Transferring Your SL Appearance to OpenSim Grids

A lot of the complaints I’ve heard about OpenSim have been related to the avatar. Many people end up stuck on the default “Ruth” avatar, and miss looking like their virtual selves. I’ve come across several posts explaining how to do this, and figured I’d combine them here, split into two sections: your base avatar (shape, skin, base hair, etc), and prim attachments / clothing.

First and foremost: make sure you have permission to do what you’re going to do. Your shape is your own, but if you do not have full permissions on your skin, for example, you probably shouldn’t transfer it. I’m fortunate that my skin is custom made for myself, as is my hair, so I have fully modifiable versions, and I’m the only one with them – then again, how many people really want purple hair?

The reason this has been made relatively easy is from some fine work from the folks over at realXtend – you will need their viewer.

1. Download and install the realXtend viewer.
2. Open the realXtend viewer and log in to Second Life; be sure to select “Second Life” in the “Connect To:” drop down on the log in screen.
3. Enter “Edit Appearance” mode.
4. Click the “Export” button and save the file to your desktop.
5. Log out of the Second Life grid; log in to the OpenSim grid of your choice, such as OS Grid.
6. Enter “Edit Appearance” mode.
7. Click the “Import” button and open the file you saved to your desktop.

Please note, this does not include any textures – this only sets the values for your “slider” options on shape, base skin, lovely Linden hair, eyes, and so forth.

If you have full permissions access to the textures which make up your appearance, you’ll need to upload them separately.

1. If you do not have the textures on your hard drive, log into Second Life, and open the textures. Save them to your hard drive by selecting File, Save Texture As.
2. Once all your textures are on your hard drive, log into the OpenSim grid of your choice, and upload the textures using File, Upload Image (or Bulk Upload).
3. Enter “Edit Appearance” mode, and replace the textures on the appropriate sections.

To transfer clothing and prim attachments in a fairly simple fashion, you’ll need full permissions of the assets. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I would highly recommend checking out the Second Inventory program, which is available for less than US$20 for a single avatar version, and US$40 for a multi avatar version. It is somewhat similar to a graphical FTP client, and allows you to log into Second Life, download full assets, including textures and scripts, to your hard drive, and then upload them to an alternate grid. Again, you’ll need appropriate permissions on the objects to be able to do this.

I hope this points some of you in the right direction. I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with sharing content across multiple grids!