Peer-ate Pressure

Ok, so that was a bad pun... but people wanted the hair :)



So I put it out ^.^ You get it in black, and brunette, and it's just 125 for both colors in one, cause I'm not deluding myself. It IS my first hair, and it IS flawed, but it's also darn cute and perfect to go under big, enormous and fabulous hats :)

Piratey Proliferance

Wow... I've just been having so much fun with the Pirate goodies, I've decided to make more... and *coughtheysellreallydamnwellCOUGH* I just started making and making, things that were a variation on the pirate theme, and well, out came... the Cavalier

It all started with the boots...

They had to be made thigh high. Yes, I will shamelessly say that I cheated and used the same base for the foot. I thought of slipping these in discreetly with the normal Pirate Boots, and I realized people wouldn't know that they were part of it. They really do deserve some light shed on them. They come in the same size dealy, two sizes with the normal size fit to the average SL woman (long legs), and the larger size is to give that extra slouchy yummy leather boot look to women, or obviously, to fit men normally.

I also made... *gasp* GAUNTLETS. Yes, honest to god yummy chunky slouchy wrinkly leather gauntlets, but being who I am, couldn't do the clothing texture up to my standards. Now, I was patronized not too long ago by Raven Pennyfeather... does that name ring any bells? It certainly should!! She owns RFyre designs, which is an enormously popular and extensive line of gothic and fantasy clothing. We were brought together by our mutual love of masks, (like so many of my friends on SL <3 2d="" 3d="" a="" adore="" adores="" against="" amusing="" and="" be="" body="" borrowed="" br="" but="" by="" can="" clothing="" collaboration...="" coming="" couldn="" currently="" d="" decided="" do="" don="" exact="" exactly="" expect...="" fact="" gauntlets.="" hands="" happy="" have="" i="" if="" it="" know="" my="" not="" of="" one="" opposite="" out="" prim="" really="" she="" so="" start="" stuck="" t="" talents.="" texture="" that="" the="" to="" together="" used="" ve="" we="" well="" what="" will.="" will="" with.="">

Also, watching the newer Peter Pan movie made me realize there was a Piratey Chapeau that had never been brought to life (well) on SL. So I bring you a very flouncy and semi-Napoleonic Bicorner

Another thing I was working extensively on, was following a longing and a desire of mine to bring a truly Fabulous hat into this world. Now, when I say Fabulous, I mean larger than life... I mean eye-catching, I mean exquisitely tasteful and yet walking the line between excess and excellence. The true meaning of Fabulous being awe inspiring, and absolutely requiring a personality, otherwise the overwhelming energy of the Fabulous will overpower you and leave you looking completely ridiculous.


To those who know how to wear it, I humbly give you the Captain's Hat


Jason Isaacs would be proud. It has a veritable waterfall of wild white feathers, cascading down the back, and framed by a super wide brim. It's over a 190 prims, and I did my best to back the alphas with a couple of solid blank white textures in order to reduce alpha flicker. This hat is actually ridiculously easy to tint! You can't see the crown even if you try, even if you camera inside the feathers it isn't easy to find. So when tinting the feathers or retexturing it, you only have to worry about the main prim of the curve of the hat. Cool, huh?


If you're wondering about the hair, I actually have a small confession to make. I made it. And it's made out of scunchy cunchy sculpties! I haven't put it out yet, because at the moment I'm just not sure if I should. I would only offer it in black and brunette, and it would very clearly be defined as a Captain Hook wig, and I guess I'd just like to hear a few folks tell me to put it out. Maybe I'll include it in the Pirate Pack I'm putting together ^.^

Phew!

Wow, have I been a busy little Siyu! After my initial offering, I've started a whole bunch of projects that are currently underway, and then I don't have anything to show for it!

I'll just say that there is definitely more pirate stuff on the way, in a BIG way, as well as a Hedgehog Musketeer v2 for those of you who have been missing it :) I've also been ironing the kinks out of sculpie masks, but it's slow going.

