On Second Life, your avatar is a representation of who you are. It should reflect something about you, tell a bit. On your first days in, you might not want to pay for it, not knowing whether you’re going to stay or not, or where to buy stuff even if you could.

There’s a ton of ways you can create a starter avatar and make it rather cool, too. Here’s my first one after I came back on SL, so I had a bit of experience before, but that said, SL had changed a lot.

Anyway, the way this avi was created is the method I’m going to show you.

Start with the default avis.

First, in your viewer, pick the avatars-icon.It’ll open this toolbar.

The avatars on this screen come with interchangeable parts. Pick a few avatars that you like, and then, when they’re visible in your inventory, remove and add individual parts from one and the other.

Every time you change an outfit, it makes a copy of the avatar into your inventory. Now, these avatar parts are yours. You can swap them around as much as you like; female hair works well on male avis, too, by the way.

Don’t forget to grab yourself a free horse, either, some of these avis ride a horse. You’ll need to swap the animation override to a rider of your avatar’s gender, otherwise it’ll warp the horse into something quite funny.

Open your inventory with the suitcase icon.

In your inventory, switch to the ‘Recent’ tab. There, you can see all the avatars you just tried on. You can try them all and have a good collection of items that you can swap around for your avi. (This isn’t done nearly as much as you’d think, either, so at least for now, you’ll be looking quite unique. The avatars I’ve marked with a ban-mark are the ones that are most used as is, but you can still swap in and out of their clothes if you feel like it.)

Worn items are bolded.

In your Recent folder, you can see the items you are wearing in bold. Just detach anything you don’t like and replace it with what you prefer.

Invisible skin (skin showing through clothes).

Now. Alphas. There will be mysterious disappearance of skin. The alphas, marked as this in your inventory make parts of your body invisible so that the clothes will look better. They are not always needed, but for your first days, using alphas will be your best bet to looking decent.

The alphas are matched to the clothes you wear, not to the body you wear. That said, this switches around when you buy a mesh avatar, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

You’re ready to go.

Now, you’re ready to go and go explore. (Try freebie stores if you want to keep customizing your avatar.)

Once you’re ready for a commitment to your SL look, check out where we get the cool avatars from.