Grid Expectations

I am still in fantasy dress-up mode. ^^

This faun (or satyr if you’re an ancient Greek :p ) outfit is from a collection called Titania’s Court by Riann Maltese, which you can find right at the entrance to Fairy’s Grove Creations.

I’ve been wanting one of these faun outfits ever since I first spotted the vendor for it back in October, but as always I was gripped by indecision as I contemplated the six colors that are available. I ultimately chose the white one because I think it makes for a nice contrast with my darker human skintone. The faun avs come in six colors, ranging from black to white, with autumnal-looking reds, browns, and yellows in between.

This truly is a beautifully made ensemble. For starters, the texturing work on every single piece in this set is fantastic, from the horns to the hooves.

I was also really pleased with how the legs look. The primary leg prim is a sculpty while the tufts of fur that appear around the hooves and at the leg joints are mostly torii. The texture covering the lower torso and thighs is on the underpants layer and comes in two versions, one of which does not cover the crotch (for all you kinky fauns out there, I guess).

For your head, you get a pair of sculpted horns and sculpted ears, and a prim tail for your tush. The ears and the tail are scripted to twitch and move, much like how you’d see a neko ear attachment move.

02/25/2008 Important addendum!!:  There are two versions of each color at the vendor, one for males and one for females.  Whenever you click on a color button, a preview of the av will show in the display, so that’s one way you can tell whether you are viewing the male or female version.  You can toggle between the genders by using the male/female symbols on the left side of the vendor. 

More on what I’m wearing following the jump…

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I’d been meaning to post this for a while but I’ve had a full plate lately and I’ve been a cranky-pants too :p but I’m over it now so back to blogging!

I had the good fortune of meeting Codie (a.k.a. CodeBastard Redgrave) early on in my SL existence.  I could go on about how impressive her SL photography and art is, her coding skillz and just overall brainy-ness (is that even a word lol), her machinimacam and vids, the fact that she’s a content creator who can make avatar appearance things like eyes and skins and stuffs, and the fact that she was Avastar of 2007… but you know what?  All of that pales in comparison to the gargantuan generosity, kindness, and warm-heartedness she exudes.  She is hands-down one of the nicest and friendliest people you will EVER meet in SL.  Ever.

Codie began an art/photgraphy project called Boudoir Rouge, and you can view the fruits of her labor thus far on her flickr set, which I’m extremely honored to be a part of.  The set was meant to be a celebration of women in Second Life; in her own words, it is “an ode to all the beautiful, brilliant, sexy, geeky ladies of the metaverse. Pure avatar shots, in the most playful pinup style. Welcome to the Boudoir Rouge.”

It looks, however, that it may end up being much more than that.  According to her blog, she’s looking into selling the series with the intention of donating most of the proceeds to charity for AIDS research and cancer research.  It sounds like this is still very much in the early planning stages, though, so if you’ve any ideas on how to get this fundraiser project off the ground or know of some resources that can be useful in this undertaking, please don’t hesitate to speak up. 

Okay, I know I *just* blogged about Eloh Eliot the other day, but it can’t be helped; everything she does is noteworthy, and her latest offering is no exception.

She has just released her latest skin in the “f” line. And you know that .psd file she so generously offered just days ago? That was for the Lf0 skin. Get ready to acquaint yourself with the Cf0 skin:

Eloh has listed some minor differences between the Lf0 and Cf0 skins:

Lighter, more pinkish skintone
Eyelid creases are lighter and closer to the eyelid edge
Eyebrows are thicker in area, but less dense
Lips are slighty less pouty

The reason why I’m so excited about this is because I think it’s finally dawned on me just how much can be done with the files she’s sharing with us. Only our imaginations limit us. A new flickr group was created just for showcasing the different modifications people have made to Eloh’s skins, and the results are fun to browse.