Carnivale went down today, for no good reason at all, so I need to take a moment to rant. After waiting patiently for a good 45 minutes for it to come back online, I tried to do a help request and... oh, silly naive me, they got rid of it. Hmm, help, additional help, nothing, nada... filed a support ticket with the support site, still nothing... visited the Linden Office and Linden Village, not a Linden in sight. And then, in an act of desperation, I just started randomly im'ing Lindens hoping to find at least one that was online, with absolutely no luck. Happily the whole thing ended well, because the ever resourceful Vanessa kept calling Linden Labs until she found the cleaning lady or something. Well anyway, she kicks major ass.

The customer support at Linden Labs is simply inexcusable at the moment, and hopefully the more we harass them, the more they'll be motivated to fix it.


I'd also like to put out there, that apparently sculpies are very vulnerable to theft when set to mod. People can apparently take the shapes and use them themselves. I'm very proud of my sculpted work, and naturally I want to protect them. BUT... I have decided to keep my items mod, all of them, even the single sculpted prim items that are yet to come. But this means, that if you see someone with sculpted shapes that seem very similar to mine, PLEASE report it, as my work is protected under the intellectual property copyrights that all folk are protected by on Second Life. I'd much rather dishonest people get caught, than honest people be denied a right I quite enjoy granting.

More Piratey Goodness

I thought to myself... what's something I've always wanted to make, but didnt want to deal with rigid prims and fitting it exactly to the avatar mesh? What would be the polar opposite to what I normally do, and yet still works with prims?

Footwear.


I bring you piratey goodness for 175L. Are these awesome or what?? I feel like clomping around and waving a cutlass in people's faces! YAHAR, matey, ye be enjoyin me wares lately, aye?

Arrrr >);)=

Compromise <3

I've feared them, I've loved them, I hated them... and now I've made peace with them :)

Sculpies and I... well, we sat down in Zbrush, and we worked things out. and I've gotten the hang of them now. I've agreed not to demean it for being so low rez, and it's agreed to help me out with some very tricky shapes. We've decided to make some wonderful hats together ;)




The long awaited superior hats... at least by me. They both are dream come trues for me on SL, and have been a long time coming. I am so very proud to offer to you what surely must be the best, most piratastic headwear on SL at this time, and timed very well thanks to Pirates of the Carribean: AWE, which was awesome ;)

The old designs will be retired and stuck up on the cheapie board for some obscenely low price, and these beautiful new sculpie hats will only be marginally more expensive than the originals. It'll be 75 for the tricorner, and 125 for the Cavalier, well worth it I feel :)

The Cavalier will also have a choice of three materials, velvet (shown), satin (like the tricorner), and leather ^.^

Much pirate love, and much peace with the sculpties.

Dissapointment >.<

I seem to be up and down more than a teeter totter in a hurricane. I tried exporting my fabulous masks, I made four and they were all beautiful, and it turns out that they had more than 10 times the amount of "vertices" than Second Life can support. So... sculpy masks might not be a possibility, unless I find a way to cut a single mask into 10 pieces ^^; (and I'm working on that). Going from 8000-10,000 points to 1024 points was like going back to vhs tapes on a black and white TV after having a high-def LCD flatscreen.

Ok I have to stop with the whole simile thing. But yes, Siyu has suffered a rather steep dissapointment, and the phantom of the opera mask might not be the full sculpy sexy dream I fantasized about (and... made... *cries*). I'll be trying to use the dinky, nasty, rough and pixelated shapes that Second Life allows, but not I'm not wary of Sculpies anymore.. I've lost a lot of respect for them. They're a whole lot of effort that they're not really worth yet.

Yes, Siyu shall be using them in the future, and expect that fabulous tricorner that I know you guys have been itching for :) But no, they won't be the amazing be-all-end-all of building. Yes, I'll be using them for what they probably were intended for, as a sort of custom lego maker and not what you make the legos into.

