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Orwar

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Everything posted by Orwar

  1. Orwar
  2. Orwar
    It happens quite frequently that people stream via Discord to show me what's going on on their end when I'm helping them out with stuff, and observing people have that little camera control HUD open and clicking away to navigate SL is painful to watch, particularly when it's their avi I'm helping them with and they got no fine control whatsoever to zoom in to the relevant body part they're adjusting.
  3. Orwar
    Had a pretty decent haul between the Shop & Hop and Friday sales thus far. Some items are ones I nabbed off the last weekend sales too. Top: Zaara - Anisha Skirt/Belt: Zaara - Ziya Gloves: !4AE - Julie Gloves Bodysuit: Moxxi - Laura Boots: !4AE - Evil Boots (Pantyhose is Psyche from Violent Seduction, BOM) Dress: Everfaery - Emmalyn Necklace: Rawr - Solstice Top/Bottom: KiB Designs - Amata Gown (S&H gift) Bikini: Lapointe & Bastchild - Swear Naomi (S&H gift) Top/Bottom/Sarong: Yasum - Alahm Dress: Yasum - Liani Some of the items are discounted at S&H, I think the necklace (which is rigged, yay) and Laura bodysuit are the only things I paid full price for. Bonus: Neither items were discounted, but well worth their full prices IMO: Top: Gawk! - Megan Trousers: Lapointe & Bastchild - Swear Leather Zipp Pants
  4. Orwar
    A catoptromancer, eh?
  5. Orwar
    The arcane art of being a decent human being in a virtual world ..
  6. Orwar
    Weeell ..
  7. Orwar
    When I take 'candid' style fashion shots where there's next to no scene setup (just a good sky setting, and maybe a point light or two, snap caught with AO running), I usually go for a very quick suite of editing steps, such as: Adjusting contrast, saturation, and exposure (quick slider work) Brushwork to fix minor clipping issues or broken/missing shadows (heal/clone/smudge/blur tools) Running an unsharp mask (sharpening the image) Adjusting temperature (either via slider or by overlaying a toned layer, depending on what effect I want) Quick focus blur (blur with a quick hand-drawn mask with just a handful of gradients) Noise ('film grain', it both helps blend brushwork and break up straight and jagged lines a bit the same way anti-aliasing does) The whole process can often be ran through in around 5-10 minutes, buuut then I've done it a few times by now. This edit I did just now to try it clocked in at 6 minutes and 4 seconds (in which time I had to boot Gimp and includes exporting time). Original: Edit: I mean I totally could spend an hour or two to create some more visual striking hand-shading, or put some carefully hand-drawn rain in there, but if I just want to quickly answer 'how does your avatar look today?' but still want a little bit of stylistic expression (or a lot - I enjoy the etherical-looking contrast between the dark shadows and sky and the skin glowing as if she's moon-bathing, I know a lot of people don't, but my pic, my taste!), running through Gimp doesn't have to take a lot of time (if I could be bothered to use BDW I could achieve most of the work right in the viewer instead, but that'd take me at least half an hour to set up). Ooor I can do an equally quick and dirty rain effect via making a few simplex noise layers with directional blurs (with some equally quick and dirty alpha masks to keep the subject from being totally flooded). And make the eyes glow for all the drama! Not art gallery material, perhaps, but a whole lot more visually interesting than the original pic (nothing I'd want to do on all of my pics, though, especially when it's a fashion shot). Using AI to do this stuff for you is akin to eating frozen, industrially produced lasagna. Keeps you from starving (arguably), but you miss out on the amazing journey that is the cooking process. And you wouldn't serve dinner guests lasagna out of a carton, would you?
  8. Orwar
    Not as such, I very seldom change tattoos as they feel like a large factor in the avi's individual identity, hehe.
  9. Orwar
  10. Orwar
    Neph dancing in her new body. And then the glowsticks came out.
  11. Orwar
    Creating an overlay like that by hand is very easy (just make a grainy layer and make a directional blur, set it to any of the layer types where only light is added - there's a lot of variants). If you want the rain to have more depth you can have several layers with slightly different directions and intensities, and mask areas based on depth (there should be fewer rain drops in front of the subject 5 metres from the camera than the tree 30 metres away). You can then use brushes (plenty of brush packs for that sort of thing around out there) to create deflections and impacts of rain drops to make the rain interact with the stuff in the picture, or even add puddles to the ground. My favourite video on the subject.
  12. Orwar
    Peeve: it appears to have become trendy to make the worst quality clothes possible, judging by the January events. Even brands that generally do very nice stuff has released so much junk which is not only totally absent of any sense of creativity for the designs, but an excess of flat textures and ill-shaped and fitted meshes. I've got old prefab clothes with more attention to detail than even some of the most well-known brands' releases this month. After demoing my way through a dozen or so events I was starting to think maybe my viewer was somehow broken because it was so awful, but then I put on my old clothes and they look fine. Perhaps they're just all knackered after the Yule season or something, but I spent around L$800 throughout January (mostly on accessories and BOM apparel), and that's with me scouring every event I could find because I want to get stuff I can wear with LaraX.
