The girl you want

I wonder how many people will get that title.

Recently I became aware of the Syzygy Community, and their 'mainland tank convoy'. After watching the video I decided it looked like great fun, and after trying the demo for the particular model of tank they use, I wanted to join in.

If you're a regular reader you'll know I can't do anything without making an outfit for it. I knew it would include my 'Wind Dancer' hat from my Cyberpunk outfit, and after changing a few pieces around I settled on the Gravity outfit from my last post, with human skin, the Wind Dancer hat and the Eyepatch from LoveCats Ahoy!

I also added a grenade belt and a gun for effect. Over the course of writing this blog post, I've also created a few variations with different colour base layers. So far the red is my favourite.

I was pretty happy with my look, and since I was planning on exploring the mainland, which involves a lot of sim crossings, I needed to keep my script count down. This outfit succeeded there too, with the only script coming from the Firestorm Viewer Bridge (except for the cigarette I used as a prop in a few of the shots) - Those deletable resize scripts really come in handy.

Now, the tank in question - The Spyker Combat System Sabre Main Battle Tank (SCS Sabre MBT) is not cheap, in fact, at L$3000 it's quite expensive. But after going over it a few times, I decided to take the plunge and bought one of my own. One of the features is you can change the colours, and the texture files are full permission, so you can extract them and customise them yourself.

But before I got into that I wanted to play!

I decided to take a Tour of Route 12, which runs East to West on the Nautilus Continent, with a couple of spurs off to the south.

 Starting off in Rannveig things looked a bit run-down, a theme continued round the next bend where the skyline was dominated by the image of a 40 foot half naked woman advertising a strip show.

But of course this is the grid and next to it was a rather nice garden parcel.

I'm not gonna give commentary for the whole trip, the pictures can speak for themselves but there are a few highlights.

Crossing through Estruda I passed the parcel we used to live on, and I still regret leaving. Perhaps one day we'll return.

When you get the the far north west, the pavement gives way to a dirt track.

Off road is no problem, but there are certainly some tight spots that needed slow and steady driving, especially when they were bordered by no entry parcels.
And the occasional dead stop when a sim was restarting.

   

Of course no trip on the mainland roads is complete without encounters with AnneMarie O'Toole's bot cars.

At first I didn't mind them, they added a bit of flavour to the otherwise quiet roads, and I even decided to be helpfull and report any stuck ones I found. I even saw her come to deal with a tank that had got stuck on Linden land.

After a while though, I started to get a bit fed up of them. If she finds one on a no-entry parcel she just leaves it for the owner to return. She uses an alt for 'breakdown recovery' but they can obviously edit her items, so why not just return them if they're stuck?
That's not my biggest issue though. My problem is they are physical objects that drive like they are drunk.
I'll admit that my tank is quite wide, and on the narrower sections of road I accept I might need to pull over to the side and give way, but I can be approaching one on a nice wide section of road, and it will swerve across into me. Or even better, I stop to take a picture and all of a sudden I'm getting a proctological exam!

Don't get me wrong, I don't want them gone from the grid, but they could be a lot better. The 'pods' you see giving tours along the road seem to move much more smoothly and they're phantom too, so apart from the odd photobomb they cause no problems at all.

But thats enough whining from me.

After getting a copy of the Texture files I set to work creating a custom version. My first problem was actually figuring out what to do. I asked Imogen what she'd do, and it didn't take long for her to reply 'pink'.
So after running a few patterns past her,  I made a pink camouflage one:

 

That gave me the inspiration I needed. Red and black are my colours, so I looked at various red camo textures before settling on a digital pattern. I was feeling patriotic so I found a nice 'hand painted' Union Jack decal to add a finishing touch.

  

I'm really happy with my tank, I've been of a few little drives. Would be nicer if there were more actual people on the roads, but the same could be said about most of the grid, for now I'm looking forward to the next tank club cruise.

Oh and the reference in the title?

I couldn't resist, it pulled me in...

Life would be much simpler if I just had one look, and could stick with it, but... no.

From Medieval fantasy to Science fantasy, I 've had this one for a while, but I loved the paladin outfit so much I just had to write it up straight away.

I've had my Eye on Graves store since I discovered it scouting locations for my Cyberpunk post. I held off for a while because their outfits aren't cheap, and don't include footwear. After window shopping for a long time, I saw a group notice advertising an upcoming release - Gravity.

It really appealed to me, but the lack of boots still put me off. The helpful people in the Graves group assured me the boots sold elsewhere in the store would match, but they all had heels, and as I've said in the past, heels are fine for fashion outfits, but if I'm going for a utilitarian or tough girl look, I want flats.

In the end, my desire to have it outweighed my reservations, and I bought it, deciding to worry about finding matching shoes elsewhere. Luckily I found some 'Tron' Boots that almost met my needs entirely, and since they were mod-able, I was able to de-tint & de-glow them. They aren't as detailed as the rest of the outfit, but they are nice, and dark colours mask a multitude of sins. You'd have to look closely to tell.