I leave you with a pretty:

Forgiveness for Sculpies

3D rendering has been redeemed... it has a holy savior, a beautiful tool straight from the hands of heaven itself... Zbrush.

I was working on this all night. It was once just a humble sphere... no tricks, no sourcing, I just sat down and made it. After tweaking and tweaking it went from a fat big face with a sloppy nose, to crazy huge pouty lips, then looking like a kind of odd native american woman, and then tweak tweak tweak... a smooth, white, beautiful face.

Actually what surprises me now is that it kind of looks like me if my nose was nicer and my lips were different O.o Lol, I guess ya build whatcha know!

Ok, a moment to talk about the beauty of Zbrush... I've had it for a couple of days now, and put in maybe a good two hours of play time, making random things like goblin heads, tweaking their male model head into a female model head, and making the head of a wasp, too. I've been itching to see if I could make a female face ever since I first started in it, and last night I set my mind to it. The wonderful thing that makes it different from Modo, Maya and Blender is that I actually feel like I've got this perfect, flawless piece of clay with fingers that only do exactly what I want them to do. All of their advertising is geared towards getting the artist of the physical world the tools to create in the virtual world, instead of making it almost impossible to pick it up without extensive courseware on how to use the darn thing.

I'm no longer afraid of sculpies. I may be wary of them..... but NOW I'm excited <3

Boneflower

I've been to Temenos Island. I've even bought one of Zoe Llewlyn's endlessly popular spotted Neko skins. But I never really fell in love with her as a skin maker until now.

Her skin series that isn't neko is called Boneflower. It seemed pretty humdrum to me at first, some interesting eyeshadows, doot do do, nothing that jumped out and said "you HAVE to buy me", and then I saw a certain fashcon notice announcing the opening of a new Boneflower series, "Whispers of Night". Hmm, goth skins, I'll check out the picture... and got my butt over there as fast as I could teleport. I saw yummies.


The eye liner is what got me, the exotic cheetah look, or the hint of the eye of ra, or maybe because if I wore the makeup I did on Second Life I'd need another room in my apartment for kohl and eyeliner. She offered up a couple more "natural" goth looks (yeah, "huh?") that have just the tail of the eyeliner or just the dark shading around the eyes, but since I was the one payin' for 'em, I got me my favorites...These are the twilight and gloom shadows, and the yummy yummy lip colors. My favorite is the one on the right, which is the "Lost Stalker" style. It's fantasy without crossing the line over into inappropriate for everyday wear, which is the line I like to walk ^.^

I buy skins for the makeup, but if you're interested in the bits, I'm going to say that it has a very lovely kitty, which is trimmed and comes only in black, but it looks actually very soft O.o Don't believe me? Try a demo, lol. The perfect word for the body shading is subtle. The skin comes in white, and whiter, and this is the white version. As quite the connesieur of pale skins, I can say that this skin has a nice "believable" pale without being completely blinding, and the shading gives some nice definition without being overly athletic or low resolution. The feet are a little blurry, but only compared to skins that pay them a lot of attention. The nails on both the hands and feet are a nice, natural clear polish, and the breasts have subtle highlights, rather than looking like they've been cut and pasted from some porn star's skin. There is something a little odd though, that the nipples are very light... I don't know about your nipples, but certainly the ones I've seen are darker than that in comparison to the skin... But hey, if you're wearing a shear shirt, you probably won't need pasties!

The skins are what got me in there, but Zoe's new clothing line of Broken is what made me need to go back and withdraw some cash from the bank.

Despite my lack of love for the overly goth, (aka, crosses and spikes), the detail and love that went into the brocade on that corset, and the fact that Zoe obviously knows that "corset" doesn't automatically equal "rack" made me buckle (sorry about the pun ;). This is the "Cross Corset" in "Purgatory", which I assume means black. It also comes with very subtle shading in greens, reds, purples and gold, but the dominating color in all of them is the black background. The quality of her clothing actually surprised me! It's not the most ridonculously clear, but the resolution is definitely better than most gothic clothing out there and the way the silk shines completely gets me. It's only 90L for each color! I'm also wearing the "Lucifer" set, which includes this wonderful trench coat in a bunch of different versions, a vest with prim laces, big chunky clunky boots, the pants with a clothing layer belt (doesn't look clothing layer does it? O.o) gloves, and a white undershirt. I'm only wearing the coat, pants and gloves, but believe me, I wasn't expecting it to be so worth the 800L it is to buy the whole set but it is.

