Customize Your Skin

i recently had a friend send me a full perm freebie skin she got from the Help Island. i was surprised at just how beautiful and refined it was. all in all, aside from the normal difficulties with seams (even Tuli's best are discernible to my inspection) i was really impressed. especially since it was a dark skin suitable for a black avatar AND it was free.

my only problem, and a show stopper for wearing them, was the eyelashes were skin toned.

if anyone's tried their hand at making skins or you've looked at the "Head Tattoos" in a modifiable skin, you'll know that the normal template one applies to the base skin layer has a transparent section up in the top right corner.

that's where eyelashes CAN be painted. since they're so small not many artists bother. in the skin i got from the Help Island the artist filled in this area with skin tone. hence: skin coloured eyelashes. even when you do leave this area blank, saved as a targa file with transparency (32bit), the system won't entirely allow you to zero your sliders to eliminate any vestiges of lashes whatsoever. unless....

in your Second Life installation character folder (the default location for this folder on the Windows system is C:\Program Files\SecondLife\character) is a file called head_alpha.tga (shown below). if you edit that file and paint over everything so it's totally black in that eyelash area you can defeat the system from painting in ANY lashes as long as the artist hasn't painted anything in on the template.

going over some of the skins in my inventory i found an example from Rachele Delgado (above left) that illustrates how this looks when all the elements come together just right. Rachele's gone the extra mile and integrated eyelashes onto her face's template drawing so there's really no need in this instance for using prim lashes. always a welcome find if you've ever struggled editing the prim based form. argh.

i've also toned down the system built-in eyeball veins editing the file i found in the same folder: \character\eyewhite.tga so they're not so drugged out and spooky looking. give it a look. oh, i think it should go without saying, but just in case...make a backup of the files you edit in this folder so that if you destroy the vision yer going for you can easily copy back the originals.

The Future

went browsing the LandFair or something or other the other day. couldn't clue in as to just what it was all about, i thought maybe landscaping and the such. looks like i got there just in time for a seminar given by soror Nishi on her perspective on the SL landscaping trade. a few Lindens were salted into the significantly large crowd of attendants. soror rezzed a few of Jopsy Pendragon's particle pieces to illustrate the direction the sector was taking.

as life would have it i chanced to have a nice conversation with my brother Orage Lubitsch (photo above). i was absolutely stunned to find him standing outside his expo. i couldn't believe how the photo realistic skin wrapped around the perfectly complementary shape jarred me. it was like he was real! that did give me quite a start.

Orage revealed it was Chip Midnight that applied his merited offerings upon Linden's polys. i then thought it must have been some custom made jobbie (always nice to have rich friends). i imagined some exhorbitant fee only the holy could afford. suprised the hell out of me. it's no more than the normal skin in the present market. the face, all i braved to see, far exceeded anything i've seen out there. the combo (skin/shape) is available at Chips store. Look him up. and take in soror's parcel at the Land Fair expo. funky? indeedy do.

Why

just thought i'd share a snap i took recently. i'm using it for my desktop wallpaper. the shot above is a jpg compressed one just for illustration but i've put the uncompressed files on my freehosting server in 3 of the most used resolutions.

1024x768
1280x1024
1680x1050

EnJoy

The Next JB

say hello to Monyka Benelli. the next JB Gazov for prim foot sandals.

thanks to Monicuzza Babenco for pointing her out

Light Up My Life

i've been skulking around some dark SIMs of late. no, no skeery sexual role playing type SIMs (no oddballs waiting for me to pounce on them against my will). just not well lit. it's part of the atmosphere i suppose. unfortunately, if it's totally black, i'm missing something.

so...

i created this light that has a most unusually expected feature. when you point at anything to Buy it, inspect it, or to edit it, the normal animation (if it's not overridden with your AO) points your avi's left arm out to where you are pointing. with this flashlight (offered to the wild for free w/copy/transfer rights) you really give the world a great impression as to what yer looking at.

on top of the normal prim work i added a few scripts that add a light feature and a slight glow around the lightbulb prim. you can turn the light on and off with the chat command "/1 light". this WILL light up your dark spaces. i tried to go easy on the intensity but if anyone complains, toss them a nuke. (please use responsibly. hahahaha...good luck with that.)

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