I am forever inspired by the people around me. It’s pretty hard not to feel inspired when you teleport into a haunted forest, tiptoe along a path of crunching leaves and stumble on a clearing that looks like this. I would recommend bringing your wellies, a flashlight and someone who doesn’t mind if you shriek a bit and grab their arm.
Bentham Forest is owned by Lauren Bentham. Aren’t we lucky to be allowed access?
I have had the building bug in a big way lately! I’ve got a lot on the roster for you guys but thought this might be a good time to stop, breathe and let you know what’s here so far:
First, the Songwriter Set. My real life home has a guitar case that I am constantly tripping over, and my SL home felt incomplete without one! It comes with an empty cup of coffee and a notebook that can be clicked to toggle between blank pages or a set of chords and lyrics for the classic Stick McGhee song, “Wine Spo-dee-o-dee.” It was made popular by Jerry Lee Lewis, but my favorite version is from Champion Jack Dupree, in case you were curious. (Can’t find a link for his version, sorry. Try this one, instead. It’s awesome!)
Up next, pretties for your kitchens! The Plank You Very Much table is named for the sculpted, reclaimed barn planks that make up the work surface. It’s mod/copy and tintable, too, so you can make it match you decor without issue. It’s quite pretty in white and wood!
The matching Kitchen Chat chairs are also mod/copy, so buy just one and rez yourself a table full. They’re also tintable, and they each have four animations in them that are specially made for sitting and chatting across a table.
If you need a centerpiece, I’ve got you covered! I’m really into the chic rustic look right now and am super excited to share these Vintage Apothecary and Medicine Jars with you. I think they’d look pretty good next to those poison bottles I released a couple weeks ago!
Whew! All of these are out at Grindstone! In the next week, I expect to release some more things to go along with this set, including some cabinets, a sideboard and a great old lamp for over the table. Stay tuned, and as always, thanks so much for supporting me. It makes my day when something I created brings a smile to your face.
I made this tutorial a while ago but thought I should share it here. Sculpty Paint is a very cool program by Cel Edman that is specifically made for sculpting things for Second Life. In my experience, it’s absolutely the simplest program for making very basic sculpts. He seems to be constantly adding features to it – the newest version even lets you add some simple lighting effects and bake those shadows into your textures.
This is a very, very basic tutorial aimed at total beginners. I’ll show you how to make a rock. Yeppers, just a rock, but given how many friends I know that BOUGHT rocks last year, it seems as good a place as any to begin. I would also highly recommend checking with New Citizens, Inc., who teach (among many other things) at least two free levels of classes on Sculpty Paint. Now, on to the rocks!
Have you ever noticed that sometimes while you’re building things, the prims seem to bounce? I’m not talking about physics, or that lovely little checkbox in the Emerald preference settings that enables the almighty jiggling boobs – I mean that kind of constant, erratic shaking that seems to torment prims? You’ll notice it the most when you work high in the sky. I tend to keep my building platform (and the mess that lives on it) thousands of meters in the air. Tonight, I was working on some very tiny prims and they just would NOT hold still. I off-handedly whined about it to my very smart friend Eddie Optera, who works in 3D and visual effects for a real life living, and he had this very informative and interesting answer for me:
It’s most likely a floating point rounding error – large magnitude numbers have less decimal precision, ie., the farther you are from the origin the less control you have over granular movement. You see, the center of a prim moves with the prim, but the prim is located relative to the origin of the world. It has a center, but that center is at (x,y,z) relative to the worldspace origin. Way up in the sky, you’re far away from that origin. Conceivably, if you found the center of the world at sea level, it wouldn’t bounce at all.
It’s a super-common problem. Every piece of software in the world suffers from it to some degree. Visual effects people will talk about scenes with continually moving objects, like a jet plane or a car, that they had to write code that would update the position of all of the items in the world on each frame so that they still had granular control of the location of the hero object at the end of the sequence…(on each frame or each shot, depending.)
In Maya, for instance, at the origin you can move things at tiny fractions of a millimeter. But a few kilometers out, they’ll move a foot at a time. Which is perfectly fine if you’re just sitting a building somewhere off in the distance. But if you’re trying to animate a character it blows.
So there you have it. I like to think of it as the wholly untrue “virtual gravity gets stronger the higher you fly,” but the short answer is, “Move your workspace closer to ground level.” Thanks, Eddie!
I’ll confess: I’m a little bit madly in love with Tom Waits. I’ve been listening to a lot of his music lately. I find the pace is good for jogging, actually, and his warped sense of humor always comes through right when I am heaving and about to give up. I have been learning to play his song, “Little Drop of Poison” on the guitar, and believe it or not, I was halfway through making these little tiny eyedropper bottles before I even realized where the inspiration had come from.
