Scylla Rhiadra

That slight hint of bitter almond? It contains a dash of Amoretto! No, really!

As Roxy has already said, this is a lovely pic! (And I want what you're wearing.) It's lovely that you've taken the leap and posted! Yay you! (Did I mention that I want what you're wearing?)

Awwwwww . . . 🙂

You didn't by any chance have something to do with Catrie's unfortunate demise, did you?

Maybe I could have found something more interesting to paint? Naaaah.

Absolutely. Of course, I get a bit of a rush when people like my pictures, but in the final analysis, my pics are for me. That, and the fact that I actually just enjoy the process of planning, setting up, taking, and polishing photographs. The portraits and fashion shots of my avatar are really just a complement to the process of dressing up and making my avatar look nicer. A pic with dramatic lighting and a nice composition is really kind of the same as buying an attractive outfit: it makes my avi more fun to look at. And in some ways, the more sort-of-narrative pics are a way of using photographs to make my own adventures. I regret now not having more pics from the "old days" in SL. (I had more, but some just disappeared in the hard drives of broken computers.) I'd like to have photographic memories of my time in SL now.

Oh yes, I totally forgot to mention this. Vital photo-editing tools: brightness/contrast, saturation, curve adjustment, cropping, blur, and, of course, wine.

Elora, your place looks lovely! The light here is lovely, but my favourite bit is the horse at the bottom right. It reminds me of the way in which seemingly random animals and human figures are sometimes shown at a distance in 16th- and 17th-century landscapes. (I've been thinking about doing something like that too, perhaps with human figures.)

This is gorgeous!!! I love the angle, and the slope of the hill! (The sheep are pretty cute too.)

Yep! Pretty much exactly the same process!

I almost never post pics that haven't been at least minimally processed through PS. Probably a third of the time, that might be nothing more than a crop (I always crop), an adjustment of brightness/contrast and saturation, and maybe smoothing a few ragged edges. Another third of the time, I might "repair" something that went wrong with the mesh -- hair cutting through something, alpha glitching, and so on. And maybe a third of the time, I do something pretty radically transformative. I think a key point is that post-processing doesn't produce "good" pictures. It makes good pictures -- ones that were well composed, lit, and so forth, in-world -- a bit better. And maybe it makes poor pictures a little less awful, although probably not. Producing a "good" picture is, in any case, almost a marginal goal. The real point of the pics here, for me, is to clothe the names and voices with a visual that makes the people here more substantial and real. I love being able to fit a face to a name or a post.

I've got some time, probably, this summer. Maaaaaaybe. You'd suggest starting with the beta 2.8?

Tempting . . .

Betcha I can guess who. I've never blocked anyone, although I've been tempted . . . primarily by the person whom I think Rhonda has blocked.

I checked it out: it's part of the same shop (I think? Sort of fetish wear?), but the parcel itself is now a gothic graveyard. Quite well done, in a sort of a campy way, if you like that kind of thing! But definitely not the same setup!

Clicking on the picture downloads the image, rather than taking me to your Flickr, but that's fine! I am sure I can find it on your page! And what kind of MONSTERS block Flickr???? /me shakes head sadly at the inequities of life

Such a great pic, Lil! Did you have to use your own Windlight, or was that the region default? It'll be really interesting to see how EEP changes landscape pics -- once it's actually fully supported by our viewers (and the stars no longer look like tennis balls that have been rolled through the muck).

I think the way that I started the process was to decide from the outset how tall I wanted to be (1.8m I think), divide that by 7.5 (for seven and a half head-heights), and use the resulting number to determine my head size. Then I went on to calculate everything else based on that . . . making the necessary adjustments as I went along.

Thank you! I'm going to drop by. I'm sure you have nicer restaurants (featuring a more accommodating maître d'hôtel)!

So, apparently you need a "reservation" to eat at Cochon in New Orleans? Pffffft.

Wow. See if I ever provide a SLURL again! You just make me look bad! Absolutely GORGEOUS shot!!

I used to be a SL bookseller, and some of the "books" I sold were notecard-based (contained within sculptie books). I don't think there's a big market for that, tbh. A slightly better route to go is the old "Intellibook" system, with books that you can read as a HUD, as well as in the form of scripted in-world objects. They are more fun to use, but laggy and (relatively) expensive to produce, because they are built from textures. In practice, though, most people prefer to read in their browser, whether it's the SL in-viewer one, or Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Whatever. I'd strongly recommend a blog. You'll get a much greater reach that way. And, if this is what you want, you can also potentially monetize it should your readership grow to the point that it is feasible to attract advertisements. There are, of course, a ton of SL blogs out there, but if you're good enough, you can attract a sizable audience. (Witness, for instance, Strawberry Singh's success!)

Well, I think it's a ways in the future. But I recently revisited Google Earth, and was kind of astonished by how far it's advanced in terms of 3D renderings of real places. And that's only going to improve with time. Meanwhile, work on 3D rendering of virtual environments and avatars is also leaping forward: think about what the introduction of mesh to SL has done to the look and feel of the place in the span of about 6 years. When those two things converge -- and I think they will, eventually -- watch out. You and I will be able to meet for gossip and a cafe au lait in my favourite little bistro on the Left Bank in Paris!

This. Except Gabriele neglected to mention that it also makes half of us nauseous after about 15 minutes. I don't think it's just the tech that's the problem. I'm reasonably confident that at some point -- 5 years? 10 years? -- computing devices that can handle high quality VR will be readily and cheaply available, and headsets will be much lighter, more compact, and less inhibitive. I don't think that's going to make a difference: this kind of dedicated VR space is never going to take off in a big way. And the reason for that is the same as the reason that FB became huge and SL did not. Most people don't want to represent as something that is unlike how they see themselves in RL, and they don't, generally, want to hang out in places that don't "really" exist. They want to be "themselves," but better. Which is to say, augmented rather than virtual reality. I've said this before I think, but I'll say it again (and you can remember this and in 10 years hail me as the Tech Visionary that I, at least, know that I am): the real future of social tech will be in a combination of VR and AR built around something like Google Earth, where you can meet with augmented and prettified versions of your friends (or coworkers, or clients, or what-have-you) in a virtual environment that faithfully reproduces, rather than mimics, RL, and using video "avatars" that are actually based on our RL bodies and appearances (but nicer, if we want them to be). Sort of like Hangouts, but with fully body rendering and motion capture in 3D, using Instagram-like filters, and employing Google Earth-ish renderings of real places.

Curiously, I had a somewhat similar issue with FS a few days ago. It didn't really affect my appearance, but for some reason the viewer insisted that I wear a second copy of my mesh body along with the one that was part of whatever outfit I changed into. And it would not let me remove the extra mesh body. Ordinarily I've found that when I am inadvertently wearing two copies of the same thing, it's not a big deal, and (while it sends my complexity skyrocketing) it doesn't really change my appearance dramatically. In this case, however, I couldn't adjust the alpha cuts on the second copy of the body, with the result that there was all manner of bits of my sticking out of my clothing. Not an attractive look. Fortunately, I was able to fix it with a simple relog. Not sure if the problem was FS or something else, though.