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!ltmoda!
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How many of you have ever played Bloodlines? How many have you heard of? Well, it's been so many years for SL users to enjoy this role-playing system and after just as many years, Bloodlines is back with great news. The game is complex and, if taken seriously, very competitive. There are hundreds of Clans with their vampires, werewolves and humans trying to increase the prestige of their family.
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However in recent years the popularity of this game had slipped into the shadows, certainly the loyal players have never abandoned it but objectively the lights of the spotlights were turned off because of the lack of novelty or new proposals that followed the "change" of SL. The game system is always very current and full of rules, potions, things to learn and to teach to new members, but there was something that had to be changed. The mesh, as we all know, has revolutionized everything on our SL, has improved many aspects of graphics, has been able to give vent to so much creativity, especially with the Bento system. All of this progress has not been followed or evolved from the Bloodlines game, at least until today.
Why Sansar is a new experience? The answer is simple: the regions and the tiny lands are designed to be explored with a much better graphics than ever before, and most of all, the environment is almost realistic. My humble judgment is positive for those who, like me, want to enjoy the beauty of virtual places as a result of fantasy, artistic extravagance, and the commitment of those who built that land.
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Browsing for socials I came across a great news from the Bloodlines team! They announced that the new HUD was available, with major changes not only in terms of system but also in graphics and accessories, including new bento-enabled mesh vampire fangs and lycan claws, and a new attachment we call The Nexus Object. But... what is The Nexus Object? The functionality that existed prior to today in the claws and fangs is now in the Nexus, and claws and fangs are now just cosmetic attachments used for effect. The Nexus Object will be used from now on to hold your custom Bloodlines bite and claw animations. In the process of upgrading, you will need to move any custom animations from your old fangs and claws into your Nexus.
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I suggest you try to sign up and try it in person. In this article I want to thank June Trekins (and I invite you to search for her photos on Flickr) for the photos she shot in Sansar. (Unfortunately my Internet connection fails to support the minimum required! Sigh!) In the same issue of this month you can find more information about sansar, I just have to leave you reading and curiosity! JANUARY 2018
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The Nexus Object will also be important in our upcoming RPG expansion, and this update can be considered a preliminary update to that expansion! It will also be possible to leave suggestions and ideas to the staff to propose new quests and new expansions of the game to make the gaming experience more dynamic and more engaging! Who knows what the future holds with Bloodlines? All this seems to be very interesting and these novelties can only bring back this beautiful role-playing game. If you've never played or if you're new to SL, my advice is to visit their site or their headquarters. Happy bites!
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Aries
Love is like a box of martial arts: you neve
Taurus
A Valentine's Day is likely to bring-out yo ter than a giant hollow chocolate heart.
Gemini
A Listen to your partnera's sexual needs t
frigid, or the one thatas's into choking an
Cancer
A The next time you do a random Google s
make Larry Flint blush, remember that you
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er know who you're gonna hit.
our sensual side. Just remember that intimate touch is bet-
this Valentinea's Day a they may not like the twin thata's
nd hair-pulling.
search for Disney characters and see photos that would
ur partner told you to turn on Safe Search for a reason.
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Leo
A This Valentinea's Day, let your partner
love getting their asses scratched, but th
Virgo
A This month, the universe begs you to und
and they dona't need to follow a Medical
Libra
A Ah, the scales of love: bullets weigh mo
and divorce is almost as common as death
Scorpio
A To you, intimate relationships are like
else, including your partner, Scorpios a
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r know that Lions are like big kitty cats and lobbyists: they
heya's ll bite your hands off if you stop feeding them.
derstand that your partner isna't as detail oriented as you,
l Safety Data Sheet before having sex with you.
ore than wedding rings, weddings cost more than funerals,
h. Happy Valentinea's Day!
e Russian Military Experiments on Telekinesis. To everyone
are just good in bed.
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Sagittarius
A Some say love is war. Your ruling plane
feelings and bombs. What you choose to ex tion.
Capricorn
A Goats may stay in the same relationship th
authorities on love. Consider facing reali
Aquarius
A This month, cosmic energies remind you th
not all ephilanthropica organization lea
Pisces
A Everyone knows that you idealize your
ward the next shiny turd. Next time, keep in m
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et, Jupiter, disagrees: ita's more like an overabundance of
xpress and detonate depends on your prescription medica-
heir entire lives, but just like Hillary Clinton, theya're not
ity instead of selfishly embracing your need for "power".
hat not all acquaintances are potential sex partners and
aders are honest: theya're people too.
r partners, and when they dona't live up to it, you swim to-
mind that you can only dress-up a starving artist so much.
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We are finally in February, the month of love. This is the perfect moment to wear something red, white, pink to amaze our partners and that's why, by exploring the grid, I want to offer you this Hunt offered by Brii Underground.
