bye bye katmosphere, hello katapult

http://katapultblog.wordpress.com

Here now!!! Now fixed!

 

Had a busy last few days.  Lost the old store due to the landlord having some RL issues and needing to liquidate. But as a fan of silver linings, I now feel like the luckiest person on the grid. I asked Eloh Eliot to move from her old location to join me in a new bigger store and she accepted…

So along with my animations, you can pick up her free open source skins.

Starlight Skins from Eloh Eliot

(Eloh is out of town this weekend so her old landmarks are still in the skins, so make sure you save a copy of the new one, I’ve also put a pushpin below them to give out the new landmark.) For more information on editing the PSD’s or AI or Gimp files, please see: http://sites.google.com/site/another/support/starlight

As for new stuff this week from Katmosphere: I love Halloween. So I’m starting early this year.  I made a hunchback/Igor/Walk-this-way/hurt leg walk with a dragging leg.  I’ve put it out for $99L until halloween. Should have some more couple poses and poses in the Halloween theme later this week.

Zombie Walk / Injured Leg 99L until Halloween

Another Skin & Katmosphere are located at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Schreckhorn/78/171/61

 

Cheap rent

I was extremely lucky when I went searching for land in Second Life; I found a decent place to rent with a decent landlord. I had a great eight month run in Schrek. Today I came back from my walk to find everything boxed up and moved out. I was a bit annoyed at not getting any advanced notice but these things happen I suppose.

So I’m looking for a new place to put down my roots and hope to have the store up and running soon. I’ve already got a friend to host my xstreetsl magicbox so most everything is available there. Not that buying animations unseen is a fun prospect.

I want to talk to a couple friends of mine and see about maybe doing something a bit bigger than the last store. So hopefully I’ll have big news tonight or tomorrow.

 

Lucky chairs

I took a couple nights and added some security and a few more features to my prize chair. I need to hit up a couple of my friends to test them out in more places then I think it will be ready for public usage.

 

Gimmie some skin

Go here now

http://eloheliot.blogspot.com/

 

Kat can’t dance

So I never really bothered making many poses because I never sold that many, If something struck my fancy I’d make it. Well that’s really true of everything in the store.

Friend showed me a website of “cute Asian poses” and I had to make them, the only problem is how dependant they are on hand position. So I have a couple versions of some of them up.

I also made my first dance. it was a lot more challenging than anything else I have done. Making it look like dancing and not an seizure was a lot more difficult than anticipated.

So like 16 new poses and a dance, I also scripted up some new vendors as the menu ones were getting a bit hard to navigate. And a sit. I guess I get creative in spurts.

 

Setting up Poser for Second Life

Setting up Poser to work initially with Second Life is a bit of a pain.

So, mostly for me. Here are the steps.

Get the secondlife avatar files. Avatar files here

Copy that folder into poser. Usually the location is c:\programs\e frontier\poser\runtime\libraries\character

Now you can select the SL character as you figure. I would setup a file with the default t-pose and one degree of movement so I don’t bother every time.

As for lacking at updates. I’ve been lazy and not done anything lately, but I do have a few new animations in the work. And a couple I have put out.

 

Boobs

Just got out of Qarl Linden’s office hours and flexible sculpties should be coming our way soon…I fear the flexi breast/dong invasion.

 

You Feeling Lucky Punk?

So I always hate standing around lucky chairs waiting to see what the letter is. Seems like they rez painfully slow. I figured out a solution a couple nights ago and have been merrily scripting away to unleash the Katmosphere Prize Chair on SL.

I also hate standing around so I also added a “bribe” option to give oneself more chances.

I hope to have them filled in the next day or two while I put the finishing touches on the animation I plan on giving away.

Well – I started writing this and then saved the draft. Here at the shots of the animations. I think they turned out ok..The top one is in a box for 25L between the two prize chairs, the bottom two are each in a chair.

 

Editing another skin skin file.

For those of you coming from Eloh’s site…Thanks for the visit I know, you were all expecting the first tutorial to be by Eloh. But then we got talking about how having someone with absolutely no artistic ability might be a better choice to write up a “how to.” And my thought was let the professional work on professional stuff…Or drink.

So for this tutorial, I’ll go into how to change your eyeshadow color, your skin tone a bit, and the lips.

If you are not coming from Eloh’s site…the first step is to download the head template. (http://sites.google.com/site/another/resources)

I’m assuming you have gimp installed and that it’s been 10 months since you last edited a skin and have forgotten most everything. (First step is to upgrade to Gimp 2.6. They made some wonderful changes since 2.4 – I’m not sure what. But people rave about it.

So, now we have gimp 2.6, the face file and you jumped ahead and have a black screen with a lot of text you are going to ignore when you put the skins up for sale. So turn those off those layers by clicking on the eyeballs next to the layers at the top of the list (No don’t delete them…They are there for your protection) (Ctrl-L should bring up the layer menu).

And then scroll down on the layer menu to lip lower 1. Right click on the layer and mouse up to duplicate. Now you have that lip gloss thing going really well. We’re going to need to that extra gloss later…

Now scroll down the layer to “metalic”. Left click once on the layer to select it. Then hit Ctrl-A to select all to be safe. Then go up to Color and select Levels or Curves, whichever you feel more comfortable with (I’ll be using levels because that’s how I learned making halftones.) So Play with the middle slider a bit on each color channel (I’m showing what happens when you only move the red mid-tone slider. I’ll use the red midtone 5.28 value for now. (You are probably going to want to hit reset a lot.) Go ahead and save your file at this point. I suggest “Testhead.xcf” if you are using gimp.

I’m also going to scroll down on the layer menu to freckles and turn that layer off. Lets also scroll down to the bottom and change our base color a bit. Left click on the layer, then ctrl-a to select all. Use the color picker (Highlighted in green below) to grab the skin tone. Then lets bring up the levels again. Lets change all the midpoints this time. Red to .77, green to 1.27, and blue to 1.23. Or we can go into the color picker (Just select this tool and sample the color it should become your new foreground color). Next, double click on the foreground color (the flesh colored box at the bottom of the screenshot). This is how I usually edit my background as I tend to use the same skintone always.

Next up, that lipstick color doesn’t work for me with that skin tone. so lets scroll down to the lips.

The lipstick is on the s.red layer, so save again, then left click on the s.red layer, ctrl-a to select all (Probably not needed, just force of habit for me.) Lets go to the blue channel and change the mid-point to 1.75. Now this looks a bit unnatural. But oh well – we can fix that. We’ll just make it a bit more glossy, so go up to filters, scroll to noise and then do HVS noise, or play with the others. This should give you a nice metallic looking lipstick.

So lets go ahead and save again. Then save as a .tga and merge visible layers, turn off RLE compression and Bottom left is fine.
We probably should have re-sized the image to 512×512 but we can walk around grey to everyone while we load.

Now log into SL and upload the image. I usually create a new skin first by going up to create, selecting new body part then new skin. Go ahead and wear the new skin for that newbie look and feel. Chances are this will look better then our first attempt, then again, maybe not…Now edit appearance and click on skin then head, select the file you just uploaded and voila!