The blog meme for this week from Strawberry Singh asks what helpful tools we’ve found to make using SL easier. I don’t use a lot of different HUDs, but I am partial to the ones I’ve found so this was a quick and easy meme to do.

This is pretty much what my viewer setup looks like no matter which av I use. The first thing I will do is adjust button bars, I discard all of the av movement and camera movement controls because I never use them, and I’ll add in a few others that I tend to click most often. Essential are the Quick Prefs and Phototools in Firestorm, I use those more than anything else when I want to quickly speed through windlights or make some adjustments to my camera controls.

If I’m exploring I will usually leave the mini map open, with rotate turned off because that always seems to disorient me terribly.  Admittedly even after almost seven years I’m still green-dot phobic, I mostly use the mini map so I can stay out of other people’s way when I’m just out being a tourist and taking pics.

If I am going to do selfies I attach the AnyPose BVH as an all purpose pose adjuster for expressions, eyes, and body positions. I really love the way it can fine tune poses, and the ability it gives you to puppet another av.  I sprung for the full version because I had dreams of making lots of my own poses that would be customized for my avvie sizes, while I haven’t done as much of that as I thought I would I’m still glad I bought this.  For my other avs I use the AnyPose free version for expressions, as well as the Animare HUD so I can move them around if I need to.

The one thing I always seem to have on is my MystiTool, I learned about it soon after I joined SL and since then I’ve made sure to outfit every avvie with their own. I don’t use all the features and I try to disable the plugins I never use in the interest of keeping script counts lower, but I still leave this attached all the time unless I’m going to a crowded event. Between Firestorm and a couple other items I have I could replicate all of the functions I use, but I’ve grown so used to having this on all the time I always feel a little lost and undressed if I have to detach it for any reason.

I buy AO elements individually rather than as a set in a pre-made AO HUD, then I just load them into Firestorm. I love how easy the built in AO is to set up.  If I need to log in with the official viewer for some reason I do have an older ZHAO II with a walk and a couple of stands that I can toss on quickly and at least be able to move around with some degree of grace.

So that’s mostly it for me. Now, off to see what everyone else is using!  😀