Craving Beauty in Every World

What have I been up to lately? Learning, shopping and lagging.

My trial on AC3D is about to run out. Before it does, I made a vase. :) But I haven't figured out how to turn it into the texture that makes sculpties in SL, so I'll either have to figure out how to do that before it does expire or how to load it into another program.

However, once the trial expires I'm probably done with AC3D. I didn't see anything in it worth throwing $75 down for. After my post on Monday, I did go download Wings3D and I've been watching some tutorials on it since.

I've also been shopping on for my gardening outfit. You know what's hard to find in SL? Gardening gloves. If anyone knows where to find a good pair, let me know!!

I went to the ASA Fashion Show last night, and had every intention of taking pictures and blogging about it... but as always my SL was having a fit and before I could get any of the models to rez enough to make any pictures worthwhile, I crashed. I really, really need an upgrade. :P Still, it was fun watching the prancing gray blobs go by. The crowd was in good spirits and what I could see was stunning.

And, I've been spending far too much time on Sephora! Yes, I shop in the physical world too! Probably more than I should, haha. And I admit, I love make up!! I'm that girl who wants to do everyone's face when we have a girl's night. So, I've fallen in love with Tarina Tarantino and the Sparklicity Pure powder, so I ordered a couple other things to try. So much for all the money I'd have been saving by budgeting myself in SL!! I guess I'm bound to spend money either way, since I use SL to keep myself from going overboard on my own shopping.

I'm going to go watch more tutorials and tell myself I don't need to go to MAC now.

This week's challenge

I've been playing around with my 3D modelling programs and reading up on them the past few days. That's why I haven't been blogging much. I'm working on a post about all of that soon. :)

In the meantime, I wanted to put down my next shopping goal. Spring is on it's way, and to me spring means gardening. So my goal is to create good gardening outfit!

Unfortunately I don't have a yard, so I'll also be working on an indoor garden. :)

Okay, time to shop!

Skirts!

SL and my computer finally decided to get along for a few minutes. :)

I started out this week with the goal of finding something every girl's closet should have at least one of: a swishy, soft skirt. So I sat down on Monday and went through my favorite stores, and pulled out ones worth checking out. And when I think cute and girly, I think DP*Yumyum, so I went to check it out.

I was surprised when I got there, because the store seemed so small! I even checked the creator's profile picks to make sure I was at the main location. I was. And their skirt selection was not only smaller than expected, but... kind of plain.

















There were a couple other skirts there but not what I was looking for. Next stop was a perennial favorite of mine, Cupcakes! I did find a couple cuties there that I was considering for a bit.

















But in the end I thought I could do better. So I headed off to Zaara's. I knew they'd be a little more pricey than I was looking for, but I've seen few places with better soft, swirly skirts. As always I had a hard time leaving empty handed and found another contender.

















I found a few more places with skirts that I liked, but they weren't quite what I wanted. So I went on Xstreet and found a little store called Hanamachi.

















I ALMOST left with one of their skirts. But then something happened.

A very beloved friend whom I've been meaning to get ahold of and haven't yet (shame on me!)commented on here. Which led me back to her blog, which introduced me to a store I wasn't familiar with. As always, Alicia Chenaux is a gamechanger. On her blog I saw a pretty tartan skirt from Bublee Bing and popped over on a whim, and I found love.


















Not only is it prim perfect and gorgeously flowly with lovely textures... it's my FAVORITE COLOR. <3

At L$275 It was a little more than I planned on spending but I got it anyway. It also comes with the other two skirts pictured there, so if I count all three they were L$92 per skirt. Haha. ;P
























Soooopretty. I had to fly out to somewhere with lots of flowers and trees and sky just to do it justice.

So adding in the stipend I forgot to consider and subtracting the other purchases I wasn't supposed to be making, I'm currently at L$1082. I haven't decided what my next quest is but after dancing around in all those flowers I think it might have something to do with gardening. :)

Also worn in the picture:
ruffled camisole from Cupcakes
dirty denim jacket from Magi Take (an ancient group gift)
Shanti in champagne from Maitreya Gold
Skin: Allure smoked in lace from Cupcakes
Hair: Akira from Truth
Poses: Long Awkward Pose (in both)

Yes, I'm a bad blogger.

Yes, I did promise a post and pictures about my skirt shopping experience this afternoon. And yes, it is well beyond afternoon and no, I don't have a post and pictures for you. I have a reason for it though!!

See, my computer is old and basic and doesn't really have the power and the graphics it needs to run SL very well, but I do it anyway. And so, SL and my computer tend to bicker a lot, and sometimes stop talking to each other, which is what they did tonight. After a lot of fuss I finally go SL to come back and talk it over, but they were both still grumpy and wouldn't rez any textures right. I couldn't take pictures of my lovely skirt because someone else's lips were on it half the night.