My hands-down favorite skin mod so far is the male skin variation posted by Noam Sprocket:

Here are a few more images from the group:

Join in on the modding, it’s fun! Head on down to Suffugium to grab a copy of Eloh’s latest skin and show some appreciation with your lindens, and then download the skin file and crack open Photoshop.

I found out from Lex a few days ago that my object matte photo “me and ary” got a little mention in Torley Linden’s “Torley’s guide to high quality photography!”

Here’s the pic:

Yeah, it looks funny… but that is how the image was captured in SL, no post-editing work was done on it. To get this look, you must use the Snapshot function (the snapshot button at the bottom of the client or Ctrl + Shift + S) so that you can view the snapshot dialogue, so soz but “snapshot to disk” won’t work. (Yeah, no sneaking in any silent pics, lol.) You must also select the “Save snapshot to hard drive” option in order to activate the dropdown menu in the Capture field (which is located at the middle of the snapshot dialogue). The dropdown will show “Depth” and “Object Mattes”.

Here’s an example of a shot taken using the depth option:

Another mention I got was on the Brutal Honesty blog. One of the contributors to that blog, Tina Travanti, recently checked out my store Mela’s. In spite of some trouble with a poster I’d priced incorrectly, she had some very nice things to say about my store, for which I’m *really* grateful:

I love my new shape and even with the mix-up I was transformed in just a few minutes and very happy with my purchase. Mela the Slider Surgeon has a great product and has put a lot of time and thought into what she’s doing. You have to check out her store. I fully enjoyed myself and I will be sending people there for some slider work.

I do try to put a bit of thought into my store and what I make, so it’s super nice when someone says something positive about it. Thank you so much for the encouraging words, Tina!

Although the filters in the Filtering Second Life group are introduced on a weekly basis, my assignment #4 and #5 posts are back-to-back because I’d taken my sweet time getting around to doing the fourth one.

Okay, so I have a favorite method for vignetting; I think anyone who plays with image-manipulation has their various favorite methods, right? (FYI, it’s hand-painting on a desaturated layer with a soft brush, merging it with a filled layer, and setting it to Overlay.) Still, it’s nice to change things up, which is what I got to do with the latest featured filter. This week’s filter, which has been bestowed the awesome-sounding name Melancholytron, comes from Flaming Pear. It’s a sweet filter loaded with tons of options that makes achieving all sorts of vignettes a real cinch; play with the sliders a bit and voila! Talk about EASY.

** Please note, this isn’t a free filter; you can download a 30-day demo but if you want to keep it beyond that, you’ll have to spring $20 USD. **

Puma paid an impromptu visit a few days ago while I’d been setting up for some pics with my new green muslin background, and we ended up shooting some pics of her wearing Grace Winnfield’s black Gothica wedding gown. I chose to use Melancholytron on one of the shots I took:

This is one of those pics that looks better when viewed it in it’s original size.

The Filtering Second Life group was kept a little more busy than usual this week with two filters to play with.

The “official” filter assignment is from Auto FX and it’s called Dreamy Photo, and is available for both Windows and Mac users. This particular filter, although free, requires a quick and painless registration process before you are able to use it; simply fill out the online form and a serial number is e-mailed to you.

For this filter, I chose a sunset shot I’d taken in my home sim, Meddledown. (Note: I didn’t just use the filter on this image. I also added a desaturated copy of the original image and gave it a red-orange hue and painted over it with a soft large brush to add a more vivid, fiery feel to the sunset.)

original shot

retouched work

Our bonus assignment came from Gita Rau, who introduced the Luce filter from Antonino Perricone. This is a really cool filter that will cause soft rays of light to emanate from the subject. For this image, I chose to treat the filter as an overlay layer to make the lines a little more subtle.

original shot

retouched work

I’m really liking the luce filter, going to have to play with it some more in the future.

The latest filter to be featured in the Filtering Second Life group was an interesting one this week. It’s from Mehdi and it’s called Projection. (Sorry, Mac users — this is for PC users only. Apparently filters that work for both PC and Mac are extremely rare.)