  

The outfit itself is excellent, the clothing layers come in just about every conceivable combination, and all the highly detailed prim attachments come with deletable resize scripts so you can get the perfect fit.

There are several colours available, I couldn't decide between the Grey and the Transparent, so I went for grey and picked up a much cheaper transparent latex underwear layer for another outfit elsewhere in the store. Its not a perfect match but its pretty close.

I wanted a bit of an 'android' look, so I added my 'vampire' skin with a dark blue lipstick layer, and glowing blue dune-style Desert runner 'mystic' eyes.
For hair I tried some white prim hair in a bob cut. But next to the detailed clothing it looked horrible (And Imogen said it'd be better in Black too). I found some nice flexi hair at Wasabi Pills, and was about to buy it when I realised I could have either a blacks pack or a whites pack but I'd have to pay twice for both. So I took off to Truth where I could find a similar style - Skyla with blacks and whites in a single pack. (Turns out Imogen was right as well).

I'm really pleased with this outfit. It's more straight sci-fi than my previous cyberpunk outfits, and it's a great base for other outfits (as I'll demonstrate in an upcoming post).

Pictures Taken outside the graves store.

Oops

I guess I should proofread my posts a bit more thoroughly, since I just realised for the last few posts blogger merged the links for some of the images so that some of the thumbnails don't work. It's fixed now.

Actually... I'm no Lady

I think I may have a new favourite outfit.

After watching Game of Thrones, I was inspired by the sight of 'Lady' Brienne of Tarth. If you're not familiar with her, well, this picture sums her up pretty well:

She's introduced winning a gladiatorial competition, and when told 'You fought well Lady Brienne' she replies 'Just Brienne, I'm no Lady'
In fantasy, usually only the pretty girls survive, but in the world of GoT anyone can die, so I'm looking forward to seeing how this skilled warrior fares (I know I could read the books, and I still might, but so far I only know what's happened in the TV series).


So I set out to find some nice Medieval style armour for my avatar. I wanted something that looked nice, but was functional. Stripperiffic Plate Bikinis are ten a penny, and I expected to have to wade through endless listings for inappropriate outfits along with 2006 era primmy monstrosities with flat textures, but as it happens the spirits of marketplace were smiling on me and I found the perfect outfit on the first page of results with the 'most relevant' sorting, not only did it look great, it was a 'Paladin' outfit (my favourite WoW class), compete with a libram (holy book) hanging from the belt by a chain. I checked a couple of more pages but didn't find anything close, other than a 'Dark' version from the same creator - The Old Forge.

I visited the creators shop to see if there were any models or additional pictures. I found neither, but I did find a customer in another outfit. Examining the level of detail gave me confidence that my chosen outfit would be a good one. After buying it and porting home to wear it, I wasn't disappointed - and when Imogen saw it she went and got the dark one.

I had the armour, but now I had to accessorise it. Although Bienne was my inspiration, I wanted my own look and decided to base it on one of my WoW Paladins - Truesilver:

2012

2008

The hair was easy, my recently acquired Truth Skyla in silver. I tried a few of my skins before settling on Snow, a gift from  from [Mydear]. As she was a warrior I decided to deviate from my normal shape, and created a much taller (in human terms, still short for SL) more muscular shape with broad shoulders less fat and a sterner expression. After a few eye/glow combos I settled on a set of vivid blue non glowey eyes from Xolo, and some facial scars on a tattoo layer from  TDS.






In terms of weaponry I hit a bit of a wall. I wasn't planning on visiting combat sims, so I didn't need a fully scripted weapon, but I didn't want a bare blade hanging off my hip. I found a Nicely detailed Japanese sword for L$1 which would make a good placeholder until I found a decent medieval sword with scabbard in my price range  (Turns out both SL and the Internet as a whole is obsessed with Katanas, they're everywhere!)

I looked good on the pose stand, but I had to move too. My 'Luscious' AO wasn't appropriate, and while my Assassin AO looked good, it was a bit more 'Rogue' than 'Warrior'. I went back to Oracul to buy a few new poses and ended up getting another complete 'Bionic Girl' AO for L$200. As with the Assassin AO I opened it up and dropped the poses into the Firestorm AO (which I was pleased to discover has been made much easier, it no longer jumps around your inventory as it creates the shortcuts).

Of course, no one says Vampire Knights can't use Katana

I felt I was pretty much done, so I went to hang out with Imogen during her shift at LoveCats where someone asked me about my outfit, and when I said I was a Paladin, someone else piped up that I wasn't wearing enough armour and that  a Paladin wouldn't have Katana proficiency.

After things got a bit snippy (I can take criticism, but the wording came across as plain rude - where I'm from adding 'nice try though' to the end of an observation can be a put-down to say you're smarter than them and they won't fool you) we agreed to put it down to the difficulty in conveying true meaning via text and drew a line under it.

She was technically correct though, so I took another look at the MP for a context suitable Sword & Sheath combo (as I'd always planned to), and this time I found one, and at just L$10 it was definitely worth having. After a little scaling I got it to suit my size, and due to the way it was made I was able to drop the show/hide weapons scripts i made for my Assassin outfit with just a little bit of modification. A final touch of some chain mail gloves and I was done.

