Leftover Soup fanart of Maxine Hellenberger

I've been following the web comic Leftover Soup for about a year. The artist is running an end-of-year invitation for fanart of the comic. So here is my interpretation of Maxine Hellenberger as an avatar in Second Life.

First video.

Second video.

Pictures below the cut.

Tura has built an art gallery.

The Mondrian-Johnson Gallery of Modern Art.

The theme for the B2B competition build in July 2014 was to make a building based on the architecture of Philip Johnson and the art of Paul Mondrian.

I knew something of Mondrian's art, but I had never heard of Philip Johnson. So I went to Google Images for inspiration. I didn't really get an impression of a single style running through his oeuvre, but I eventually found motifs in some of his works that tickled my brain.

Tura does not have nearly as much time as she would like for SL projects.

Since last time, I've done some weight-painting, mirrored the half-harness, uploaded it to SL, and worn it, with the results in the picture.  The modelling and weighting need a lot of work still, but the basic workflow all works.

This is a first draft of half of the harness. I shall probably redo this completely at some point, but for the moment, after mirroring it to make the whole thing the next step will be to learn how to rig it and import it to SL.

I made this by starting with a rectangle as the cross-section of the strap, and extruding it inch by inch over the avatar's surface, painstakingly positioning and rotating the new end. There is a snap-to feature in Blender that lets me snap the strap-end to the avatar surface, but it only works on one vertex at a time. I found it didn't help much so I turned it off.  Maybe there's a faster way (automatic extrusion of a cross-section along a smooth curve?) but I haven't found one.

Even with a three-button mouse, a Space Navigator, a full-size keyboard, and a 30" display, it still feels like using one of those fairground machines where you have to manipulate a claw to pick up a stuffed toy. I have a long way to go to get to this level.

And now for something completely different.

Fae Varriale's build at LEA6.

What a friendly tree!

Tura is learning to make mesh.

After completing the harness sculpt from last time with the mirror image shoulder strap, it fitted well, until I raised my arms to shoulder height. Then my shoulders poked right through the straps. Just walking around made the waist belt bob around most unrealistically. Something like this is only really going to work as mesh. So I downloaded the latest Blender (and noticed how many older versions I had that I'd never used) and googled up some tutorials.