Get your Party Hat!

To celebrate the 4th of July, Cloud Party Inc. is giving away Uncle Sam hats with sparklers at a booth on Beginner Zone island:

You cannot rezz the hat onto the ground, but there is a way to make a copy of it and retexture it.  Go to the 4th of July palette where the male and female hats are located.  Select the one you want to make a copy of, and use the duplicate command to do that.  You will be able to edit the duplicate hat.

You will need, not only a texture to retexture the hat, but also a transparent texture to replace the sparkles as well.  If you don't, then you'll have a new hat but also sparkles at your feet :-)

Happy fourth of July to all you Americans, including the staff at Cloud Party Inc!  Thanks for the cool gift.

Scale Yourself!

One of the many console commands you can type at the chat window prompt is a very cool command called scaleMe.  This is quite unlike anything you can get in Second Life.  It allows you to rescale the size of your avatar from very small (fairy size) to very large (giant sized).  Everything is kept to scale, even your clothing, as you resize. The syntax is:

/scaleMe number, where number can range from 0.5 to 1.5; the bigger the number, the bigger you are

/scaleMe 1 returns you to your regular size.  I'm tall in real life, so I have an avatar that is taller than normal, so I usually set myself up as /scaleMe 1.1 as I run around the grid:

(that's me on the right, scaled at 1.1)

Here are some pictures of the various sizes and how they compare to each other:

(Frtiz is 1.0, the woman between us is 0.5, and I am 1.5)

Achievement Unlocked: UV Mapping

I was able to use Lilli`s video instructions to create a UV mapping for my latest long dress design, it was easier than I thought it would be!  Now that I have the UV mapping included in the mesh for the dress, I can have more complicated texture patterns appear properly, for example this one:

Now instead of just any which way, the textures map properly across the main part of the dress, with the seam under the left arm.  The sleeves worked out okay too.  I`m so happy :-)

The Latest from the Dressmaker`s Shop

I spent a good chunk of today (July 2nd) working on this long, modest, but still sexy dress:

Because the long skirt is weighted the same as the underlying leg, the skirt moves with the leg in a natural fashion:

Attack of the Bouncing Lovestruck Aliens

I will tell you one thing about the Beginner Zone at Cloud Party: it is never boring.  Somebody is always putting together new creations, often highly entertaining ones.

Case in point: this evening Lilli Thompson created these bouncing purple aliens, who would randomly follow people around until they caught up with them, and then sit by their side, adoringly spitting out a cloud of pink hearts.  Lovestruck aliens!

Like I said earlier, it never gets boring.

How to Create UV Maps for Clothesmaking

Lilli Thompson has created a new video tutorial on how to create UV maps for mesh clothing using Maya and PhotoShop.  For a working example she used the dress I had created and shown you earlier.



While this tutorial is not for the beginner it does give an excellent overview of the second half of the process of creating a complex mesh item: indicating how and where the texture is applied to make it look more realistic.  (The first half of the job is, of course, creating the shape of the mesh item itself.)

Island Hopping

There has been an explosion in the number of private islands since rentals were launched on Saturday, so I decided to do some island-hopping and take some pictures.  Here are shots of the earliest work done in many locations I visited.

First up is utopia, the island rented by Claudia222:

Next is the sinister environment of New Trouserland, with spiderlike creatures skittering here and there:

Drift Miles and Alexa Despres have been hard at work setting up Tribe Island Estates:

Moya:

Meilo:

Theox:

Artee's Cloud by Artistide Despres:

Botgirl's Island by Botgirl Questi:

Unique Megastore has put up an interesting marker, with some intricate 3-D work atop it: