Scylla Rhiadra

Most of the bots spouting the same stuff over and over again that I've met turned out, upon further inspection, actually to be people.

Great idea! The week after that, we'll run an experiment that involves staking someone naked and covered with honey over a red ant hill. It would be interesting to discover which of the two test subjects lives longest.

OMG CONGRATULATIONS!!! 😏

Well, I hate to be difficult, but . . . 1) I don't think Ellie is "better looking" than you. Not at all, in fact. 2) the look with makeup is lovely, but i like it without too. Maybe even better?

It's highly dependent on the texture and the need. Some textures -- generally those that are light or (better still) have high contrast -- tint better than others. Tinting can also wash out the underlying texture if you aren't careful. It's very much trial and error: sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, I scrap the attempt. Also, in my experience this is more applicable to hair than to clothing. Just to demonstrate that it can work, i should mention that i have a couple of pieces of clothing and at least four hair styles that include not only conventional colour/texture HUDs, but also colour picker HUDs. So retinting is built into the product. To be clear, I don't retint a lot. It's a matter of need coinciding with opportunity. If for some reason I want to modify the colour of something that is mod, then I'll try it. I would do it more often if I had more clothes and hair styles that were mod, but it's still not something I would do for fun. Nope, I never have. Maybe I should one day.

Yeah, it kinda is, actually. If I buy a tee shirt, I can dye it, cut it up, rip it, add stuff to it, or use it as a dishrag. It's only an issue if I decide to start redistributing reproductions of it. Also, most copyright law has a provision for the artistic reuse and reproduction, within limits, of copyrighted images, words, ideas, and objects.

Well, potentially lots of different things. Mix and match is a way of creating unique looks for oneself, and making one's wardrobe stretch further by creating new outfits from a variety of sources. So, this top with that skirt, with those shoes. Arguing that we should be happy to wear, without modifying or changing things up, whatever creator puts together as a complete outfit is a bit like suggesting that we don't really need customizable mesh bodies and heads, or a choice of skins, because the creator has already put together something that "looks nice." Yes, sometimes. Or take it in, let it out, remove elements I don't like, or even add things I do. And unlike Theresa, I'm not even in theatre. In addition to just ensuring that something looks good on one's one uniquely shaped body, it's a way of creating one's own style -- in SL as in RL. Qie and Theresa addressed this already. I get the sense that you don't put your outfits together the way that most -- or many, at least -- people do. When I choose to wear a saved outfit, I don't want to then have to mess around changing colours, textures, or (where applicable) sizing, so I save a copy of each of the things I'm wearing that has already been tailored to fit the look of that particular outfit. And autohide is just a pain: as often as not, it glitches and hides parts it shouldn't, and it seldom does a good job of matching my particular shape. I have it disabled on my body HUD. I don't need it because, like the clothing for an outfit, I save a copy of my body to which the desired alpha cuts have already been applied, so that I don't have to spend two or three minutes customizing it (or open my mesh body HUD to do it). All of those scripts are not merely unnecessary: they are an annoyance. None of this necessarily implies that creators should be compelled to make things mod so that scripts can be removed, but the clever ones will realize that mod goes hand in hand with copy, and that, at the very least, they need to add a "remove scripts" button to their HUDs. It is a factor I consider when I buy things.

It's ok Lindal. Pam and I are starting our own club. You can join us. We're the cool kids anyway.

And not the good nubbly stuff.

Does it have to be fresh?

Yes, but that's just because you're so nice. I'd show him where the toaster was.

Well, ordinarily, I'd say "doubtful." But this is really a rather sweet post by Dres. I totally understand what he means about missing people here. And I really wouldn't want him to think that he wouldn't be welcomed back, because he was a pretty important (if sometimes slightly grumpy) voice here, and I know he's missed. So I say we expedite his application, should he choose to apply.

He missed me (from his list). Well, fiiiiiiiiine. Pfffft. 😝

My own approach most resembles that of Orwar, with a bit of Matty thrown in too. Rather than repeat what they've said with slight variations, I'll just throw in some fragmentary observations and suggestions. 1) Composition is for me the most challenging part. One rule of thumb (which, like all rules, should be broken sometimes) is to use the "Rule of Thirds" to set the focus of your picture's attention. This involves dividing the pic into thirds horizontally and vertically, and trying to place the picture's focus (for instance, your face) at one of the intersections of the horizontal and vertical grid. So, for instance, in the last picture i posted here, you can see that my face, and specifically my mouth, correspond with the upper right-hand intersection. It creates more interest in the picture, although, again, I think it can be overused (and I think I do overuse it). 2) Depth of field and shadow can be really important, but be aware that if you are using a really high resolution picture, one that is significantly larger than your screen resolution (my pics are usually 4999px or 6000px wide), the expanded size will severely weaken the effect of DoF and shadow blur. I ramp both up significantly (esp. shadow blur, which I use all the time, and which I generally manually set at 12 or 16), knowing that the actual effect when it appears on the saved image will be much less pronounced that it appears in my viewer. 3) I don't use Windlight nearly as often or so well as I should, but one thing I sometimes do is set the scene to Ambient Dark in the presets. This effectively eliminates any ambient light, leaving just local lights working: it allows me more control over the precise lighting and shadow, using projectors and non-projector lights. Remember too that you can change the time of day in Windlight, and adjust the angle of the sun/moon, so that shadows are cast in different directions. 4) Two settings in Phototools that it's easy to forget, but that can make a difference, are under the "General" tab. LoD, or Level of Detail, adds, yes, more detail to objects, esp. mesh. I try to set it to 4 or so. And Anti-Aliasing, at the bottom, should also usually be set high (I have mine at 16x) so that rough edges on curves and circles are smoothed out a bit. Both of these can impact your computer performance though, so be careful! There are lots of other things too, but that's probably enough from me for now! We really need a separate thread for this kind of thing in the Art, Music, and Photography forum.

Oh, interesting! I didn't know that. I'll stand by my basic point though: all of these instances are specifically about wearing a uniform, and doing so to impersonate either a soldier or veteran. That said, I note that the US law is specifically about impersonating someone who has received a military award with fraudulent intent to gain. However one wishes to parse these specifics, I am still convinced that there are some very real and tangible differences between how the US feels about its military, and how most of the rest of the world does. I don't mean to imply a value judgement in suggesting that: it's just a cultural difference that explains, I think, the response of non-Americans in this thread.