Mycenaean pottery gone naughty

Gotta love that bugged world... My pottery turned "Adult" on the Marketplace. Must be all those tentacles.

I've changed the setting back to "General", but the marketplace is a bit like a game of whack-a-mole at the best of time, so I'm not sure if it'll stick!

Supposedly, the bug has now been fixed. O-kay. I'll check again in a few days.

Faun

Faun legs: Caverna Obscura - Faun Legs Dark Tones
Antlers: Illusions - Rusa Antlers
Skin: Bite&Claw - Skins Aria - Reindeer (Blk) Tone 3 (gacha)
Tattoo: By Snow - Reindeer spots
Eyes: By Snow - Satyr Eye Mesh Gold
Deer Tail: Bite&Claw - Deer Tail - Brown (gacha)
Hair: Exile - Bad reputation
Mesh panties: Bite&Claw - Reindeer Top & Panties - Plain (gacha)
Top/Skirt: Cellar Door - Fatima

I love the hooves (rigged mesh) and the antlers (also mesh, with about 4000 colour options... okay maybe not that many, but definitely enough to keep me happy). I only wish the faun legs came with a tattoo version to cover the upper-legs area.

By Snow is, as always, great value for money. The tattoo is free, and the mesh eyes are 15L$ or so.
Exile is my new go-to hairmaker.

The Deer Tail by B&C came with Faun legs too -- good looking ones, I may add. They're made of sculpties, however, which I tend to avoid whenever possible. The skin is very cute.

The Cellar Door outfit comes with sculpty horns and mesh bracelets. I'm not wearing the bracelets because although they look good up-close, they lose their shape too quickly for my taste. I also took a risk with Cellar Door: their demos are untextured. I'm not happy with that. The texture can make or break a good mesh. How hard is it to slap the word "demo" on the texture, and include it as part of the demo? Arhumpf. Anyway, I quite like the Fatima outfit for my faun. I'm wearing it with mesh panties because the alpha doesn't cover my bits, and I didn't feel like creating an alpha for it. But I think that's a feature, not a bug :-p .

Learning from my mistakes

I'm just going to copy a post I made in a forum thread about running a business in Second Life. Just some advice given to someone else, coming from a hobbyist who didn't have any business experience when she started. I know a lot more about business now - some because I ran a store, which ultimately failed (= stopped being enjoyable; profitable doesn't even come into it), some because of my RL job experience which is now a lot more business-focused than it used to be.

Anyway, the forum post, unedited.

Please for your own sake listen to the advice given here.

A lot of us in SL had to let things go. For me it was my clothing store. Whose fault was this? Mine.

I started with a reasonably niche style : latex. It was technically challenging and I liked the look of it. Trouble is, I wasn't 100% into the lifestyle that's linked to it. I started developing an interest for historical clothes and costumes. That's when I did my best work, IMHO.

That's also when I made my biggest mistake. I should have shut down the latex side at that point and focused on the niche I loved... But I was still proud of my latex line. I didn't want to let go. Instead I branched out even more, and made a handful of casual clothes, because I thought that was where the money was.

You know what? It didn't work. I didn't have the time to run three businesses, on top of my day job. So eventually, I got fed up and overwhelmed. It stopped being fun. I closed the store.

I'm back onto my feet now, with a new store and a niche that is more solid. It's taken me a while. It's been a painful process.

Think. What's your core business? What do you really want to do? Importantly, are these two things the same? Then, prune that tree. Make it healthier.

I hope someone will find this useful.

Mycenaean Ox Figurine

The function of the lovely Mycenaean figurines this ox is inspired by is unknown: they may have been children's toys, votive figurines, or grave offerings...

The real-life versions are tiny. We've made them bigger for SL - so big in fact, that in the case of this ox, we've turned it into a make-shift seat! The "Ox chair" comes with a female pose, a unisex one, and a "petite" pose. Try them in-world at our main store!
There's also a small version that will look good on a shelf, to decorate your home.

The pattern, although heavily inspired by talented Mycenaean artists, is hand-drawn. The materials use custom specular and normal maps.
Featuring original mesh and textures, your Ox Figurine also benefits from fine-tuned Level of Details and Physic shapes. What it means to you is that it'll look good up close and personal and from afar too, while still keeping a reasonable land impact.

PERMISSIONS:
Mod,Copy,No trans.
The version with seats will show as No Mod in your inventory, but you will be able to modify it when rezzed.

FEATURES:
- Includes three versions: one small, one large, and a bonus large one with sits (AVSitter system)
- Land Impact 2
- Mesh + advanced materials

Get it in SL
Get it on the Marketplace

We hope you'll enjoy this Timetwist product!

Yours,
Raindrop Drinkwater & Abyssin Otoro

Updated banner

We've updated the banner. We kept the colour scheme but simplified the design. It's a lot more readable now.

New:

Old:

Squeeeee!

Another WIP :-)

Amphora: Warriors

This amphora comes all the way from the Bronze Age.

The pattern, although heavily inspired by talented Mycenaean artists, is hand-drawn (hand-vectored-and-painted, technically!). The materials use custom specular and normal maps.

