 Hello everybody, my name is Michael Bailey with Avocon. I'm also known in various virtual worlds as Marcus Llewellyn and I'd like to welcome you to this next tutorial where we'll learn how to link prims together. In the last tutorial we learned how to res-prims, move, rotate, and resize prims. If you skipped that video, please go back and watch it as it forms a solid foundation for what's to come. After creating prims and playing with them you may have wished to be able to glue it together somehow and keep it, but how do you do that? That is what you will tackle in this next mission. Linking is the process of attaching prims together so they can be moved as one object. In this mission you will learn how to link and unlink prims. You will also learn how to edit a prim, even when it's linked to another prim. Finally, you will learn about root prims and why they are important. Let's start by opening our build window and res-ing two prims. Let's make sure they're relatively close together. Before we go further, you need to understand how to select prims. Currently, the prim we just res-ed is selected. You can see this because it's highlighted in yellow. You can deselect it simply by clicking on the ground. To select a prim again, just click on it. You can also change what prim you want selected by left clicking on the other one. If you want both prims selected, first select one, then hold down your shift key, and left click on the other one. You can see that both cubes are now selected. Another way to do this is to simply left click and drag a selection window around your prims and let go. Now both prims are selected. Now let's link these prims. On your keyboard, with the prims highlighted, hit CTRL L. You can see that one of the prims is still yellow, and the other one has turned blue. This means that these are now a link set, and for all practical purposes, they're one object. When you move them, they move together, they rotate together, and they resize as one object. To unlink your prims, select the link set you just created, and hit CTRL SHIFT L. The viewer will ask you if you really want to unlink them. Go ahead and click on Unlink. Now both cubes have turned yellow, and they're no longer part of a link set. So they can move independently now. Make sure to practice resing a few different shapes, and linking them together, and then unlinking them. Now let's say we already have a link set, but we want to add a prim to it. Let's res another cube, select the link set, hold your SHIFT key, and select the cube you just created. Now when you hit CTRL L, it will add that cube to the link set, and you can tell because when you move it, it all moves as one. Now let's say you want to edit just one of these prims in the link set. To do that, we go over to our edit window, and we select Edit Linked. This allows us to select a single prim inside the link set. With one of your prims selected, and Edit Linked selected, you can modify just that one prim without affecting the rest of the link set. And when you unclick Edit Linked, it's still part of that link set. If we want to unlink one prim, again we go over to our edit window, choose Edit Linked, choose the prim that we want to unlink, and hit CTRL SHIFT L on our keyboard. Click on the Unlink button, and now this prim is no longer part of the link set. The rest of the link set, however, remains intact. Every link set you create has what's called a root prim. A root prim is the last prim you select when linking a group of prims, and it has some special qualities you want to be aware of. The position of a group of linked prims is based on the location of the root prim. The name of the group of prims is based on the name of the root prim, and some scripts will act on the root prim in a special way. To find the root prim of a linked object, select your link set, and look at the colors. The root prim will be highlighted in yellow. The others will be highlighted in blue, and these are known as child prims. By default, any link set you create is called a primitive. You can see this in your edit window, under the general tab, and where it says name. As soon as you create and link something you think you'd like to keep, you should rename it with a descriptive name. So in the edit window, general tab, name, I'm going to call this link set walls. If you like, you can also add a description. Now if you right click and choose take on the menu, the object will have been taken into your inventory, and you'll be able to find it much more easily by simply typing its name. Let's practice a little bit now. Start by resing three cubes. Now let's name each cube prim 1, prim 2, and prim 3. Now from left to right, using your shift key, let's select all three prims, and now let's link them by hitting control L. You can see that we now have a link set named prim 1, and it took its name from the root prim. We can take this into our inventory by right clicking, choosing take, and we'll see that our link set has appeared as prim 1 in our inventory. A good way to pick up ways to build is to see what other people have built. So let's look for something in world that looks like it's been made up of many, many prims, like this shoe here. Let's right click on it and choose edit. This will highlight all the prims in its link set, and by giving it a close inspection, you can get an idea of what prims they used, how they were changed in shape and size, and put together to form a more complete and complex object. And that concludes our video tutorial on learning how to create and manipulate link sets. Thank you for watching, and remember to keep practicing and keep building. Thank you, and we'll see you next time.