Day 52: Boucle and Gecko.

Time to completion: approximately 3hrs.


Today's outfit features a texture I made myself - a sort of super boucle that you would never see in real life, the nubby parts being too overemphasized - a belt, a new neckline, and cut sleeves.

I created the boucle in the Gimp, basically just playing around, seeing what I could create starting from a flat color. I applied various noise filters, a couple of layers of layers of different colors and then bumpmapped the whole lot.







The belt is a simple resized torus - I learned to minimise the Y aspect of the hole size to make a thin torus. From there, it was just a matter of fiddling and judging by eye to get the thing to fit in a belt like manner. To get the color of the torus to match the pants, I followed a tip of Natalia's that works brilliantly - texture the item as per usual, then tint the item gray, (R - 192,B - 192,G - 192). You can see how well this works! The belt buckle is just a hollowed prism textured gold, which does not show up well here. I wanted to put in the middle part of the buckle and holes for it to go through, but I don't have enough skill with smaller prims - I keep losing them, even inside my specially created "prim theatre", against which backdrop they should show up.

There's not too much going on with the shirt; I used the path feature to cut the neckline and the sleeves, which gives a much better look than just leaving it up to the appearance sliders. The textures for the shirt were source from deviant-art.com.

Here's a second shirt that I was tinkering with today - playing with getting the armholes right. I uploaded quite a number of textures with the upper body template in the background, and tried a number of different cutting techniques before coming up with this. It really looks better in the Appearance posture than it does just standing normally. By this stage I was getting much better at matching the front to the back :)

Something I attempted today but which turned out very poorly was wrinkles in clothing. Understandable, I guess, it is supposed to be quite difficult, but I was taken aback by how difficult it was. I tried out several techniques, all of which were undeniable failures :) I moved on to try and follow a couple of tutorials, but was stymied, because the tutorials tended to be for Photoshop CS2, whereas I use the Gimp exclusively. Oh, well. Expect more experimentation to come!

The skin I'm wearing is I&K Leilani Nature Gloss Natural by LisaAnne Juniper at Inks & Kinks, Baeogae (157, 165, 75). The pearl drop necklace and earrings, a little hard to see in these photos but very nice, are by Second Mirage Fine Jewelry, proprietor Britneyj Crimson.