Oh! And while you're browsing, don't miss the beautiful and much needed sheer shirts, in a whole bunch of different patterns. They are tres AFI, with long sleeves and a high collar, and they look good on both men and women. But since I have a thing in both IRL and SL about clothing that touches the neck, I didn't buy any myself, but the price is certainly not what stopped me, the sheer shirts are 90L each.

SLurl: "Temenos Island"

Whispers Of Night Skins in "Deathly", Gloom and Twilight shadows 700L per skin
Broken clothing: Lucifer set 800L, cross corset 90L
Worn with Symon hair by Deviant Kitties in black and white

Sculpies Shmulpies

The news about sculpted prims was huge for me. As soon as I saw the words "new" and "building" secondlife.com was loading and I was definitely focused on finding out what this new fangled thingamajiggy was. Finding out about new, high-tec sculpt mappy things and one prim mushrooms blew my mind, "OMG! Pillows!?"

My first thought was "oh god", and then it was "oh no". Because I just happen to be rather adept at a build set that's been around for a while, is very comfortable to me, and that I feel I've explored the potentials of. Yet if I don't jump on to this new technology, there will be people all around me making far superior things and then I won't sell anything, and I'll lose business, and lose money and then lose my apartment! EEEP. Some parts of my head of course, were retaining rationality and saying "hmm, I guess I'll have to learn new things in order to stay on top", and patiently started looking for affordable (or accessible) 3d rendering programs. Because I'm not just gonna open up photoshop and be able to make one of those newfangled rgb doobobs. I found a few programs, only two of which work, and only one of which has any sort of understandable documentation...

And I realized I'm such a hardcore noob. UV mapping? Baking? What are you baking, muffins? My 3d rendering program experience boils down (ha, I can use the kitchen words too) to Terragen, an old open shareware program that was used to create land and water for rendering, and then Second Life. It's very, very scary and uncomforting when you're trying to find a tutorial for a beginner's guide to the program, and you STILL don't understand a word they're saying. "Ok, camera, perspective, view from the right... ok, now why is it that when I make my sphere, it's only a couple of stretched lines? oh, ok, there we go, I forgot the z axis.... ok now what? Morph? Apply mesh? Quoi?"

I've managed to make a folded ball, and a twirly vortex of doom. I forgot how obsessed I am with instant gratification. Must... be... expert... now!! I think I'd be able to be more patient if I could actually find the beginner's guide to beginning.

Pimp My Mask!...er...

I was working on marketing myself today, sent out fashion show packages, a couple of review packages, and spreading the word about the Illusions group on Flickr. Admittedly there are only 4 people in it as I write this, but there SHALL BE MORE! For I scoured the metaverse and tracked down a few folks that used my stoof in their piccies, and begged em to put them up in mah group :) So far I'm the only business that has a stream like this, but it's really nifty! I'm pretty sure it'll become a trend... So I totally ripped off Linden Lifestyles and tucked a fan-based photostream into my blog... that's right, it's now YOUR pictures. So yes, I was pimpin' mahself out.

All of this busy bodying made me realize that there are some business owners with lovely products who just have no clue how to put their stuff out into the world. I might add my own perspectives into the marketing advice that's out there, make a notecard thingie or some such :)

I've hired the talented Zeal Zenith who will be providing some animations for some top secret Siyu projects! Ok...maybe not soooo secret... Let's just say one of them is victorian, and Caledon lovers will just adore them, and the other is an alternative to the core of my store that's been a long time coming...