Très Chic is celebrating their 5th Anniversary, with the event opening yesterday, and running until June 10th.
I managed to get in today after only a few attempts. Tip: switch on World->Show Friends Only and cam shop to save yourself from lots of lag. There were approximately 50 avatars present when I visited.
There are lots of FREE gifts which you can pick up just by joining the FREE event group.
This dress and cardigan (the creator calls it a jacket, but I’ve never seen a knit jacket!) are separate pieces, and the dress is quite nice on its own or with the cardigan. Both pieces in this gift come in the one color, and there are fits for Lara, Reborn, Legacy, and Legacy Perky.
Outfit: Milli Dress NUDE by Aurica, available at their booth at the Très Chic event
Here’s a FREE outfit for members of SLF&O from a store new to me: ZEX.
The sweater and skirt are separates, with skirt and sweater sizes for Lara, Lara X, Legacy, and Reborn, and additional sweater sizes for Legacy Perky, and Reborn Waifu.
The store group is also FREE to join and there is at least one group gift available.
I’ve mentioned in passing before that I have a greenhouse on one of my parcels at ground level. I’m not much of a green thumb in RL as I live in an apartment, but I sure can be one in SL 🙂
Owning a greenhouse means that I’m always on the lookout for new plants to display there, and today I noticed a FREE group gift from CJ Creations.
This is one of two colors of a very pretty vase of lily of the valley. You can pick these up from their store for FREE with a FREE group join.
While these are beautiful to photograph, the vase and flowers are very small, and weigh in at five land impact. They have a resizer, but I know the land impact will go up if I resize them, and as object limits are tight at my place, I’ve shelved them for the moment. They may eventually find a place in my house at their original small size.
But the real story here is orange trees! While walking out of CJ Creations store, I noticed these orange trees in planters. Before the greenhouse, I had an orangery, which I made in Blender as one of my first 3d modeling projects. Having an orangery calls for orange trees, and back then I found some and made planters for them, and things looked nice. But! How I wish these had been available back then!
The trees come in three different color pots, and you even get a lazy (static) Siamese cat as a bonus (not shown). The orange trees are four land impact and the pack of three (and the cat) are L$249 at the store.
This teddy is FREE for members of SLF&O, which is also FREE to join. “What goes around comes around” as they say. The mesh for this outfit is quite old, I blogged an outfit based on it way back in 2018!
But, come up with a beautiful lace pattern, and a huge HUD with over seventy colors, and everything old is new again!
The teddy is sized for Lara, Legacy, Legacy Perky, Hourglass, Freya, GenX Classic, GenX Curvy, eBody Reborn, and Kupra.
I put a new furry avatar together for an event! A red panda! Note, this one is not made of free stuff, sometimes you gotta pay to get what you want 🙂
Cute, or what?! As with most furry avis, there’s a lot going on here. You generally can’t just buy a complete furry, you have to put all the right pieces together. Be warned, this means you need building skills, for this one, mostly texturing skills.
This look is dictated by the skin pack, which contains a BoM skin and mods for the head and ear combination, and the tail. I’m using Lara in the photos but the skin would work for any BoM enabled mesh body.
You could use human legs for this, but I don’t think you’re thinking “furry” enough without digitigrade legs, so this avi uses some fennec legs. These are only partially BoM, you have to tint the feet, but with a little bit of patience, it’s not too difficult.
I used some hand paws that I bought for my snow leopard a few years ago. These are similar to the legs in that you have to tint the fingers, so I just used the same color for the fingers and feet.
The head is what makes this one come alive though! It’s fully bento and comes with a range of expressions and animations, and is perfect for a fox (or a panda in this case). This is also a different version of the head in the pack that you can easily use for a feline, hence the name “Foxcat”. There are a set of fennec ears included with the head, but again, the skin mod is dictating the build, and the required ears are only L$50, and come with some cute twitch animations too.
The tail is really the only bento fox tail worth buying in SL, and I already owned this too.
With a little trawl through my huge collection of hair, I found a group gift from ages ago that suits this perfectly! Et voila!
There hasn’t been too much free fashion worth blogging lately. I’ve gone gift hunting at most of the major monthly shopping events (including Cosmopolitan’s 12th Anniversary) and have come away rather underwhelmed by clothing gifts, although there have been some nice deco pieces available!
But this dress popped up in one of my feeds and not only is it standout, it’s also for Lara X!
There are two versions, the normal one I’m wearing here, and a sheer version. It comes with a fourteen color HUD that lets you color the dress and the diamonds separately for some outstanding looks.
Sizes are for Lara X, Legacy, Legacy Perky, Waifu, and Reborn.
A new rendering system is coming to Second Life, known as PBR, or physically based rendering. This is the industry standard these days, and it’s really nice to see LL stepping up and making the major code change needed to support it.
If you have no idea what PBR is, and you want to know all the gory details, you can read about PBR on Wikipedia.
Some of the most eye-catching effects have to do with reflections. For example, realistic metals are one of the most difficult things to represent with the old rendering system. And PBR makes it a piece of cake!
The official SL viewer already has PBR enabled, and it’s coming to Firestorm Real Soon Now™.
Which brings me to the reason for writing this post… I’m revisiting some of my products to redo their textures to support PBR, starting with the carbon truss scope, which I textured before PBR became the way to do things, even in Blender.
Here’s a new render with the recommended SL HDRI sky lighting the scope.
Updated render of the BF Carbon Truss Telescope using PBR (physically based rendering)
I’ve redone all the materials using what Blender calls the Principled BSDF shader, which I’ve been using in Blender since it arrived there. Only now I can take the shader outputs directly into SL and expect the textured object to closely match how the render appears in Blender.
Some noticeable changes in the above image:
You can clearly see the resin overlaying the carbon fibre
The steel counterweights and support rod look much more realistic (and should provide realistic reflections of what surrounds them in SL)
The matte black inside the tube and the optical path now has just the right touch of gloss to make it look believable (nothing in real life is totally matte)
I’ve added a finder scope on the OTA, which you can easily remove from the scope if you like the plain look.
I can’t wait for the version of Firestorm with PBR to launch so I can try this out in SL!
You know the game, connect four in a line horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and win! Now available from Blues Fantasy in Second Life, the game is six land impact, and can be played by one or two players. As with all Blues Fantasy scripted products, it comes with updates for life.
