Second Life Fashion, Second Life Clothing from a Designers Point of View

   Hello and a Happy Holiday to all my pixel based buddies and friends and as well any fans I have met along the way !  So do I have many fans ? Not as many as I do with my male avatar, but in all respects and the reality that Elliana Inkpen is actually me a male could be the reason behind lack of followers and real friends.  I also basically use Elliana for my modeling and design ideas and for photography in second life,  as well for the template building and creating clothing for female avatars. Since first off making promotional and advertising content via model avatars can become time consuming and as well somewhere along the way ... Even if Badabong Bigbear is snapping the pics with Elli posing as the model.... well its always easier then being the model and the photographer at the same time ...   Yes though I can run multiple viewers with multiple apps and programs, it is still easier to have the multiple second life viewers.   My method and workflow being that I set model avatar up and turn the models graphics way down detach all but the posing and clothing huds needed. Now I will log in as the photographer with either the Phoenix, Nirans or the Exodus viewer with most graphics turned up very high  and then depending on whether in a studio or in public on a sim i will adjust the wind light settings and any other graphic settings needed ... but Important info that needs to be read !  ( Second life is a very graphics and resource intense application and program, and some computers just cannot handle it ... even more so tablets and older computers do not have the graphics capabilities, so if you are doing graphics and fashion work in second life then you need a system that can handle it. This means a quad core system, a good nvidia graphics card preferably a card that is specifically made for graphics and videos which is not just a game card but rather a scientific based graphics card such one of the quadro cards ... as a heads up nvidia quadro cards often start at over $250 and the one I have cost about $650 USD alone for the graphics card.  Last but not least dual monitors may also help as well. For Elliana Inkpens Avatar images this is the set up I use and also sometimes log in with and alternate laptop or desktop that is not as big and bad as the one being used for the taking the snapshots themselves .... So normally this is a Photography and Fashion blog though I thought I should explain my tech side for this process. So this all being told this week have worked on getting clothing and other items for the mesh deformers of mesh body parts. My first bitch as of this is that with the huds and color picking you can not just type in a the rbg cordinates ... there should be a chat function for the scripts and huds that allows this and I am talking on all of the mesh breasts ... Lush, Lolas Tangos and as well the Puffy breast add ons are all the same in this respect ... so if u have a skin that does not come with appliers you are stuck adjusting all these rgb settings one click at a time and still at that point it is not easy ....

    One last tip before I go, if you do have the mesh add ons and yours do not have a applier ... then to get and almost exact match first take a snap shot of you in the skin with the breasts on as well, then open the picture in gimp or another paint and photo program that allows you to use a color picker, and click with the picker right at where the mesh meets the skin color on the skin its self, look at the rgb values then and match those  starting with a pure white hue .... from there you should be able to get the closest you will ever get with out and applier for your actual skin.

The Life of a Second Life Fashion Avatar

  Elliana Inkpen goes through many transformations as a second life fashion model, from many hair styles to many other attachments, a whole pose hud, many clothes and attachment huds, facial emotes and more. Just to get a single outfit shot she may go through 5 or so pictures and a few poses to say the least. Adjustments to the looks, adjustments to the hair, changing her hair in second life and then taking more second life photographs. If there is and outfit that comes in 8 colors that is poses in each color of the outfit,and of there are many pieces of the outfit then many poses to show the separate clothing's if there are for example stockings and bras under the outfit that they receive with it then separate second life photos for each part ... I am telling you this so you can understand that being a well paid model you must have all of your inventory very well organized and of course if you received the clothing ahead of time you also should be going by your cards and have each outfit etc all ready so you just have to wear it. As well in a sl fashion photo shoot you also will have pictures from the front photos from behind the side ..... etc  ...

its just fashion photo after fashion photo sometimes in a studio and sometimes on location, some photographers have huds that can move you and give you poses others expect you to have some and as well may give you some to use also.   You will end up stripping clothing your avatar more then a Madame in on Saturday night in Tombstone ... 