So, intead I took my laggy, mismatched behind to look for some poses. I figured I could sacrifice a few lindens for a couple poses to make my pictures look nice, and so I wouldn't have to do this entire project hijacking someone's photosphere. I made a pretty good haul, I think.

I went to Long Awkward Pose first, because my always-eager-to-help group told me they were the bomb-diggity for photo poses. I snagged a bag of pretty nice freebie poses and bought about 3 more awesome ones when out of the blue I get the message Penny Dreadful Arcade is closing and almost all of their poses are L$10. (Or you can buy the whole lot of them for L$1000.) I went and picked up a few more. I think overall I spent about L$125, which I consider money well spent. Now my pictures will be pretty!!

On the topic of pictures, that one in my last post has to be the most unposed, unprocessed, unplanned blog picture ever. That was taken on a bench outside my Linden Home, which I don't think even has any poses in it, and went straight onto the blog because I was about to make myself late for work. ;P

And I promise as soon as my ass loads I'll have pictures of my skirt!

I do love my hair....

I had my first impulse buy already. I kinda suck at this "not spending Lindens left and right" thing!

BUT, look at this new hair from Truth, and try to tell me it wasn't worth it!

















I DID find my skirt though and I'll tell you about it this afternoon!

SL is for learning!!

So aside from my current shopping quest (which I will get to!) I've also been considering what I would like to learn about SL. Particularly, about building in SL. I've never done any building. I've thrown a few prims around and played with them, but I have never MADE anything more than funny shapes. One thing I really wanted to do once upon a time was make sculpties. More specifically, I thought it would be fun to make sculpted furniture and jewelry. So, the other day I went on the SL wiki, looked up "sculpty prims" and found a list of programs to learn about. So far I've tried out two with mixed results.

Now. I have never used any 3D-modelling anything before. At all. I didn't even take anything in school that used one, so Blender and it's bretheren are complete strangers to me. And I knew that, and told myself over and over not to expect myself to catch on immediately. However, I've learned in my years of trying to teach myself things that there's only so much you can prepare for not knowing what the hell you're doing.

I'd heard good and bad things about Blender, but mostly that it isn't very beginner friendly, except in that there's a boatload of information on it to be found. I ignored that though (for now) and went to see what else what out there that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg. Especially since I probably wouldn't be able to make even those for a while. What I ended up with was Caligari TrueSpace 7.6. The good news is, it has a set of video tutorials, beginning with the very basics and moving up. The bad news is that isn't enough to save me from myself.

Now, the tutorials use version 7.51, and either there's some little differences between that and the version I have, or I've managed to mess up my settings already. There one little, tiny step in the video that does not happen the same in my program, and it's enough to throw me off. I'm sure most users would be able to fix it fairly easy, but remember these programs and I are complete strangers. How do you do sir, we've never met. So I don't have the slightest idea how to fix this little difference in the "setting up the workspace" process, so I've yet to actually make anything.

During a bout of frustration with that program, I decided to give something different a try. I found one called AC3D and it is quite a bit simpler. There's a menu with some shapes on it. You grab a sphere, you drag it into your window and drop it into your screen, and voila, you have a sphere, which you can then morph and reshape to your hearts content. Or you can select the pen thingie and draw in a profile, then flesh it out. So far I've made more funny shapes and a squashed, lumpy thing that may or may not have been my attempt to make a shoe. However, I only have the trial for two weeks and then I have to fork over $75 to keep it, so my time with AC3D may be limited.

A friend in world said I should try Wings 3D, a beginner-friendly program that is (yay!) free. So once my AC3D fling is finished I'll give it a whirl. :)

I'll go into a little more detail with the programs and post some pictures once I play with them a bit more. :) If anyone has any tips feel free to send them my way! And also if anyone knows of good Photoshop tutorials, I'd love to know about them!! That's the next thing I want to try.

SL is for shopping!!

So I thought about my little self-imposed budget... and decided it was too easy. Between the generous gifts and the current trend for "day sales" (like the Fifty Linden Fridays and it's spinoffs) you can look pretty glam for next to nothing. Which is a great thing in my book!! But... it's still not much of a challenge, and not much worth writing about! So I decided, while I'm doing this little budget, I'll also be on the hunt for some closet staples and signature pieces for my wardrobe. Each week I'll give myself something to find (or readers can send me after things!) and try to stay within a budget in the process. The point isn't to hunt down freebies and sales, although those aren't out of the question either. Just to get some nice items I really like without breaking the bank. :)

This week... well, next week, starting Sunday... my goal is to find a flouncy spring skirt. With my current funds I can give myself L$150 a week. Let's see what we find!