  13. Orwar
    It's not a whole lot more difficult than changing a light bulb, to be fair. And, since I know people these days are struggling even with changing light bulbs, it's lucky that a lot of stores will happily change the component for you in-shop, sometimes not even charging for it if you bought the component there - and it might be a good time to ask them to blow out some dust from inside the chassis for you too, which is well worth a few extra bucks to help keep it alive a couple of years longer (and, you know, keeping your home from burning up). .. Or buy yourself a can of compressed air and look up how to do it safely on YouTube - pretty sure at least the 16 year old can manage that!
  14. Orwar
    I already kind of did that .. How an object looks in a bright light that one may use whilst out and about shopping/exploring or tinkering with stuff (like Neutral or Nam's Optimal Skin & Prim) and how it looks in the sky setting I actually use at home with local lights can be very different (especially since subtle shine is nigh-impossible to see if the entire scene is flooded with ambient light). My solution has always been to just swap the sky setting to what I use at home (a dark one!), and if the local lighting on the display is insufficient to actually see the materials look, I've got attachable lighting prims that I can move around the object to see how the materials react to them. Annnd I do cam back and forth to see when and how stuff deforms - there are few frustrations when it comes to furnishing your home as taking a step back to see how it all came together only for the bookshelves at the back wall to turn into an imploded hedgehog of stray triangles. .. But then I guess I'm quite nit-picky.
  15. Orwar
    I think there are some fun react videos, but not for pop music. Getting to see people react for the first time* to a live performance by Rammstein with half the stage on fire, or an ahem-shaped cannon shooting white gunk all over the audience, or Alice Cooper getting decapitated or hanged is fun. But I've also seen some really bad stuff. Like, if in the intro the guy says 'so I saw this video the other day, and now I'mma do a reaction video to it because it was so wild', it's like .. Doing an unboxing video where you've already unpacked it, tested the product, broke it because they dropped it whilst trying to take a selfie with it (because apparently we need to take a selfie with a video game console?) and then put it back sloppily into the box just to make an unboxing video.
  16. Orwar
    Peeve: YouTube shorts. Been scrolling through a few today, and sure I enjoy some of the fun and creative stuff people do (although I don't get why it has to be in TikTok format), but some of it is just baffling. How are videos by people not knowing how to sharpen knives or use cast iron pans 'content'? Do we really need more reminders in our lives that people are stupid?
  17. Orwar
    “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht” - it's an old Yiddish maxim ("Man plans, and God laughs").
  18. Orwar
    You consumerist, you.
  19. Orwar
    9000 years ago my cellar would have been under water, the entire valley used to be a lake, hehe.
  20. Orwar
    Err, no. Stockfish was one of Scandinavia's main exports throughout the middle-ages, and it can last for years. Fish can also be made to last for a very long time via salting, smoking, graving, or pickling (we've got herring jars in the cellar that are around 10 years old and still fine to eat, just the other week I ate herrings from a jar that we made in 2015 - no modern, synthetic preservatives involved). Besides, a fair amount of fish during the medieval period was sold alive in barrels and slaughtered when they were to be cooked, especially to supply castles and monasteries that were further inland.
  21. Orwar
    My favourite recipe for medieval meat-free Church days was how Henry VIII's cooks minced fish (which was allowed) that was shaped to look like chicken drumsticks (which wasn't), and T-bone steaks shaped out of coloured sugar. This was before he chucked out the Catholic church from England.
  22. Orwar
    Ah, but they're so tender and succulent when they're that size ..
  23. Orwar
    Smoked reindeer heart is lovely - and thematically perfect for the Yule feast!
  24. Orwar
    British cuisine has a rather unfair reputation, in my opinion. Nothing wrong with stuff like fish & chips or shepherd's/cottage pie, or a Lancashire hot pot, or scouse, or Scotch eggs, or Cornish pasties, or beef Wellington, or clotted cream, or black pudding (I almost prefer the British style to the Swedish one, the oats give it a much more interesting texture and it's meatier, the Swedish is usually a lot sweeter and almost like a compact bread in texture). French cuisine is overrated and not even French. Italian cuisine is nice but actually quite boring. And just look at the Belgians eating oysters with chips like some sort of animals. If I were going on a food trip (in Europe) I'd probably go for Hungary, Bavaria, or Poland, but I'd sooner go to Britain than France or Italy (and Hell before Belgium! Besides, I've already been to Italy, and as someone who doesn't drink gone-off grape juice I found the near-total lack of beer culture quite unacceptable).
  25. Orwar
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