Lore

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In case you’ve missed it, it was Second Life’s 21st birthday the other day, and there’s a month of celebrations and events happening.

Of course, one of the big events is the Shop & Hop, which unbelievably covers twenty four regions with over 480 creators this year!  Just as well for the girls at FabFree (more on this in a sec) or you’d be wandering around for weeks!

This is the first giftie I want to show you.

This short sleeved dress is sized for Lara, Lara Petite, Legacy, Legacy Perky, Reborn, Peach, Kupra, Khara, Belleza Gen X, and Gen X Curvy.

It has a HUD with a very nice selection of abstract floral patterns, some subtle like the one I’m wearing, some much more bright, for a total of twelve in all, so you’re sure to find something you like.

The chain belt is a separate object, and is sized for the major bodies mentioned above.  It also has a twelve color selection.

Now, a big thank you! must go out to the girls at FabFree for getting early access to the Shop & Hop and putting together a comprehensive spreadsheet of all the gifts on offer, including photos of most of them!  For all 450+ stores.  What a fantastic effort!  You can find the spreadsheet via the FabFree SL21B post on their website.  I highly recommend it!

Mirrors!

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Back in 2016, I faked a mirror in SL with photographic post processing trickery.  It didn’t look that great, but at the time, there were no real mirrors in any virtual world (or any video game) as far as I knew.  Now SL has real time, dynamic mirrors!

Currently, mirrors are only supported in the official SL viewer, however, as I compile Firestorm for myself, and the “Materials Featurette” release was just merged into Firestorm’s source code repository, here’s a first look from the upcoming Firestorm!

As you can see, while impressive (it’s even more impressive when you see it update in real time!), it’s still not perfect.  There are obvious “bevel” effects around the edges.  Before I blame FS/SL for this too much, I must note that this is the first mirror I’ve created and I understand that there might be some level of fiddling with the reflection probe to get it to look just right.

But never mind the imperfections, it’s here, and it’s amazing 🙂

Update: Resizing the reflection probe eliminated the bevel effect.

So yes, play around with these to get the hang of them.  Also do realize that mirrors are expensive in terms of performance.  I run frame limited at 75 FPS (which I hit all the time in the upcoming FS) and switching Mirror Resolution to 2048 in graphics preferences dropped my framerate to 17 FPS.

Exothic

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For those of you still building up your Lara X wardrobe like me, a FREE gift that fits is most appreciated!

This bikini is a FREE group gift from Blonde Queen, and their group is FREE to join.

The top and bottoms are separates and there are size for Lara, Lara X, Reborn, and Legacy, with additional top sizes for Lara Petite, Lara X Petite, Legacy Perky, and Reborn Waifu.

There are two other color combinations in the pack as well, a red/orange and a teal/yellow.  These come as separate objects instead of a HUD.

Deya

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This outfit is a FREE group gift for members of FabFree, which is of course free to join.

The bra and skirt are separates.  The skirt comes in sizes for Lara, LaraX, Legacy, Reborn, Erika, GenX Classic and Curvy, and Kupra, and there are additional bra sizes for Lara Petite, LaraX Petite, Legacy Perky, and Waifu.

Hair Fair 2024

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Hair Fair, one of my favorite yearly events, is open!  The event covers six regions, and is chock full of the very best hairstylists in SL.  There are event exclusives, discounted items, and even some gifts for you to find.

Rush over and have a look!  The event runs until the 16th of June, and benefits Wigs For Kids, with a percentage of most items being donated (or you can donate at a kiosk, and don’t forget to buy a bandana).

No Match is offering this wonderful gift that I picked up to show you.  I’ll have to return tomorrow to browse all the booths!

This inverted bob is certainly my style!  It’s unrigged and also comes with a resize script.  The base HUD has thirty six colors and there are two other HUDS – ombré and unicorn – with twenty four more colors!

And, if that’s not enough, the hair is modify, so you can tint it to get the color just as you like.  I do this for hairs that let me so I can get close to my RL color.

The creator has also been thoughtful enough to include matching hairbases for all the base colors in both classic BoM and EvoX, which are also mod.  This is a very nice gift!  Don’t miss out!

Did I use enough exclamation marks?

Hemera

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You’ll have to run for this one!  It’s (nominally) on as a Fifty Linden Friday item, but the vendor is not in the FLF group, so it may be available for more than just the few hours left until midnight at the time of posting this.  Good luck!