 

 

All that remained was to go get some nice pictures with Imogen at Taure Ru a set of beautifully designed fantasy RP sims.

Because the lady is a Vamp

Wow, I'm way behind with my posts, so many ouftits I've made lately that I want to blog about, never seem to get the time to actualy write them up, so I'll make this quick lol.

While browsing around for cheap 'odd' skins, I came across this cheap, good value vampire skin. Well this is SL and everyone should try being a vampire at least once right? So I set about putting together an outfit.

I started with my Red Orion hair from Wasabi, and some red 'heart eyes'. The skin was a little plain by itself so I added some ink. Of course I was still missing the most important thing for a vampire. The fangs!

A lot of fangs give you a bit of an overbite, but I found a nice set of prim teeth. They're subtle, and can only be seen when my mouth is open.

For the clothing I picked out a mix of LoveCats Anastasia and Black Widow. Finished off with some nice mesh over knee boots from Blackburn.

  

Pictures taken at Sleepy Hollow (Lost the SURL and can't find it on search, sorry :( )

What a Mesh!

 I've made no secret in the past about my enthusiasm for mesh in SL. The way mesh hair and clothes can move with your avatar looks great, and the technology is on the way to looking even better with the latest developments with Quarl's Mesh Deformer

For those that don't know, the deformer is a piece of software that will allow the viewer to resize a suitable mesh object to fit your avatar. Existing mesh sort of does that, changing certain sliders on the shape will make some changes to mesh clothes, but most things have no effect, and if you don't want your skin showing you need to change your shape or wear an alpha. The deformer will also let physics layers work with mesh clothing.

The deformer project has been ticking away in the background for a while now, and the version 0.3 alpha just made it into the LL beta viewer which can be found HERE

If you want to try it you now need specificaly deformable mesh (early test versions deformed anything). Geometry have kindly produced a free deformable mesh dress for testing purposes HERE.

From little...

To large.

Playing with this new tech alerted me to another problem with mesh, one totaly unrelated to how well  it fits, and one that i realised is kind of a big deal. Did you know that on the lowest graphics settings, mesh objects don't appear? They don't look bad or wierd or anything, they just don't exist. Which is kind of a problem when its your clothing!

I had to nip out while testing, and since the test dress is rather nice, and i knew i wasn't sticking out of it on a 'non deformer' viewer, i didn't bother changing into another outfit.
On my screen, I looked like this:

Loveley

The first I realised there was a problem is when someone asked me why I was almost naked. She had a laptop that could only run SL on its lowest settings and was seeing me in nothing but boots and briefs!
Like so:

EEEK!

Yes I should have been wearing a bra, but I don't have one that wouldn't have visible straps, and like the physics layer issue, you can't control other peoples settings, you have no way of knowing if your clothes have vanished. My advice, if your outfit doesn't include an alpha, invest in a good set of underwear!

*Edit* Apparently it's just v1 based mesh viewers that have this problem. Doesn't help that v1 based Phoenix is still the biggest viewer on the grid.

Lady in red... and green.

My latest acquisition is this lovely evening gown from Pixeladict, I'd been looking for this style of dress for a while and when I saw someone wearing one while out and about on the grid I decided it was the one I wanted. After browsing the available colours at the store, I was torn between Emerald green and Ruby red. I settled on the latter, and set about building an outfit around it.

I started with the skin, I'd just got my hands on a new group gift from MyDear, the Ella skin (although visiting the store later its gone, wonder if it limited edition?) I added some red flexi-prim hair, Ruby red lips by MissMurder, Tesla 'Jane' shoes (fire) Aqua blue eyes by Xolo, and some diamond jewellery.

The prim hair was OK, but it was starting to show its age, since the vast majority of viewers these days are mesh capable, I decided it was time to take the plunge on some mesh hair.

I'd seen some nice demo's in the past from Wasabi Pills, and it didn't take me long at the store to Settle on a redhead pack in the 'Orion' range. The great thing about good mesh hair is that it flexes with your head but doesn't clip through your shoulders.

I had my new outfit and I loved it. I was thinking about going back for another colour when I got an IM from the creator, Ms Rosie Scott. You see, I'd found the store from the SL search. I'd originally looked in her profile, but the LM in her picks was (at the time) out of date, and I'd sent her an off-line IM just to give her a heads up.

 

She thanked me for letting her know, and asked me to pick a complimentary item from the store by way of thanks. How's that for customer service? Since I'd already got my eyes on the Emerald dress it didn't take me long to choose, and I soon had a new outfit to build. I decided, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' and simply swapped my blue eyes for green, the 'fire' shoes for 'lime' and a lighter shade of the Orion hair.


Since I got the second dress as a freebie, I think I might go back and buy yet another colour, since up until now I've neglected to mention that this dress is ONLY L$59!

Pictures taken at the beautifuly built Alchemy Immortalis Sim.