It’s been a somewhat frustrating week. But I made progress on a couple of fronts.

New hat – not really that new, I’ve been wearing it for a year, but only recently got serious about choosing the final set of textures (yes, it’s another texture change) and realizing something fundamentally dumb about how I’ve been doing things.

The new hat is called “Flutterby” and it’s got the same (old) base top hat with a texture change band and body. I really like the steampunk textures, of course, and there are some other ideas for other hats, but with a different base.

These are the body and band choices – I’ve gone this route before by photographing a simple texture organizer inworld to use as the “features” image on the Marketplace ad. It’ll look slightly different, this is just the raw inworld setup.

But due to my realization of the dumbness, I spent some time thinking about how to get around the problem, and decided that I’d have to join the rest of modern SL practice and produce a texture-change HUD. I figure that most users now probably use these for skin and outfits appliers, and after looking around a little, liked Xavier Sockington’s minimalist touch-area approach.

Some of his reviewers didn’t like that there was no resize option. But I’ve taken classes from Xavier and always got something out of them, and wanted to support his business. And although I struggled most of a day before the angels sang, I am still happy with this, although by the time I finally got it working, I was forced to knock off, pack prims away, and venture outworld to a gathering.

Note to my future self: setting this up as a duplex required touching the individual linked prims in order to get the actual link number. Separating them wasn’t a requirement, as they did have to retain their original link number rather than being recombined after being separated. This HUD gives up to 8 button options, with each button offering 8 link or face options. So you could use it to to change textures on multiple faces per button, and you can stack one on top of the other. This way, I get one for body textures, one for band textures.

You could also limit the combinations of textures to just 8 groupings per HUD. I expect builders of retexturable homes and furniture love this stuff. I got the idea from my “realization of my dumbitude” and also from the clever and beautifully textured HUD that came with my texture change patio furniture from Max Graf.

So not only did I mess about with prims, I actually dusted off GIMP and bungled around with layer files until I remembered how to select and mask and so forth, using the image of the texture organizer to stencil the HUD buttons. The textures are named in order so that they’re consistent with the button positions; in a future project, with a little scaling, it’ll be a snap to set up button textures.

Really all that’s required is to double-check the perms with some tests (my poor alts), re-check that the HUD is working (I literally took the working copy into inventory and walked out the door), and set up Marketplace and store vendors.

Of course, all this got me thinking about updating to a newer GIMP. And the dangers of filters not working.

And I set out a group gift in the shop (a mesh top hat, super simple), so that got me thinking about Blender.

Here we go again, taking online classes (Udemy this time, there was a big sale). And I pulled out some old unfinished things and had a look and a think. This time, I think I can actually finish the older projects and get over the block at last.

In the “stuff not done” column, I need to go through my MP listings, update the link to the shop (as it changed when the sim was swapped), and before that, cull old junk ruthlessly.

Although I wasn’t online at all this week, I was getting other things figured out. And thinking about fun activities (a kind of organized tour) that’s sort of fitness oriented. More on that later.

UPDATE: I had a few minutes at lunch today to check on the hat and HUD, and ermagerd, ert werks! Now thinking of getting my hair did with something modern and hat friendly.