Congratulations Vi and Marc!

Some of you may remember "Vi Paravane", intrepid steampunk girl and stalwart gun bunny. She isn't on Second Life much these days, thanks to a slower computer and more happily, a very busy Real Life.

How busy? Well, she still blogs her life in comic strip form over on www.bitstrips.com, so I shall let her tell you :)

Bird of Prey

Done and done! Will be on the market as soon as Miss Munro comes back from holiday.

Watch more videos of Second Life

Falling in love again

We went to the shelter and a border collie bounced into our lives.

I'll never forget Puppy, but I've made room in my heart for Mopsy. And I think she needs an awful lot of room.

Jet Pack Dreams for Vi

My friend Vi Paravane kindly commented on my yesterday's post:

How I wish I could ride one of those in SL. Alas, even if LL could do it, my poor old machine would probably choke on it.

But the truth is, amazing things are possible with current game technology. So for Vi, and for anyone else who loves flying lizards, may I present a browser based game, with amazing 3D animation. And, oh by the way, it is absolutely and utterly free. And absurdly beautiful:

JETPACK BRONTOSAURUS!!!!
(well, he's an Aptosaurus. But his name is Brontosaurus, you see. It's in the introduction)






Cute, wonderfully animated, and lots of places to explore with his magical Jet Pack. And, not to hammer at the point too much, all done with fairly low polygon models and heavy use of simple procedural textures.

But enough negativity! Go have fun!

http://blurst.com/jetpack-brontosaurus/play

Edit: if you don't have it, you will need to download the free Unity plug in for this game.

http://unity3d.com/unity-web-player-2.x.html

Fiddling about with 3D

Not to teaze, but I will be making an announcement about a collaboration with Miss Ilsa Munro fair soon. Hint: it makes good use of her amazing skills with fun flying flivvers and my obsession with cute animals. Well, perhaps not so much cute as dignified in this case, but that might be Miss Munro's influence.

But we want to check it all out before releasing it, so not just yet, sorry!

I'm also finishing up my first year of design in RL. I've learnt an awful lot, and I have to admit there are more than a few days in which I really, truly, painfully wish that I could do some basic things in SecondLife such as import meshes (rather than just the base sphere sculpts are), and create and animate skeletons for them. Not to whimper too much, but the technology for bumpmap importation (not just the stock Linden ones in the edit window) has been around for quite a while--and yet even something that simple has yet to happen.

Le sigh.

So, in the meantime, I fiddle about with projects outside of SL, sometimes for class, sometimes to amuse myself. The following is an example of my workflow for a somewhat science fictional dragon I imagined-- it has no legs, being primarily a flying creature, with hydrogen filled bladders that keep it aloft (akin to a fishes' swim bladder).

Here's my basic "concept art", which mostly demonstrates my inability to draw. But when I squint, I at least could see what I had in mind:



Next I blocked it out in Maya, fiddled a bit, and came up with this:



Next, I added the wing membranes, textured in Zbrush and Photoshop and added a basic bumpmap (greyscale leather from a Maya procedural texture):





Note that this one is about the polygon count of four sculpts in Secondlife. Or (please reference earlier whimpering), we could have shapes like this if they'd just set up mesh importation.

Finally, because this was really just to amuse myself with, I sent the silly thing to Zbrush, bumped the polygon count up to erm...1.4 million, and had fun with all those lovely different brushes that aren't that useful at lower resolutions like the clay and rake brushes. Then a few different render passes and off to Photoshop for compositing:

And here he is, Stormy the Dragon--



I like to think I managed a touch of dignity in his eyes...

ANZAC Day

May the tired old heroes from a forgotten war have the peace they were not granted in life.

Holidaze...

I apologize for the lack of updates on this silly blog, although rest be assured, I have been fair busy with the Aviara animals and the upcoming flying Eagle (with the talented Miss Ilsa Munro).

Lazy though I may be, I am nonetheless taking a bit of a holiday until the 22nd. I'll be popping online today, albeit briefly, to take care of final housekeeping. Then it is off to pack, mostly planning on driving aimlessly about with our RL bicycles in tow. It's getting warm enough to allow for that sort of thing, so I ought take advantage of the moment between "too hot" and "too cold", and enjoy the "just right".

Yours etc,

Goldilocks