I’m slowly building up a wall of fun things that are mod/copy and cost L$75. This is one of the things you’ll find on it. I’ve put up a couple others, including a little caged heart and a vase full of lily of the valley, my favorite flower. The poison set comes with three small bottles that you can rez or wear and a hollowed out book display case.
And now, we must dance:
If you haven’t been to Grindstone lately, you might want to pop in and check out my new Wave Sofa and Loveseat! And, lo, a small table that looks way more primmy than it actually is! (I love sculpties.)
Like most of my furniture, they contain lots of animations and colors. And for all you mad tinkerers out there, you’ll be glad to know that not only are they modifiable, they’re actually set up so you can easily add your own animations (even couples animations.)
And while I’ve usually only offered furniture as mod/copy, I’ve gotten tons of requests for transferable furniture lately so I’m giving it a try. You can pick these up as either mod/copy/no trans or mod/no copy/trans.
Wave Sofa Poster
Wave Love Seat
Hope to see you at Grindstone soon! Remember, you can click the sign at the landing point to subscribe to the update group in-world. [SLURL]
Believe it or not, I actually made this blog to talk about pixels, so hey, let’s do that, shall we?
Some of you remember I used to have a store called Plenty For Everyone, but I closed it some time ago. At the time, I had just moved to the UK and was doing full-time freelance work building SIMs for schools in England (one of them even got a little shout out on the BBC, ha!) and just couldn’t devote the time to my personal projects that I felt they deserve. I’m kind of a perfectionist sometimes and it really bothers me to think about selling things that aren’t made to the very best of my ability. It bothers me even more to offer things that don’t offer a good value to a shopper. I always want my furniture to do MORE and offer MORE choices, even when it means more work for me.
I have a new store now, called Grindstone. It’s in the sky over beautiful Ursa Major, and you can get to it via this SLURL. I have to confess, I’ve just moved it into the sky and it’s a bit of a mess still! Watch your step!
This bed is my newest release. I used to sell it at PFE but pulled it from my stock when I learned that the builder’s pack of animations I’d bought ages ago probably contained some stolen content. I don’t want to be that person! Full perm animations were harder to find back then, and even now they’re really expensive (about L$1000 each for a single animation) so it’s taken me a while to save up and buy some new ones from reputable animators…. but that’s exactly what I’ve done, and so the bed got a facelift.
I completely gutted the bed and gave it all new animations from VMotional, along with an update to the MLP2 scripts that power it. There are nine animated couple cuddles, and 12 sleeping animations. I have to tell you – the sleeping animations are SO cute. I bought them from Sin Toshi before I even knew what I’d do with them. When you hop on the poseball, your avatar falls asleep (and even closes their eyes without making the Elvis face!) and then rolls over every 30 seconds or so to a new position. I’ve been in SL for close to five years now and they’re the cutest ones I’ve seen. You will love them! I also replaced the headboard with something cuter and added a tintable white texture to the blankets and pillows, all of which contain 25 different textures that change individually on click.
I’ve been thinking about re-doing my older furniture with MLP2 scripts. The reason I really like them is that they’re infinitely customizable and expandable. I know I really like to mod the furniture I buy from other people, and I like to pass that ability on to people who shop with me. You can add your own animations to it, set up sequences of animations (such as rolling over in your sleep!) and even add props that rez with different poses. Some animation creators, like Sin Toshi, even make drop-in packs for the MLP2, which you just open and add to the root prim and instantly get a shiny new button containing all your new poses.
I will probably make a series of tutorials here on how to use the MLP2. I just have to think a bit about what they should contain and if I want them to be videos. It’s absolutely one of the best tools in SL, and it’s free.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the bed! More new releases coming very soon, including a bookshelf, a new sofa set and some really crazy lamps with octopus tentacles oozing out of them. (No, really!) Hope to see you at Grindstone!
PS – If you already own the original bed, just drop me a notecard with your name on it and I’ll shoot you the update.
Have you guys been to a sim called Life Is Good? They have up all kinds of beautiful winter landscaping right now. It’s lovely.
Keiko Morigi released some new skins the other day at her store, &bean. I can’t get over how beautiful they are. It’s been such a long time since I found a skin I love so much. I especially love the lips on this one. Overall, these are such a great balance between being pretty without looking like a covermodel, and being youthful without looking like a young child. I just adore them.
Eta: It’s now June. Keiko has released a new line of skins since my original post, which are very lovely, but I have to tell you that I still like these most of all and haven’t taken mine off in six months. I’m sold!
