Ugh...

I really ought to make a new post. I've even had a draft one sat in blogger for about a month.

I'll get it done, promise.

In The Club

In my last post I talked about my new tank and the Syzygy community convoys that inspired me to buy it. What I didn't mention is that the community has now formed an official 'Tank Club' with a presence on the mainland with a shiny new HQ on Jeogeot.
You can see the club house in various stages of completion in the background of several shots in the last post. Its largely done now (although I'm sure there will forever be tweaks) and well worth a visit at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Vacit/61/160/73

I also continued to tweak and change things with a new tank skin. After chatting with Imogen, I wanted to make her a 'Tabby Tank' with a tiger print pattern. One thing I'd been unhappy with on my earlier efforts was the way the pattern 'jumped' between sections (There are a total of 8 separate texture files UV mapped to different parts of the tank) So this time I set out to figure out the joins and make sure the end result was contiguous.

After much pixelsmithing in Photoshop SE I had what I felt was my best skin yet.

Tip: If you log into the second life Beta Grid you can upload textures using Beta L$ (You get L$40k) to 'preview' things. Once you know it all works you only have to pay the L$80 to upload to the 'proper' grid once.

I wasn't the only one who thought so, Samantha Glume, one of the founders and first club leader noticed my skin 'wrap' and asked me if I'd be interested in producing an official 'club' skin. The skin would also include a club logo based on the Syzygy logo.

I was delighted, and got started the club skin first. After my success with the tabby tank I wanted to do a 'traditional' green cammo pattern. I found what I wanted in the form of 'Multicam' from Crye Precision. This would be my most detailed skin yet, even using rotation and mirroring of the pattern to produce even fewer breaks between sections (in the end I don't think there were any at all).

I also had a logo to do. I didn't know if Sam wanted me to actually do it, or just come up with a skin on which to place it, but I drafted up some suggestions and was encouraged to continue.

My brief from Sam was a tank bursting through a Syzygy logo with a line of people to represent the membership - specifically the different genders and species. I took snapshots of people I saw around the clubhouse at the times I was there, and cut them out of the background to make a row of shillouettes. Since I'd finished the camo tank I took a shot of that in a similar pose to an image Sam suggested to me. Since the turret can only be turned in first person mode i had to use an alt to get the shot.
Although I did use actual club members shillouetes at the front it's not meant to be exclusive, but to show that anyone is welcome. I'd have liked to have more people on it, but it was important to keep things simple, so it could still be recognised even at a small scale.

After a few variations I came up with two versions. A detailed version, and a 'stylised' version. Personally I quite liked the latter but it seems I was overruled as most people seem to prefer the 'HD' version.

As well as my skins, the logo is also used on the signs over the building, and on our awesome animated membership cards courtesy of club member and tentacle connoisseur Mr Elric Anatine
Of course, I added the finalised logo to the tank too:

Its not all work though, we've had a couple more 'mainland convoys', travelling around route 9. We had a lot of fun, despite the joys of sim-crossings. I could post the pictures here, but they wouldn't even come close to this frankly outstanding video from my very talented club compatriot BW Jinxing:

I've watched it several times and i'm still not bored of it, great soundtrack, great choice of shots, and I even got a closeup :D

While chilling out back at the clubhouse after one run Moto (the current leader, and another of the clubs many, bright creative types) broke out her 'Nyannon' (I think I spelled that right lol) which is basically a Nyan Cat Cannon.

One of my first ideas for a tank skin included Nyan Cat, but I had no idea how to actually do it. Now, seeing the Nyannon, something clicked in my head and suddenly I knew what I had to do:

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 :( )