I finally finished the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow, and presented it at MadPea Show and Tell today, temporarily held in a skybox while the sim down below is being remodelled.

Jernberg

Mayfair

I recently chanced on the Mayfair sim, which is the location for the Celoe and Mon Tissu shops. It's modelled on the prosperous London district.

The shops exclusively sell mesh items, primarily clothes, and Mayfair is described as a mesh-only sim, the first in SL. I did detect a few prims in the vendors, but apart from that, I could believe there's not a single prim or sculpt anywhere.

Tura is experiencing mission creep. The cloudhopper balloon is on hold while I work on this:

This is a recreation of the tower of St. Mary-Le-Bow in London, which I built a long time ago, and I'm trying to get into a form that I can exhibit at a Show & Tell. Probably MadPea, as it's heavily scripted and it’s never going to work in the lag at Little Blue Fermi.

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.

Tura is putting off learning to make mesh.

Picture from historylink101.com

I want to make one of these for the cloudhopper balloon. The obvious way is as mesh. That will make it deform appropriately as the avatar moves. The only other way to achieve that would be to make it as system clothing, a mere texture painted onto the avatar. But that wouldn't blend well into the straps the wearer hangs from.