Creator Resources for Second Life

The Second Life Wiki: Run by Linden Labs themselves, the Wiki is an endless wellspring of knowledge about the specifics of SL's world and where things came from. Particularly useful for scripters, land owners, and event managers.

Second Life Community Knowledge Base: The community-run forum hosted on SL's official website. A great place to look for specific answers to your creator questions, or to ask your own. One thing I will note, the general attitude here is to lead you in the direction of your answer rather than do it for you, so please keep that in mind.

Second Life Marketplace (MP): It might seem counterintuitive to include the Marketplace here, but it is an absolute wealth of resources such as texture packs, scripts for you to configure, and more that you can find for your own builds.

The Mighty Ginkgo: A truly mighty channel that was run by Zero, documenting lots of creator tools and tips back when this information was scarcely known to civilians. Zero no longer makes videos on SL, but there is a delightful backlog of vital resources on the channel and she's making cool new stuff all the time worth checking out!

Sofa's SL Beginner's Manual: Created by the amazing Sofa, this guide is intended less for creators and moreso for absolute beginners. However, contains a lot of important knowledge about the editing features present in SL that creators of any kind absolutely need to master.

Heather's Prim & Learning Resources: A gorgeous website run by my friend Heather, sharing numerous resources for utilizing the SL engine to it's full potential with just the native tools.

Object Permissions, Build Tools, and Calculating Land Impact: Recommended by Heather. Three articles written by Jeremy Linden that create the foundation of how to build and import your creations into SL's engine.

Dr. Frank's Shape Combiner: A tool useful for transferring your unique shape across various meshes. Alternatively, you can use Silkenpaw's Shape Merger in your browser.

16 Bit Character Count/Byte Counter: Useful counter for telling you the byte limit of your text; All forms of writing in SL have a byte limit you should be aware of.



Builder's Brewery: Classic sim run by volunteers with numerous freebies for all aspects of creation in SL. Anyone can visit and get something out of it, no matter their skill level.

Ivory Tower of Primitives: Immense collection of tutorials, demonstrations, and other resources showing what you can do with prims along with many other things.

Happy Hippo Building School: A learning center dedicated to all manner of building tutorials, with plenty of freebies to boot.

Dreams: Excellent sandbox and classroom sim for building, particularly with prims.



GIMP: Useful photomanipulation software that can be used for basic texturing in SL. Natively supports exporting to .TGA, which along with .PNG are commonplace for SL textures. This is the choice I'd suggest if your background is graphic design or photo editing.

FireAlpaca: This is the art program I've used for over 10 years on my PC. FireAlpaca has simple, easy-to-use tools that work well for careful texture work such as the creation of BOM skin mods. This is the choice I'd suggest if your background is illustration.


Robin Wood's Avatar UV Templates: The late Robin Wood's classic clean, exported UV maps for the default SL model. These are the same UV maps in use by most mainstream bodies that use BOM technology, and are absolutely vital for mastering BOM textures.

CCCCybernetics' Avatar Databank: A further database of the various default models in SL. Useful for creating BOM textures for male avatars in particular.

Using Local Textures: Quick showcase of the Local Textures feature that allows you to edit local files and see the changes update in real time without spending money uploading.


Mr. Monke's GIF to LSL Texture Generator: Ingenius script and texture generator that allows you to import GIFs into SL and animate them!

Polygon Love ORM Generator: Recommended by Vegan. Useful generator of ORM textures so you can take advantage of PBR materials in SL.

Kuromori's SLUV to EVOX UV Converter: A great converter for turning textures designed for Lelutka Evo X into ones compatible with SLUV heads, and vice versa.


Material Maker: Open source alternative to Substance Painter, for creating greatly detailed materials.

Ucupaint: Free add-on for Blender that helps you paint right on the mesh, similar to ZBrush.

IMGonline Seamless Texture Maker: Create seamless textures right in your browser.






Blender: Comprehensive, open source 3D modeling software, to put it simply. I use Version 3.4.1, and I would recommend anything above Version 2.8 as you will find the most applicable tutorials and plugins that way.

Marvelous Designer: Industry standard software for creating mesh clothing out of cut patterns. Useful for creating clothing and fabric simulators, but not required to do so.


Y.A.V.N.E.: Recommended by OpenPony creators. A plugin that can help create much sharper normal maps for your meshes.

gret: Recommended by OpenPony creators. A suite of plugins designed to help all sorts of things, with a focus on furry-related mesh.

TexTools: Recommended by OpenPony creators. Various tools all bundled together to help make texturing a breeze.


