The clock tutorial is divided into seven steps that walk you through how to create the clock from the ground up. Besides a Second Life account, you'll need just a couple of other things to build the clock:

1.	A graphics editing tool. I've used Corel PaintShop Pro Photo XI in the video, but you could use Adobe Photoshop or The Gimp if you prefer
2.	To do any building in Second Life you either need a premium account and buy some land, or have access to a sandbox. A sandbox is an area of Second Life where you can build objects without having to own any land. You can find sandboxes by searching for "sandbox" in the Places search in Second Life (but make sure they allow you to run scripts, not all do).

Step 1 - Introduction, and Making the Clock Face Texture

This video walks you through how to create a simple clock face texture in PaintShop Pro, ready for importing into Second Life. It doesn't assume you know anything about PaintShop Pro, in fact if you're already a PaintShop Pro wizard you could skip this step altogether.

Download/Stream  Running time: 13 minutes 54 seconds

Step 2 - Building the Clock Face

In this step you create a cube that will become your clock face, applying the texture created in step 1. You'll learn how to apply a texture to a single face and will be ready to start building the hands.

Download/Stream  Running time: 2 minutes 40 seconds

Step 3 - Making the Clock Hands, Part 1

Making the hands move is the heart and soul of what the clock is about, so we explore a few problems that we need to overcome in this video. It's important to understand how we're going to make the hands rotate around the clock face before starting to define the textures we're going to use.

Download/Stream  Running time: 4 minutes 22 seconds

Building a Clock in Second Life - Full Video Tutorial

I don't assume you know much about building objects in Second Life, and really do go back to the ground level in terms of explaining what you need to do. For some people this might mean that they can either skip or fast-forward through sections of the video, but for people who are just starting out in Second Life, or are long-standing residents who haven't tried any building yet, it should be a useful introduction.

I hope you enjoy watching the videos.

Copyright © 2007 Ian Monstre  ·  All Rights reserved

Step 4 - Making the Clock Hand Texture

Now that we've figured out how the hands are going to work, we can design an appropriate texture to represent them. In this step we walk through how to create partially transparent textures in PaintShop Pro and save them in a format that will be recognised by Second Life.

Download/Stream  Running time: 6 minutes 23 seconds

Step 5 - Making the Clock Hands, Part 2

We can now apply the texture we've created to finish off the clock hands and position them correctly on the clock face.

Download/Stream  Running time: 6 minutes 16 seconds

Step 6 - Writing the Minute Hand Script

Linden Scripting Language (LSL) can be difficult if you haven't done much programming previously, but we only need a fairly small piece of script to rotate the minute hand correctly. In this video we write the script to rotate the minute hand so that it shows the correct time, and explain the thinking, and take a brief look at the LSL Wiki along the way.

Download/Stream  Running time: 11 minutes 10 seconds
Download source code (version on video)
Download source code (optimized version)

Step 7 - Writing the Hour Hand Script

In the final video we write the script for the hour hand - which is heavily based on the script for the minute hand - then link up the final object to produce a complete working clock in Second Life.

Download/Stream  Running time: 3 minutes 38 seconds
Download source code (version on video)
Download source code (optimized version)

Don't forget to take a look at my other videos including making a working radio in Second Life, a door that opens and closes when touched, and a fluttering flag.

HELP! My Clock Hands are Doing Weird Things!

A common problem you might get if you build your own clock after walking through the tutorial is that your clock's hands may do something quite odd: As soon as you link them to the clock itself, they may stick out at weird angles, or rotate backwards, or seem to show the wrong time.

If this happens, don't panic. It's pretty easy to fix. You just need to move the hands to another face of the cube. If your hands are at a weird angle, try moving them to the adjacent face of the cube to the one you've used. And if they're running backwards or showing the wrong time, move them to the opposite face of the cube to the one you've used.