Two versions are included: one "new" amphora, and one that, frankly, has seen better days. It's just a little cracked. It's still perfectly usable as long as you don't mind a small leak every now and then. (Mop not included, by the way.)

Featuring original mesh and textures, your Amphora also benefits from fine-tuned Level of Details and Physic shapes. What it means to you is that it'll look good up close and personal and from afar too, while still keeping a reasonable land impact.

FEATURES:
- Includes two versions: one "new", and one antique.
- Land Impact 2
- Mesh + advanced materials

Get it in SL
Get it on the Marketplace

We hope you'll enjoy this Timetwist product!

Raindrop and Abyssin

Pottery WIP

Quite pleased with this one... I'll now need to work on a damaged version of it.

Little things that probably no one will see: I've tweaked the diffuse map, gloss map, and so on so to get rid of the seams by using the clone brush and smear brush directly in Blender. Took me a while to find that trick. That's different from my usual workflow, which was a painstaking process of endlessly switching between 2D and 3D apps.

By the way, I ran into an annoying issue with Blogger. It took me two days to submit this post because of this horror:

Blergh!

Google+ introduced the Auto-Enhance feature a few months back - feature I promptly turned off with my Google+ account, the one that's linked to my real identity.

Unfortunately it's switched on by default on Picasa Web Albums accounts as well... and if you don't have a Google+ account, there's no way to turn it off. Hence this lovely, "enhanced" creation. I had to create a Google+ account for Raindrop Drinkwater just to set my preferences! Stupid. I deleted it immediately, but seriously, how backwards is that???? Get your stuff together, Google.

More Mycenaean pottery (WIP)

I'm getting addicted to Mycenaean pottery. I like how stylised the designs are; they lend themselves very well to vector art. I've started another jar (not a stirrup one this time):

It's an early WIP. I've almost finished placing the patterns, but I need to roughen them up a bit. Maybe add some grass at the bottom... and something on the handles. I also haven't touched the rim and the bottom yet. The handles is actually a separate material at the moment, which is why there's a seam showing.

The opening is wide enough that I've had to solidify the jar -- i.e., there's a complete inside. It might end up having more land impact than the stirrup jar, although not by much; we'll see. I haven't taken it into SL yet.

On the minus side, I'm really annoyed that I can't seem to bake a texture map from Blender when using material nodes. It just bakes the diffuse colour... Unless I'm missing something, but I don't think so. Ah well, I'm getting there anyway.

Fooling around with Inkscape

What I like about trying out a new software is that crazy phase of experimentation where I just press buttons with no idea of their function. I've created a lot of vector soup in Inkscape, following that method... and also something that looks a bit like a necklace:

Fun! I might use that filter again. It's still nowhere near as cute as the Kokeshi Doll I made, following this tutorial that I've already linked to in an earlier post -- it deserves another link because Awesomeness!.

My Kokeshi doll:

Try it. It's easier than it looks.

Stirrup Jar: Octopus

This stirrup jar comes all the way from the Bronze Age.

The pattern, although heavily inspired by talented Mycenaean artists, is hand-drawn (hand-vectored-and-painted, technically!). The materials use custom specular and normal maps.

Featuring original mesh and textures, your Stirrup Jar also benefits from fine-tuned Level of Details and Physic shapes. What it means to you is that it'll look good up close and personal and from afar too, while still keeping a reasonable land impact.

FEATURES:
- Includes two versions: one "new", and one antique.
- Land Impact 2
- Mesh + advanced materials

Get it in SL
Get it on the Marketplace

We hope you'll enjoy this Timetwist product!

Raindrop and Abyssin

Vocabulary lessons

Oh Hello World. I'm done hibernating for a while, and I have a computer that works!

After this long break, I decided to start getting back into 3D modelling with an easy project: a vase. Sounds reasonable, right? So I grabbed some references of Mycenaean pottery, picked up one I liked, and started modelling it.

That was easy enough... but the texturing? Silly old me picked up a model starring an Octopus! Gaaaah! I first painted it directly on the surface of the jar in Blender, just to give me a rough idea, but I then had to clean it up... Vector sounded like the way to go.

Did I have a proper vector-editing programme? No, of course I didn't. So off to Inkscape I went. It's open-source. There's some nice tutorials for it (go to Inkscape kokeshi dolls for awesomeness), and if you already know the basics of Bezier curves, it's actually not that difficult to use.

Then I started adding details... Dear-y-me.

So, work-in-progress of what was meant to be a 1-hour project, and is turning into something a lot more involved than that:

That version is a couple of days old. I've since realised that there's a third bit poking out the top -- and that my jar is what's called a stirrup jar, i.e. two handles and a beak. I've added the beak, presto! It means a new UV map, but it's an improvement on the old one so I don't mind a bit.

The texturing is super-temporary, I've added some fish below the octopuses and scale patterns on the handles. I still need to populate the top of the jar.

I'm quite excited about it. I've learned a lot already... including, and that's not the least of it: how to spell Mycenaean and the plural of octopus.