tommjames: I can change head, eyes, lips etc. But when I try to change my hair nothing happens, it's as if it's failing to load the textures or something because when I look in the little square that shows what the hair looks like, it's empty. There are several other items that I don't seem to be able to change too.

Good question Tom. OK I need to get a little technical here, so everyone please hold tight:

In Second Life, your avatar has both items that are worn in the sense of a "layer" wrapped around a "doll". Think of your avatar's shirts, pants, socks etc being like a graphical texture map being laid over a 3D rendered object. That's how skin, tshirts, pants, underwear etc are usually changed. SO when you say you can change certain things about your avatar in the "appearances" box that's why.

Now, some items are worn in the literally sense, they are objects created from prims (the building blocks in SL) and are "attached" to your body. In order to give avatars a more realistic appearance, most hair these days is rendered as a "prim object" and then worn. An analogy would be you putting a hat on, the hat isn't "drawn" onto your head, it's a created object you attach.

So what's happening is that when you change "hair" properties, you're actually changing the "drawn on" texture-mapped hair, not the one you've got attached, that's why you can't see the changes. You would have to have editing permissions on the hair object and then manually manipulate, edit or change the properties of that hair depending on what you want to do....

hope that helps

Hmm, well I'll assume I have editing permissions to edit my own objects (correct me if I'm wrong).

In that case how do I edit the hair object?

tommjames:Hmm, well I'll assume I have editing permissions to edit my own objects (correct me if I'm wrong).

In that case how do I edit the hair object?

Well you cannot assume you have editing permissions unless you "made" the object. Owning it does not automatically bestow editing rights. In fact, when making something, you can specific who has what rights -- this is the basis for commerce within SL. Some objects are listed as "MOD/COPY" or "NonMOD, NonCopy" depending on the rights you have on them.

If you do have the rights, you have to right click on your hair object and choose Edit. It will highlight in blue and you'll see an editing window. Check the help files on the website for details on what you can do, I don't really have the space or time to go into that in depth here