothing selections ... by coping and colouring to the shades that I need.  I have about 12 shades now, and typically matches the colours of the main styles I wear.   In that case I have a folder called BLAZE, a subdirectory called "**Originals**" and each clother combination is in a sub-folder organized by shoe color.  If I different shades of RED I'll describe the sub-folder as "RED - Dark" and "RED - Light".  Next I just right-click the color and select WEAR to wear that color.



zzARCHIVE
zzArchive are outfits that I just don’t wear anymore because of low quality or the style just isn’t me anymore.  zzArchive gets split into two subfolders TRANSFER and NO TRANSFER.  Transfer stuff I usually give away, and no transfer I typical keep even though I would probably never wear them again.  Who knows? They are out of the way anyway or may come back into style.


zzCUBES
zzCubes is where I put the boxes that objects of clothes came from (especially copy/modify).  I delete the ones that have nothing left, and purge the rest.  Landmarks get moved to !!New!! in the Landmarks folder, because that’s where I look when somebody asks for suggestions.  I generally leave notecards with the clothes.


Therefore, if I buy an “Blaze* Vivace Aqua Dress”, I:

(1) Move the folder to “!!NEW!!” in the Clothing Directory, then move the object/cube to “zzCubes” if appropriate.
(2) Rename the folder “AQUA - Blaze* Vivace Dress”
(3) Determine the various combinations and create folders for them so that dressing is much easier to do.
(4) Drag the organized folder into BLUE.  Therefore if it is an outfit it’s dragged to:
               Clothing   :::   2-Outfits   :::   AQUA   :::   AQUA - Blaze* Vivace Dress

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

I have been using this system since September 2008 and have modified it here and there.  I works well for organizing thousands of items -- especially clothes.

If the system works for you, Great!  If not, modify it and take back control of your Second Life Inventory.

Custom Colouring – In Firestorm

This guide will describe how to change the colour of your dress using the Firestorm viewer.  It was described using version 4.2.2; so if you receive these instructions and are using in a different version they should be close to what you will be using.  If you are already a builder in SL, you won’t need these instructions.

Phi had considered and actually successfully built a HUD to colour our dresses and it worked well.  But we soon realized that the HUD would not give the fine controls the way the default editor provides, and after much tweaking decided to abandon the HUD and focus on a notecard that described how to do it in the two main viewers Firestorm and Linden Labs Viewer.

About each Design

Phi defines a design as a combination of three things:

(1) Style
(2) Pattern
(3) Hue

The STYLE is the layout and structure of the mesh.  The PATTERN is a general arrangement of that has been placed on the mesh.  The HUE is a colour variation of the original pattern.

This guide allows you to add a fourth element, COLOR.  All non-Demo Phi Dresses come in Modify/Copy/No Transfer without a colour defined, it is always white, and this guide describes how you can use a Second Life viewer, in this case Firestorm, to change the white color to something else to give you a potentially different looking outfit or to tweak the colours slightly to match your existing accessories.

Step 0 - Don't Over Do It!

I put this step in to remind people to not over due it in the colour bar.  The colour changes you might make should be really subtle, otherwise you will end up with something that looks yucky!

Step 1 – Open Your Inventory

Step 2 – Select the Worn Tab

Step 3 – Open the folder next to your Phi outfit

Step 4 – This reveals the worn contents

Step 5 – Right-click the Mesh, and select Edit

Step 6 – Click the Texture Tab

Step 7 – Click the Colour Box

Step 8 - Play

This window gives you presets, a colour grid affecting hue and brightness, specific brightness controls and you can even be geeky by selecting specific Red, Green, Blue, Hue, Saturation, Luminosity, LSL, or Hex values.  OMG.

The thing about the colour window is the colour you select will alter the existing colours.  Like adding them together, for example, PINK + YELLOW produces a RED result.  I could explain why, but the best thing to do is just try.  You’ll find that the best colour combinations are only slight colour changes from white, rather than significant colour changes.

Don’t forget to click OK when you are done.

Step 9 - Examples

Who is Phi Clothing Designs?

Back in 2009, my first attempt at designing clothing in Second Life was such a disaster that I figured I'd never do it again. Then a friend of mine started designing pants, and described a multi-hour process to fitting the pant design to the clothing template. This is because the template is not square, it's a polygon, which means a manual texturing of the texture to fit the polygon. While it's possible to use Photoshop to spread the texture over the polygon, the problem is the process often smears the texture making the seams hard to align, and it's awfully challenging to get the seams to align.  This is why many designers have stitch lines or dark areas along the seams so it looks okay when the texture is applied.

But not at Phi.  At Phi, it took us 2 years (no full time of course) and 3 major versions to create a process to blend textures into these odd shaped polygons so that the textures align.  In our October 2013 reboot, we optimized our clothing process while making the clothing buying and using process as easy as possible.  3 BETA testers evaluated the system and found it seamless.  Now it's your turn.

We also went to a FREE model.  The HUD is FREE and copiable (no transfer).  Each OUTFIT is FREE and copiable (no transfer).  What you pay for are the patterns/fabrics.  You don't buy one colour, you get 8 hues in a pack.  We also sell FATPACKS, 6 designs in a pack, and save even more money.  So one FATPACK is actually 48 different dresses.

The HUD makes it EASY to manage the hundreds of variations you could buy, get as group gifts or give-a-ways

We don't do conservative design. Our patterns are eye popping, wild and colourful, using complex shapes and styles. Because we match seams, this allows the patterns to be large and seamless themselves. When you tie this to seamless texture mapping you'll see very quickly how we are very different.

As of October 2013, we have 4 mesh outfits, 30 patterns and 240 variations.  With significant increases in productivity, we will be able to offer more outfits more quickly.  Hours, instead of weeks.  Want the latest designs?  Check out Phi first.