Low Poly Modeling in 六角大王: Recommended by Vegan. While in Japanese, gives detailed diagrams on how to 3D model in 六角大王 (Rokkaku Daioh). The skills absolutely can transfer to Blender and any other 3D program.

How to Create Virtual Beauties: Recommended by Vegan. Great old book discussing the ins and outs of 3D modelling in an anime style. Once again, a useful resource that I believe targets my audience's tastes in what kind of mesh they want to make.


Creating Stylized Anime Hair in Blender: Useful for creating large stylized hairdos, which might be complimented well with these Fur & Ear Curve Profiles.

Making Buildings in Blender for SL: In-depth process of creating building models for SL, useful for knowing what to specifically include or exclude.

The Models Resource: Ripped video game assets and other 3D models available for downloading and tweaking with. Great place to start if you're an absolute beginner when it comes to 3D.

Low Poly Meat Bucket Modelling Timelapse: Recommended by Vegan. Stylized tutorial for creating a decor object, with special emphasis on texturing it as well.

Low Poly Anime Character Modelling Livestream: Recommended by Vegan. Useful livestream of someone's entire process of meshing and texturing a little character.

Low Poly Bedroom Modelling Timelapse: Recommended by Vegan. Depicts some ways to make simple bedroom furniture models. Please note this timelapse was recorded in Maya, not Blender.

Low Poly Anime Character Modelling Timelapse: Recommended by Vegan. Detailed timelapse of creating a simple character model.


Upload Mesh with Lower Land Impact: Short but absolutely critical video showing best practices for optimizing your mesh uploads. To grossly oversimplify; Land Impact (LI) is how much space your mesh takes up when rezzed, and following these guidelines can reduce the value tremendously without removing detail from your mesh.

Nano Mesh Trick: One method for importing extremely small mesh in SL, since by default all items in SL can only become as small as .01 meters in any dimension.

Avoiding Issues with Physics: Useful livestream recording going over problems mesh creators may run into when it comes to adding physics to their builds and potential workarounds. VERY important if you plan to make furniture or buildings.

Second Life Free Physics Lesson: Another excellent explanation of how physics work for mesh imported into SL, especially in terms of making them easily traversable.


Local Mesh Tutorial: Quick showcase of the local mesh feature in Firestorm, which works similarly to Local Textures for troubleshooting mesh as you export them in real time without upload fees.

Exporting Prims: If you didn't already know, SL has an option to export your prim-based builds and optimize them in Blender/other 3D programs. This video gives a rundown on how to do so, saving you a lot of land impact and cleaning up your topology.

My Flexi Hair Tutorial: An older tutorial of mine I'm surprised still gets attention. Documents a bit of the nature of flexi prims, and how to use them to create an anime hairstyle.



Avastar: At this time, this is the de-facto tool in use for any sort of rigging and animation in SL. Has incredible documentation on their website as well. Bootlegs are floating around, but you should purchase if you can.


Onigiri: Really useful plugin for assisting in rigging and animating to the SL skeleton in Blender.

Robust Weight Transfer: Recommended by OpenPony creators. A useful tool for smoothing out weight painting in your rigs.


Second Life Rigging Avatars With Avastar and Blender: Very bare bones introduction to using Avastar and rigging practically any model to it, useful for all skill levels.

My Guide to Coverting MMD Models to SL: Guide I made if you wish to import MMD models into SL for your avatar or animesh objects. You should read it alongside watching Zero's Original Video Guide.

Weight Painting a Dress to eBody Reborn: Useful walkthrough on weight painting a dress smoothly to a common SL mesh body.

Rigging a Bento Tail for Second Life: Useful tutorial for making tail bones visible and rigging to them smoothly.

Use Blender with Avastar to Make a Tail:Another tail rigging video, this one I find a lot simpler to follow.

OpenPony Rigged Mesh Tutorial: Very helpful demonstration on how to weight transfer and configure rigged mesh for OpenPony.

Beginner Animesh Tutorial: Showcase on how to rig animesh models, which can use different bones from the SL default skeleton.


Zanibar Pixelbottom's PBR Tutorials: Comprehensive playlist discussing all manner of the generation and setup process of PBR materials, which have recently been added to SL and change the way one handles photography in numerous manners.

Lighting a Basic PBR Scene: Quick tutorial by Violent Seduction, a brand I enjoy. Shows you how to simply light and set up a PBR scenes for screenshots.

Tips for Adding Realism: Blog post with screenshots detailing how to add realistic touches to your taken photos.



ZHAO II Animation Overrider (AO) Base: As the description suggests, this HUD attachment and script set are some of the most widely used across SL for giving your character unique animations. Useful for creators or just skilled SL players to customize how each and every action animates.


