Journal

Sculptie Tool: Plopp SecondLife

5 October 2007

New tool for creating sculpties in Second Life. Plopp: “PloppSL allows you to create intriguing Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™ easily. Both texture and model are created in one step. Simply paint the front and back side of your model and it will be converted to a Sculpted Prim by PloppSL.”

The Piracy Paradox

23 September 2007

James Surowiecki, who wrote the highly recommended Wisdom of Crowds, has a great article in the New Yorker on the economics of the fashion industry and its notably weak intellectual property laws.

The paradox stems from the basic dilemma that underpins the economics of fashion: for the industry to keep growing, customers must like this year’s designs, but they must also become dissatisfied with them, so that they’ll buy next year’s. Many other consumer businesses face a similar problem, but fashion—unlike, say, the technology industry—can’t rely on improvements in power and performance to make old products obsolete. Raustiala and Sprigman argue persuasively that, in fashion, it’s copying that serves this function, bringing about what they call “induced obsolescence.” Copying enables designs and styles to move quickly from early adopters to the masses. And since no one cool wants to keep wearing something after everybody else is wearing it, the copying of designs helps fuel the incessant demand for something new.

While I admit that texture theft in virtual worlds is a different situation I think there are lessons to be learned from how the RL fashion industry handles intellectual property theft. Of course real life fashion designers aren’t happy about companies ripping off their designs either. The smart designers, though, are starting to directly compete with the stores that sell the knock-offs from their couture collections. Vera Wang at Kohl’s? Fantastic. The companies that peddle knock-offs will lose in the face of such strong, established brands.

What can you do?

Build a strong brand: create a cool store experience, design great packaging, build strong relationships with your customers and reward them for their loyalty. Communicate with your customers via in-world groups or something like Subscribe-O-Matic (haven’t used this, so can’t vouch for how good it is). Create a weblog. Get your stuff on onrez and SL Exchange. Keep innovating and creating new stuff. You’re the one with the talent so use it as best you can to beat the thieves. The reality is that they’re not going away.

Second Life is a huge place now, which makes it easier for the thieves to peddle your designs without your knowledge. The great thing about building up a loyal customer base is that they’ll tell you if they see your stolen designs. When that happens, take a deep breath, and handle it in a business-like fashion. Do what you can to handle the thief, informally at first and then via Linden Lab if need be, but don’t let it consume you and don’t let it dishearten you or keep you from working on your next piece, because then the thieves really win: they’ve robbed us all of your next design.

SculptyPaint

16 August 2007

Cel Edman (SL) has created what looks to be a nifty tool for generating sculptie textures called SculptyPaint. It was created using processing and is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux. I’m looking forward to trying it out when I have some free time.

Sculpties + Maya

15 August 2007

My pal Fallingwater Cellardoor has been slaving away creating wonderful things in her secret lab and has posted some great information on creating sculptie shoes in Maya. If you’re a more technicaly inclined designer, head over to her Shiny Things weblog.

Using 3D Tools to Model in Second Life

28 June 2007

Recent news gives promise to the idea that one will be able to model outside the Second Life viewer in a more traditional 3d application and import to the grid. This has always been possible for at least a year with Jeffrey Gomez’ Prim.Blender and Blender, but while Jeffrey’s work is a technical achievement nonpareil, I’m not a fan of Blender and it wasn’t an easy process for complex models.

Recently, though, some projects have been quite encouraging, including, of course, sculptie prims. Even more exciting are some of the complex models that can be created using sculpties and a recently created uber sculptie exporter for Maya: qLab.

Also on the horizon is a new script from TU Delft that will aid in importing complex models from Maya.

The TU Delft Second Life working group has now written an import function for doing this from Maya. So now all technically drawn objects such as buildings or cars can be converted in one go into Second Life.

It’s not clear from the news release (English | Nederlands) if the imported models will be sculptie or prim-based; my sense is that it might be prim-based, which would be a great achievement.

Update: just saw this weblog post from last Autumn over at eightbar about a Sketchup importer. Looks like it’s only useful for very simple models and doesn’t appear to have been enhanced any further. (via Vint Falken).

Photoshop CS3 Extended: SL Clothing Makers' Dream Come True?

3 April 2007

Exciting news for SL fashion designers: Adobe CS3 Extended will contain features that could dramatically change your content creation workflow. According to the Adobe site users will be able to:

Edit existing textures on 3D models directly within Photoshop Extended and immediately see the results. Photoshop Extended supports common 3D interchange formats, including 3DS, OBJ, U3D, KMZ, and COLLADA, so you can import, view, and interact with most 3D models.

From what I can tell, not only will designers be able to preview their designs within Photoshop, but, according to John Nack, Senior Product Manager at Adobe, users will be able to “[Paint] directly on the textures of 3D files & updating the models.”

Right now I personally use external 3d applications to preview and paint textures directly on to models, but it certainly would be great if I could get a lot more of the work done without leaving Photoshop.

I know many of you can’t afford Adobe Photoshop, let alone the extended version, but for those of you who currently use Photoshop for fashion and avatar design in Second Life, you might want to consider the benefits of upgrading your 7, CS, or CS2 to CS3 Extended. Look for more information here once it’s available, and, of course, a tutorial once I get my copy of CS3 Extended.

Creating a Complete Avatar (Part 2)

13 March 2007

On to the clothing! Now that we’ve got the skin taken care of, we’re going to dress Sir Arthur up in some Late Victorian duds. (In case you’re just tuning in, be sure to read Part One.

Ok, actually I first threw together a very simple body skin, primarily to allow for a smooth texture transition between the head and neck textures. This simple skin was combination of shading baked in modo, a color layer in Photoshop, and a layer with a little bit of noise in it for texture.

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