But hey I guess without it the creativity level would never be what it is in second life fashion and design, and it would be a big boring grid.

Second Life Dude Looks Like a Lady

   Hello this blog is written as my second life fashion model alt, yes Elliana Inkpen is a woman. She was created to first off, make my life easier. How many started a business in second life and realized wow if I make this a Metasexual Product then I will need a female avatar to try it out. Now Linden Labs Second life is a virtual world and there are far less restrictions on avatars then any other virtual world and lindens biggest question is are you real or will you be a scripted intelligence being or well a robot. They do not care if you are human, female, male, transgendered, fury, alien, lycan, vampire or Metasexual.  Metasexual is a avatar that has either store items that female and so he needs to test them. So you have two well maybe 3 choices ... First give them to others but then you must grant them maybe more permissions and as well maybe there are things you want to personally adjust. Next you can buy or create a female skin shape and clothing and save a copy and switch over when you want to test ..... Now that personally made me feels strange and well if a friend visits in the middle of it all you may give them the wrong ideas ...   Honestly ,many people may not even notice but anyway the other choice is to make a female alt avatar to do all the design and modeling with. This is much easier and as well maybe you should take a walk in a woman's shoes if you are designing things that females will be buying and using. So this is what I have dubbed as Metasexual and it is a phenomenon in these virtual worlds. Now granted I am a male and I as well design for both males and females, I first realized that I needed a solution a few years back ... I became tired of changing back and fourth rather quickly, fortunately I have multiple high end computers and I am able to use either viewers on separate machines and sometimes with my workstation I can run multiple viewers at maximum settings on the same machine.  I tell you all this as the point of this blog is to document the meta-verse as a female from the design and artists as well women's avi point of view. As a designer and a 3d artist I am greatly curious as to marketing, building and creating merchandise for all avatars. To do this i must look at things from what I like to call a Metasexual point of view.  This term has no real bearing on sexual preference but rather in a female avatars tastes and styles compared to the males ... In reality all it took for all the male avatars to add sunglasses take of there shirts and cover there avatars in tattoos was a single female to tell him he looked hot ... I have to laugh my ass off about this because it is all too true. As well being a bad boy or a bad girl in second life has very few real life consequences.  You do not know who is behind those dead and staring eyes. And that is mostly impossible to read without the thousands of tells and facial muscle movements as well body language that we use in real life, as a fact you are going on appearance and text messages and sometimes voice communication going on. In all the years I have been here in Second Life one of the most amusing things to me is the escorts and the all the note cards almost like the Vegas strip once you get to and adult sim, The one thing I always chuckle about is the prostitutes signs saying voice verified.  Now even if they have someone ask to hear the voice to verify its a female I always laugh as all it takes is one female verifying for all these call girls that are just  avatars ....   maybe male maybe female.   So these are the first things that come to mind as a female avatar ... But I am here to build mesh, design and create artwork whether I am wearing a male or female avatar.  I do look around in both avatars at the products that others create, and often male and female have the same problems from anything from animations to how mesh or other clothing fits. I though have a better understanding of marketing, business and as well the everyday challenges of women in the metaverse ....In the meantime before I published this article I went and took a look around as a female avatar even more, this time letting her roam under the guise that she is a model and well I see so many new and interesting things daily ... Honestly the shopping side of Secondlife totally caters to the female and the female avatar. As a male well we decide to find say the best weapons shop, or well say a tattoo and maybe that great looking hair ..... Well women here have tattoos as well as hair and I have came across quite a few dangerous women here ....   one such woman castrated a male male avatar I used in a specific Role-play sim called Crossroads a few years back then again Malkavian vampires are all crazy. But on with the point for women there are clothes, shoes, skins, hair , more clothes, outfit accessories etc again and did I mention more shoes ...  So being a designer and 3d model and sculptor if you ignore the womens side well you are really cutting out where a lot of the shopping money comes from.