Winter Tree Textures

Yet another in my line of Tree Textures. These are bare trees with a light load of snow on the branches. All crisp and clean at either 1024x1024 or 512x1024 px each.Get them at the Xstreet listing, or the Sculpts Only Mall

Creepy Tree Textures

Another in my line of textures especially suited to my One Prim Plant sculptie shapeThese are very clean 1024 sized textures specially made to look creepy but real.

Get em at the Sculpts Only Mall - click here

Better Bullets

Another in my line of Full Permission BUILDERS PACKS. Great looking Bullets with baked textures.These bullets are carefully crafted to meet my exacting standards. With full perm textures baked on (lighting, shine, and shadowing) these bullets look great and are bound to attract the eye. Use them for bullet belts, weapons, decoration and much more.

See them at the Sculpts Only Mall - click here

Copper Bottoms

Ok ok, I know this is a weird one ...but this is my latest Full Perm sculptie pack...Now you wouldn't think they would be useful for anyone would you? But surprised me... I sold 2 packs in the first 8 hours! Maybe they'll use the frypan as a weapon?

Why even make these? They are kitchen props in another upcoming Avatar Repertory Theater production - our Xmas show - 3 short plays... details coming soon.

See this pack and its contents at Sculpts Only Mall - click here for SLurl

Beautiful Sculptie Roses

New Releases into the Custom Love store last week... carefully crafted sculptie Roses.

Designed to be gifted as singles (either by themselves or in a vase), we also have them in half dozen packs at a discounted price. Available in Apricot, White, Black, and of course Red.

Click here for SLurl to CUSTOM LOVE - Gifts for Lovers

Snake Charmers Necklaces

New releases into my PrimEvil store yesterday... the Snake Charmers Necklaces and Armbands for Men and Women.

Available in Gold and Silver baked textures these beautiful items are only 3 prims each! One for the sculptie snake, one for each of the eyes.

Click here for SLurl to PrimEvil @ GARDEN WORLD

Sculpties and LOD

So many people have asked me about sculptie tricks i have decided to start revealing some...first up Sculpties and LOD!

LOD = Level Of Detail
The Lindens in their infinite wisdom decided to treat sculpties with the same ideals as they do textures... that is to reduce the level of detail on a sculptie with distance. The further you are from a sculptie - the less detail it will have. They do this by reducing the detail in the sculpties mesh. It is calculated by how much area the sculptie takes up on your screen. So a big sculptie will still look ok from a long distance, a small sculptie may look bad from a close distance.
There are two basic ways to counter this issue - people generally call the problem fixes Sculptie LOD or Nano Sculpties. And another that is a fix for your personal viewer but doesn't help others when viewing the same sculpties.

Personal fix: Find the advanced menu in your SL viewer - if it doesn't show at the top of your screen beside the Help menu...press Ctrl + Alt + D simultaneously on your keyboard to activate it. Scroll down the Advanced menu to "Debug settings", enter "renderVolumeLODFactor" and change the value to "4" then close that popup. It may reset each time you relog :/

Sculptie Fix No 1 (for builders): Tricky to do depending on the sculptie shape... but is basically doubling the mesh points at the important places. Move your mesh points/vertices or segment lines so they almost overlap. This can counter the removal of detail by the SL viewer software by leaving mesh points in place when a line of them is removed. Has a bad side effect tho'... texture mapping is very hard. This is not my favourite method but can be useful in some cases.

Sculptie Fix No 2 (RECOMMENDED for builders): This is by far the simplest method - it works by fooling the SL software into thinking the sculptie is larger on screen than it appears visually. Has the side effect of producing a larger invisible bounding/collision box - so it's best to set such sculpties to phantom. Take your sculptie map/texture into Photoshop ... go to Image menu/Adjustments/Levels and adjust its Levels as per pic below ( is almost the same dialog in GIMP)

Play around with the slider settings to achieve a result that best suits you - the settings above are my favourite. Hit OK to close the dialog..and your sculptie rainbow will appear to dim a little. Import into Second Life to see the results. It will help the sculptie keep its detail at a longer distance - but please bear in mind it is not a perfect fix.

False accusations suck

A recent SL blog post accusing me of stealing meshes from 3d sites has made me think how i have badly neglected my blog and how i can use it for good.

I can post how i work, and progress shots from recent works to showcase my skills and hopefully provide helpful hints for people who are interested.

So.... below are some screenshots from a statue project i am working on currently. Sadly the statue that the accusing blog post from Vryl Valkrie refers to is on another computer that lies in pieces atm - but i can show you my latest project :)

A Toltec warrior statue (i love statues) modelled using techniques i learned from this tutorial many many moons ago.

First i find suitable front and profile piccies from good ol Google image search, like these (slightly edited for alignment and size)...

The trick is in finding good side and front profiles , then i add them onto planes at right angles in 3dsmax for using as reference to build a basic mesh with.

Then i go about making a basic mesh... by creating a single Plane object, converting it to a editable Poly, and then laboriously copying, positioning, and linking multiple Plane objects to form a basic half face as below...

It takes a bit of time and effort to create a suitable starting mesh like this...for instance this one took me about 6 hrs, however 3dsmax has some great time saving aspects...you may be wondering why only half a face... well Max has a function called "Symmetry" which allows a mesh like this to be easily reflected thusly...

Then I apply another built in function called "TurboSmooth" which has the effect of adding heaps of vertices/lines and smoothing all the hard lines out. You can see the added Vertices and Edges the function creates...

Then its just a matter of Rendering with suitable lighting and shadow settings to get a good look at how everything is falling together so far.As you can see it is far from perfect...the mouth is a little small..some of the crisper detail around the eyes is not quite so good... and of course its lacking a suitable texture (and the rest of the body and head). I will tweak and move and add detail and Vertices/Edges where necessary til it meets my standards. So far its about 6 hrs work and has a long way to go. Previous statues have sometimes taken a couple of weeks off and on - i get distracted easily :P

After its finished i will use similar methods to make a lower resolution Sculptie version for importing into SL. However I will take a 'baked' texture from this version because of its superior detailing/shadows/texturing. This way i get the best of both worlds..a high resolution mesh i can sell on 3d model sites , potentially a suitable mesh for the future in Second Life..and a sculptie version i can start selling in SL straight away.

Here's a quick perspective rendering with some simple texturing noise on the bump map... normally i would create a special bump map in Photoshop and use that instead for getting as close as possible to the original statues texture.

After a lot of work and tweaking.. hopefully i can get a statue that closely reproduces the originals. I wouldn't want to offend a culture with a crass imitation... so i put a lot of effort and time into getting what i think is a pretty good reproduction for people to display with pride. As you can see below it will take some considerable time to finish, however i love what i do and others seem to appreciate the extra effort i put... even if they have no idea of the actual process.

A piccie of the original statues for ya :)