Breathing Pose Tutorial: Quick look at all of the basic features one needs to understand and use to make a simple breathing idle animation.

Making Priority 5 Animations: Tutorial on animation priority, useful for layering animations such as when the avatar holds an object.

Zero's MMD to SL Animation Guide: Zero made a great walkthrough of how to convert an MMD animation file into one that works with the SL skeleton.

OpenPony Animation Class: A detailed demonstration on how to animate the OpenPony avatar, which is configured very differently than most other SL avatars.



Notepad++: My favorite text editor and the one I use on Windows. Easy to indent and color codes to other file extensions, plus unsaved files are kept around in your cache. You always should save your files, though...

Visual Studio Code (VSC): The editor I use on Linux. Contains plentiful plugins and color coding that makes scripting in general helpful.


LSL Portal: The SL Wiki's official portal and documentation of their scripting language, called LSL. Tells you in detail what each tag can do, and sometimes provides simple examples.

LSL Library, Categorized Library, and Old Forum Index: Recommended by Heather. Three libraries within the LSL Wiki pages of scripts that are free to use, edit, and learn from.

Outworldz' Free Scripts: A magical website where users have shared countless scripts for you to freely use and peruse. Website is clunky, but that's the price to pay.

AVSitter: Open source script suite mainly used for animating furniture. Likely the most widely used script set for these purposes.

SLua Alpha Information: If you have familiarity with the Luau scripting language, then your skills might transfer to the newly introduced SLua scripting language. This page lists further information on how it is used and sims it can be used at, since it's in alpha at the moment.


How to Particle Script: Step-by-step creation guide for adding particle effects to an object with minimal scripting (Although all aspects of a particle can be edited in the script with more detail). Please be aware this video begins with the creator sharing the loss of a loved one.

Animesh Easy Setup: Simple showcase of how to get an animesh model up and running with the script shown and in the description.

OpenCollar: NSFW. Open source script and object suite designed for BDSM play within an RLV (Restrained Love Viewer) environment. Useful if you plan to make such items.

RealRestraint: NSFW. Marine's original Restrained Love Viewer, could be further useful for the development of RLV products.



Audacity: Very common audio recorder and editor. Useful for exporting sounds to be SL-friendly as well, or to divide up sounds into songs

Importing Songs in Segments: Guide on how to upload full audio files longer than 30 seconds to SL; Audio uploaded this way is controlled via Sound volume settings rather than Music or Media, and may be preferable for the purposes of making dancers and other items.

The Sounds Resource: Video game and other sound assets available for download, potentially to be added to your creations.


Second Streaming: The modern go-to resource for renting and setting up a streaming URL as a DJ or other live performer, unless you already have a personal server that can do so.

Disc Jockey Tutorial: Linden Labs' official guide to being a DJ in SL, using IceCast rather than the above link. Useful for if you have your own server especially.

Kosmi: Screensharing and streaming platform in use by most SL media players. Useful for giving presentations of any kind.



eBody Reborn Dev Kit: Page for applying for the eBody Reborn dev kit, the most common modify-enabled mesh body in use right now. They are very generous with giving out their dev kit.

Meshbody (Legacy) Creator Homepage: The website homepage for Legacy's creator club, which requires a Discord account.

Maitreya Dev Kit: Information on how to obtain the various developer kits for Maitreya Lara X and Classic models.

Belleza Dev Kit: Creators of Belleza Jake, one of the most popular and versatile modify-enabled male bodies in SL, alongside many other models. Dev kit applications are available in-world.

Lelitka Content Creator Page: Application info for obtaining the dev kit(s) to Lelutka heads, the most commonly used realistically-styled heads in SL right now.

Genus Dev Kit: Another popular series of heads, both with realistic and anime-style models. Dev kit applications are available in-world.


Apricot Paws' Dev Kits: Developer materials for Apricot Paws' works, such as Feety Peets and Handy Paws.

Utilizator's Development Resources: Dummy rigs and UVs/Textures for Utilizator's products, like Kemono and Himeko.

Cherry Head Resources: A great site compiled by lovely CVLC friends on this very moe looking head.

Tonkati Head Resources: Resources for the modern anime heads by Tonkati, including Mitsukuri and Rabuka.


World of Dinkies' Creator Resources: Guide for creating Dinkie items, small kitty avatars. Be sure to check out their Beginner's Guide as well.

OpenPony Creator Resources: Shared here sparingly, you're better off lurking in their thread or just ask around in-world for a link to the official OP Discord server.