Modeling Certification

This certification exams consisted objective type questions such as true/false or multiple choice questions and simulated labs for examining a candidate's expertise. For this reason, it is essential that those aspiring for SL Modeling certification have sufficient hands-on experience.

The holder of a SL Certification has demonstrated competency in basic SL User Interface, SL Permissions

This Certification includes

• Mechanics of Building
  • Arbitrary Shape Recognition and Duplication
  • Prim Optimization
• Architecture
• Furnishings/Interior Design
• Objects
• Weapons and Vehicles

Note: Includes using scripts to animate objects and textures but no writing of scripts

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Areas like vehicles, buildings, and avatar attachments should remain a marketing and portfolio issue. There's huge stylistic issues with judging those - camera control, proportions, historical accuracy and realism, etc. It also prevents claims of bias (I notice a lack of prim hair and womens' footwear on the list.)

Certification Topics:

• Proof that a person can use the edit controls in basic ways. Create, select, move, rotate, copy, delete. Hollow, cut, resize, dimple. Convert one prim type into another. Resize using the edit window, resize by grabbing the points. Choosing colors and textures, aligning textures, transparent/opaque, fullbright. Understanding shiny, bumpmapped, and how alpha affects them. Grid modes.

• Linking and unlinking. Manipulating linked groups of prims (individually and as a group) - moving, texturing, coloring, resizing. Deleting a prim in a linkset. Knows that a stable linkset can't be a mix of phantom and real, etc. Understanding root vs child prims, and how that affects position, rotation, etc. Number and distance issues with linking. The existance of script tools that let you work around those limitations. The vehicle prim limit.

• Knowledge of flexi limitations (only some shapes can be flexi, always phantom)

• Knowledge of lighting limitations( 6 sources, no shadows ).

• Alpha flicker and techniques to prevent it. Positioning, "blacksiding", etc.

• How to make a prim into an attachment. Setting it to an attachment point. Using the edit window's grid mode for attachments. Making a basic one-prim HUD.

• Making "mini" prims with different techniques - cutting, dimpling, hollowing with a transparent texture on the outside.

• Oversized prims. How to do the ones that are technique (like flattening a 10M box to create a 15M plane) and best practices with the huge or mega prims that were introduced thru the Havoc hack (phantom is best, don't make them physical, bounding box and hollowing issues, beware of parcel boundaries).

• Prim torture shapes.

• Techniques to minimize your prim count. Sculpted Prims

• Texturing techniques that influence building. Shadowing, lighting, details, alpha games... texture maps. Textures and lag. Size, tiling, alpha channel issues, formats for upload. Common uses of alpha textures.

• Balancing and minimizing lag. Textures, shapes, levels of detail, etc...

• Working with curves and organic shapes.

• Basic script usage, more of a "drop it in and let it run" sort of thing. Animating textures, basic sound use, setting sit targets and assembling pose balls, removing hoverscript and particles, basic doors...