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This Hunt is active throughout February, so you still have several days to get your prizes. Like last month I want to present some outfits that you can find and get for only 2L$. The prizes to be found are 21, an excellent diversion to enrich your inventory with something very cute and sexy, complete with all the accessories such as necklaces, bracelets and shoes! The outfits offered by Brii Underground are simple but tasteful, suitable not only for Valentine's Day but also for a sensual look.
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This Hunt is difficult but not impossible, in fact, the Store provides a list with all the necessary Hints, so... have patience and sharpen the sight!
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Why don't you start telling us about you, your expirience on SL and the how’s and why’s you became a creator?
more time exploring this world, the wonderful sim creations, the social side ... the shopping ! oh god the shopping lol.
Well, my first avi on SL was back in 2007 and I actually joined because I have a somewhat geeky interest in the whole idea of virtual worlds and creating computer generated landscapes and environments. When I first came to SL I really had no idea about the whole "social" side of things here, and much less about about the commercial activities of creators. I kind of saw it as a canvas on which to build a kind of playground. I had ideas of designing my own little peice of the world - i already had a hobbyist background in 3d design, and saw SL as exactly the kind of platform i had been searching for to unleash my creative and imaginative leanings.
Of course back then we thought a flexi prim skirt and shoes with invisiprims were the height of realism and i made a few of those kind of outfits for my own enjoyment, and eventually did what i think everyone in SL has a crack at at some point and that was i opened my own club. Being me, i decided to build it myself - it wasnt an elegant build by any standards, but for a while i managed to afford (with a couple of friends) to rent a whole sim, which i terraformed and landscaped, with the club and a beach which enjoyed a bit of popularity for a while. All the while of course, my main enjoyment was the actual design and building - I taught myself how to design raw terrain files and experimented with different sim designs and at one stage had a "sim surround" city which i built out of megaprim sculpties.
I very soon ran into the hurdle of how much it was going to end up costing me to have enough land to even begin to realise a little part of my dream and for a while i spent more time exploring this world, the
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All of this was for me own fun though, I never considered the idea of actually creating things for others to use, SL was my playground but over time (and we are still talking around 2009-2010 here) began to feel more and more limiting as newer technologies emerged and Sl seemed to be failing to keep up. I took some time out, turning my creative energies back to 3D modelling and rendering, something that SL prims and sculpties couldnt hold a candle to, and when I came back to SL with my new avi (my current avi) i came back just for the social life and diversions. I danced and shopped my way round the grid, for the first time actually experiencing SL as an alternative life rather than just a 3D space to manipulate. I messed around outside SL with my computer art, models and videos, and rarely did anything creative in SL which seemed so limited and dated by this time. Then, of changed.
course,
everything
With the advent of 3d mesh support in SL, suddenly the whole world of creativity was opening up again. Suddenly I was immersed again. Not only could I start to experiment with real models on the grid, but also, and very suddenly, the clothing creators were making amazing mesh clothes ... ok, you had to deform your shape and alpha out half of your body to wear them, but hey .. so now, i was wearing the latest mesh fashions, and trying to figure out how to optimise external builds to look half decent in world. It was a steep learning curve - how to optimise things built in Blend-
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er to not be 3000 prims heavy when you got them inworld, how to bake decent textures, from externally built scenes, how to build the damn physics so you didnt either fall through floors or have your whole building inside an invisible force field ... and it wasnt helped by the fact that the new mesh clothes were looking so good that i just had to keep on dancing and shopping at every opportunity .... but I played and played with the new technologies, built myself a few more nice environments and buildings, I had my 3d interactive playground back. Then, of course, things started moving very fast indeed ... rigged mesh, fitmesh, mesh bodies, mesh heads .... bento ...! By this point, I felt there was no way I was going to keep up with the new technologies - I just wanted to enjoy looking so amazing in SL, it was hard to believe how different the avis now looked from the old days. I'd tried my hand at a bit of SL photography a few years before, I do a bit of it in RL as well and seem to have a bit of a knack for "seeing" a good composition. but I'd been frustrated in the past at the "cartoony" look of the avatars and particulary at the creases and folds in the body and around the face which just made the photos look so "unreal". That all changed with mesh heads ... i love doing closeup portraits - with a mesh head, a great skin, and a little creative work on the windlight and graphics settings, suddenly i could create amazing lifelike portraits ... my building efforts took an aside as i rediscovered my love of SL photography.