I decided to use a picture of Gallia Plubeau modeling a body shape for Gogo’s store, Demoiselles, located in the new LicoLico sim.

original shot

retouched work

In addition to the filter, I added a tri-color gradient to make the largest image of Gallia (on the right side of the pic) stand out more, and just a tiny bit of a gaussian blur which was screened at a lesser opacity.

Looking forward to next week’s assignment

The filter being featured in the Filtering Second Life group at flickr is ColourWorks from Cybia. The filter has twenty different effects; the one I chose for my shot is the converse effect.

original shot

retouched work

I didn’t do a whole lot to this image other than use the sliders that came with the filter — I adjusted threshhold and cropped a little bit. Looking forward to next week’s assignment

The New World Notes (NWN) blog announced it’s Uncanny Valley Expo contest back in July, and the directive was simple: “Send me images and video of realistic avatars who engage on a human level.”

So yours truly took a pic and sent in her avi’s mug. Although entries are no longer being accepted (the deadline was August 12th, soz), the contest hasn’t quite started yet. Wagner James Au is slowly sharing the entries, releasing one new image per day, and you can view them here. At some point in the future ten finalists will be selected, and readers will be asked to vote for the image and video that they feel accomplishes that human engagement.

What is this “uncanny valley” biz, you ask? I followed a Wikipedia link to learn more, too, which may be found here. If you’re too lazy to go to that URL right now, I’ll do my best to sum it up for you: It’s basically about the way we react to robots and other non-human entities. Someone made note of how human response to these entities becomes more favorable as the entity takes on a more realistic human appearance, but that response will turn negative if the realism becomes… well, creepy. It’s an interesting read, I’d recommend looking at that wiki entry.

Anyways, why am I bringing this up? It’s because my entry was chosen for the NWN 9/7 feature :p…

And speaking of SL blogs, Vivienne and I recently submitted a Reader Style photo for Second Style Fashionista (SSF). ^_^

A little while ago, we discovered that we’d purchased Soviet military coats from D3volution separately (I have the Spetznaz and she has the Army one), and Vivi came up with the cool idea of visiting the Moscow sim while decked out in our coats. I really liked how our outfits looked, so I told her I wanted to take a shot of us and submit it for Reader Style. (Clicking on that link will give you the shop details for the clothing articles we used.)

Turns out we’re not the only ones who liked out outfits :p Grazia Horwitz, who blogs regularly at SSF, decided to feature our entry.

Vivienne seems to have a knack for putting together some pretty awesome outfits; she’s won countless SL costume contests (and no, she doesn’t TP her entire friends list every time she’s in one of these, she actually wins on her own merit). When I realized she still did not have an account at Snapzilla, I told her she should get one and submit her stuff to the Reader Style section. You can now see her outfits for yourself at Vivi’s Snapzilla.

And speaking of SSF, there is a Fashion Challenge vote being held right now! The theme of it is supposed to be cultural diversity in SL, and all of the pictures look fab. Last time I checked, Georgette Whitfield’s photo was in the lead. Woo, go Georgette!

Ryker Beck recently sent me an invitation to join a new Flickr group called Photoshop Me: Filtering Second Life.

The basic premise of the group is simple: Once a week, a new filter is introduced to the group which everyone is subsequently invited to download. The filter is then employed in one of their works, the results of which are posted in the group to be shared with everyone.

This week’s filter is called Bad Dream and comes from Xero Graphics. I decided to use the filter on one of my older images, here are the before and after shots:

original shot

retouched work

In addition to running the filter, I also made adjustments to saturation, threshhold, etc., and used a little bit of gaussian blur on a layer that was then screened. Cropping the image also made the Godzilla-ish monster dominate more of the space, making him seem even larger. I’m kind of happy with how the pic turned out. ^_^

Also posted this in my deviantART gallery.