Thursday, July 19, 2007

Today was a day for little touch-ups, because my creativity was feeling a bit burnt out. I redid the bulletin board at the teleport, so now there's boards that give links to the Flickr group and the blog (yay!), as well as a label "upcoming events" over the other side. I redid my landmark giver for my off site vendors, and lowered the prices on all of my top hats (except the Mad Hatter). I realize that there's definitely a mental shift that comes over a vendor when they start to do better. For a while I never understood why or how on earth Bare Rose could charge so little for what was obviously so much work, or why Last Call and Pixel Dolls charged the same for incredible work as a mediocre vendor did for something boring and unoriginal (and poorly executed). I realize that when I was starting out, if I got anyone at all in my store, I had to make their presence seriously count for something. I had to live off one or two transactions of 500L, rather than now, which is obviously more transactions of fewer $L. So I am able to give, thanks to my higher traffic and my up-and-comingness, my lovely things to you for less!! hurray!!!

I made something funny today for the Nessa, which I'll be sharing with you:

Ski mask!! It needs some touching up on the texture and maybe the mesh before it's ready for sale, but I just thought it was funny. Gimme all your lindens! (I say this in an elegant evening gown).


Today's very big project however, has been spending hours and hours trying to conquer a problem I've been having with sculpted prims. As I probably have mentioned before, I use a combination of Zbrush 3 and Maya. I make my sculpts in Zbrush, export as an .obj, import in Maya and then export as the sculpt map. Some people might have noticed that I haven't made any "mirrored" sculpts, that is, two objects that when facing each other, mirror each other. This is because of a nasty glitch:

Ok not the unibrow and moustache glitch. But if you will kindly direct your eye to the purple circle, you'll see that the mesh of the horn seems a little odd. It actually has turned completely inside out, with a transparent effect on the outside (like when you texture the inside of a hollow object, but make the outside transparent). I've done so much reading about this tonight, and I've only been able to fix it for when it happens inside of Zbrush, not whatever is happening between it and Maya and Maya and SL. I've tried inverting colors in Photoshop, negative scale in maya, doubling mesh and flipping pixols in Zbrush, and I'm running out of ideas. If this has ever happened to you or you happen to know anything at all about what could be causing this, oh lordy please IM me in world or leave a comment or SOME thing. As it is, it seems almost ungooglable, because there's nothing involving all three together. So I call out to the readers of this blog who are familiar with Maya and importing things into Maya especially... Help!!!

I will reward you with awesome symmetrically mirrored things <3

2 comments:

Miriel Enfield said...

I've tried inverting colors in Photoshop, negative scale in maya, doubling mesh and flipping pixols in Zbrush, and I'm running out of ideas. If this has ever happened to you or you happen to know anything at all about what could be causing this, oh lordy please IM me in world or leave a comment or SOME thing

Here's what's always worked for me: put the sculptie texture (the texture that defines the sculptie, not that one that goes on it) into an image editing program. Flip it horizontally. In Paint Shop Pro, I just use the mirror function; I don't know what you're using but I'm sure it has something similar.

Anonymous said...

If you flip the sculpt image horizontally, and then invert the colors, you hould successfully mirror the sculpt.

(I often use this for Car fenders)