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For the last year I have spent my time learning the ins and outs of the graphics engine, the tweaks of windlight and the advanced lighting model and honing my photography skills. Interestingly, the side product of this was having to teach myself how to create poses, and using the avastar plug-in for blender i started to build myself a library of poses for my photography. My partner, friends, and social life in SL, along with my photography have absorbed me over the last year, but again i found myself wanting to make stuff. I'd had a few thoughts about maybe opening up a store to sell some of my photo poses, and also a few gadgets i had scripted to help myself with some of my photography, but I really wanted to feel again the sense of achievement from creating a beautiful object and i decided to really motivate myself to make something and see it through to a professional finish for inworld. It's actually much harder to create something that looks good inworld than in an external 3D program. You don't have the luxury of waiting hours for a beautiful render, since SL has to render everything 40-50 times a second, you also have to be very careful about how much detail you put in and get the balance of all that right. so I set myself the challenge of making something i could feel proud of. I thought about maybe making a piece of furniture, or an ornament, or vehicle and i started trawling the web for pics of something i could make ...
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Recently you released some videos and photos about an animation where your avatar was playing the violin! Where did that idea come from? Was it hard to achieve?
this as a photo-prop i needed to actually have a pose to go with it. I went back to google and found some pics of people playing violins and built a pose for my avatar. I uploaded it, took my photograph and posted it to flickr and fb.
Music has always had a big part in my life, i've played guitar and keyboard since i was very young, and do love listening to a variety of genres. I was looking around the web for inspiration for somthing i could build, maybe to use as a prop for my photography and I found myself looking at guitar blueprints and all manner of other instruments when suddenly the detailed plans of a stradivari violn jumped out at me.
I was kind of shocked at the response i got. The photo of me holding the violin (I hadnt even built the bow yet) on my flickr feed remains to this day my most "faved" pic and the response i got both there and on fb was overwhelmingly "where can i buy this violin?"
Building the violin was a very satisfying experience for me. I hadnt put as much care into any of my modelling projects before, but i was motivated this time to make something that i could make look good in SL, my first goal, to make a prop for my photography. I can be somewhat OCD with my approach to modelling. It didnt just have to look like a violin, it had to have the exact measurements, the exact arch to the belly, the exact curve to the scroll on the headstock that was there in the 16th century plan i was working to. that may have caused me to make something that is less efficient in SL that in could be, but I have the satisfaction of knowing it is totally accurate and that was something very important to me.
Well I could have just stopped there and sold the instrument and pose as a photo prop, but as you'll probably guess by now i needed to go the whole way. So i found and studied a couple of videos of people playing and built the 30 second playing animation. Throwing into the mix my interest in video making, that pretty much took me to where we are now .... the video i posted on facebook of my avi playing the violin got so many "wow"'s and shares and people asking where they could buy it that i realised that it was finally time, after more than 10 years in SL, to open up a store and actually try selling something !
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Are you working alone or maybe with a team? If not, how did you achieved those majestic skills? You're very kind with yoru compliments ... I just work on my own, and as I said previously most of the skills surrounding this stem from things that have interested me for many years - over time i have taught myself the basics of 3d modelling, texturing, key frame animation, photography and viseography, basically because i just find these technologies so interesting, it was always just a hobby - getting to the point of actually creating and selling something in SL wasnt my original goal, but the advancing technology in SL and the enthusiasm of friends who saw what i was working on motivated me to try and go that extra mile to push my grasp of these concepts to a level that could produce an outcome that people would like to share in. This is your first creation and it's amazing, you made a terrific entry as a new creator. What else is in the pot? Are you planning singers poses, piano, or guitar’s? Again, thank you for the lovely compliment. I'm certainly not planning on stopping now, the whole act of bringing something from an idea to a finished creation is a wonderful feeling. I have aready had requests to follow up the violin with a cello and this seemed a reasonable next step since the models are (at least superficially) very similar, so that is what I am working on right now, the model is almost complete and then i face a new set of chal-
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lenges for the animations, since by its nature, this intrument will not be attached to the avatar like the violin is, but rather the avatar will "sit" on it, or on a chair, which requires a slightly different approach to the animation plus the overhead of actually having to rez the instrument inworld so I need to be very aware of the Land Impact. Guitars are a big interest for me, and I think something along those lines may be my next project, I also have a few ideas for adjustable drum kits and maybe some brass and woodwind instruments. A microphone with singing poses is also something there in my mind, but I'm not necessarily going to limit myself to musical instruments, I have a lot of ideas for things which will look good for photography as well as for perfoming artists and I have a number of other "gadgets" (not necessarily animations or models) that I would love to work on. Of course, time is the big limiting factor. I have an active SL outside of my modelling and photography, and a fairly busy RL outside of my SL, so we shall have to see how far through this list I manage to get, but I am certainly enjoying this process at the moment and hope to put a number of new creations into my store as time allows. thank you so much for your interest in my work and my story, it has been quite an insight for myself to actually think through this story and see where i've come from and imagine where i might be headed with it.
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