This is not my usual style, but I really wanted to grab it as it’s PBR enabled, and I wanted to show you just how good PBR can make things look if it’s done right!

All the gold reflections are not textured on, but are true reflections achieved with the new texture and rendering system.  This environment is [TOR] SUNSET – Buccaneers of the coast.  If I switch it to something like Orac – green, you guessed it, all the reflections would be green!

I shot this in the pre-release version of Firestorm that “supports” PBR, which you can get by joining the Phoenix Firestorm Preview Group (or self compile the viewer like I do… join the group, it’s far easier hehe).

Beq Janus from the FS team posted yesterday about where the FS devs are with PBR support in Firestorm.  While her article sounds positive, there are still glitches (to be fair, she acknowledges this in the article).  I had to twiddle lights and graphics settings multiple times to get this to work.  We shall see if things improve after the Materials Featurette release drops.

OK, enough drooling over PBR, back to the outfit!

The back wings and small harness they are connected to are separate from the main bodysuit.  There are sizes for Lara, Lara Petite, Legacy, Legacy Perky, and Reborn.  There are two color choices at the store, this and a full black version.  Other colors are available, but are not included in the L$50 deal.

BeSpoke Faun

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This is a slightly scary one.  The mythology around fauns is filled with stories of them playing tricks on humans, and being indifferent to the results, as long as they get a chuckle or get what they want.  If you’ve ever seen the movie “Pan’s Labyrinth”, you’ll know what I mean.

At The Warehouse Sale, there’s a FREE gift for members of the FabFree group from BeSpoke, who describe themselves as “a collective of artists, deviants, and makers”.  If you’ve not seen their work before, it tends to lean very much to the darker side, as do most of the items available at this event.   This free Bento faun head is no different.

There are dozens of items in the pack, including two female and two male heads to support both SLUV and EvoX mapping, female and male skins and starter shapes, eyes, addons such as the black nose and deer dots makeup I’m wearing here, and the horns.

The HUD is extensive, and it has all the usual options you’d expect with a modern head, including HD texturing for lips, eyes, eye shadow, and brows, various teeth types (I’m not showing you those, some of those really are scary), a load of static and non-static face animations, normal mapping for some facial features, and more.

I took the head parameters from the starter shape and modified a copy of my usual body shape accordingly.  The settings I used were all the default ones in the head’s starter shape with the exception of the mouth width and lip fullness, both of which I dialed down to make the mouth smaller, which to my eye suits the pointed chin far better.

The only tiny issue is the head has a slight halo that shows up against transparent backgrounds (you can see it in the second photo), but for FREE, this is a wonderful gift if you’d like to dip your toes into fantasy RP, or play the darker side of furry.

Oh, and if you’d like to look slightly more human, there are human style eyes in the kit instead of the goat eyes 🙂

Tita

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This is a FREE gift for members of the teleporthub.com group.  This group costs L$10 to join, and gives you access to a large number of FREE gifts from creators all over the grid.

This is actually quite an old gift that I must have missed when it came out back in February of last year.  Never mind, I’ve found it now!

Sizes include Lara, Lara Petite, Legacy, Legacy Perky, Reborn, Kupra, and Kupra Kups.  It’s also probably tight enough to be worn with jeans.

Included is a HUD to texture the bottom and top of the suit separately.  There are two types of fishnet for the bottom, or you can choose opaque.  All three choices are in both black and white.  For the top section, you can choose from eight plains and patterns.

The suit also comes with another HUD to choose from a selection of phrases to be displayed on the turtleneck collar, if that’s your thing.

Zee

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At the Très Chic event, one of the FREE gifts you can pick up are these rather amazing thigh high boots.  The sparkles are animated and you can switch them and the materials on and off via the provided HUD.  They come sized for Lara X, Reborn, and Legacy.

I kept them, because, you know, they’re shiny!  But I didn’t think I’d even wear them with anything, having seen the matching dresses at another event last week and deciding such, shall we say, “sequined extravagance”? was not worth the asking price for what would probably be a one-off wear.

But!  Announced in the creator’s group today, the matching silver dress is on sale on her marketplace store for L$90 but only until Satuday (SLT).  This is a significant discount from the price that was asked at the event last week.  So I bought it 🙂

There are sizes for Lara X, Legacy, Reborn, and Waifu.