(Hair: ETD; skin: Tete a Pied; outfit: ::Lollipop::).

Casual Excess is released. L$200 for each one; L$420 for all five colors. I'm experimenting with pricing; L$200 is a bit more than I'd normally be inclined to actually charge, but I think this necklace is quality work, so I'll see how well sales do.

It's done, it's done! The build is done! It's not everything I had hoped for, but it's done!

Warning: more buildblogging ahead.

I was actually ahead of schedule yesterday, when it came to build texturing! I finished every single octagonal floor, and got to some of the other floors. Of course, that was only because I spent about seven hours working, and since I didn't put in that time today, I'm now behind again.

I've shown the untextured build to a few people so far. They seemed impressed.

I'll be so happy to be done! I'm really getting antsy now. This build is my baby and I want to show it off. And I want to sell things publically again.

I did try to do some fun work on a non-build project -- a pretty, simple circlet -- but I was getting terrible prim drift. I still have a nagging sense of guilt that I should have perservered, even though bits of the thing were wandering off every few minutes.

As soon as I do the product photos for the new dress, I think I'll be done with the textures for my build. (I say "think," because it's happened a few times already that I've applied textures to the build and found that I needed to change them.) And I've done a little terraforming, and I've put everything I'll be selling into my new boxes. The main thing I have to do now is actually apply the textures to the build. This is quite time consuming and tedious, because:

1. I am a perfectionist and will spend time adjusting the offsets by 0.001 to make sure everything lines up correctly.
2. Many of my floors are octagons made of eight prims, with one texture to be stretched across the whole thing, or tiled smoothly across it. Getting the textures to line up properly is an enormous pain.

Progress on the neverending build continues, but is typically slow. As of today, I know I have to put together the following textures:

1 floor texture (easy; it'll just take one tweak of an existing texture)
7 textures for the undersides of brick arches
6 product photos, for the new dress

Huh. That's a much smaller list than I thought, now that I look at it. And it's a lot smaller than my previous lists! Makes me feel like I've accomplished something, even if new problems keep popping up as I work.

It's the arch textures that are going to be the worst; I'll need to do a lot of uploading and tweaking per texture. They're very simple textures, thank goodness, but it's difficult to get the bricks on the front of the arch to match up with the bricks on the underside. (Oh, and I just remembered the topsides of the arches. Gah. Oh please oh please, let the underside textures work for those.)

I also have to texture the build (not a small thing in and of itself), and do some more building. This latter I hadn't planned on, but now that I've applied a few textures, I've realized the buildings will look better with some trim on the bottom. It's sort of a pain, but without giving the buildings a solid grounding, they don't look very solid -- and given that they're supposed to be made of marble, this is a problem.

I've run into a problem on the build; there's something I don't know if I'll be able to texture properly. I've asked for help on the texture and design forums, so I'm hoping that Robin or Chosen or Chip will come in, wave their magic wand of helpfulness, and I'll know how to handle the problem easily using 2D painting software.

I'm also hoping for a pony and a million dollars.

Yay, the gown is done! It's not 100% perfect, even for SL, but I just love the way it looks on my avatar. Now all I have to do on it is box it, price it, do the product photos, and set up a vendor. Though it won't go on sale until my build is done -- which should be in about two weeks, barring something taking much longer than I expected. Huzzah.

My gown is looking less crap:



I'm still not too happy with the way the bottom of the top trim meets the purple, but... meh. I've been doing a lot of fiddling with it already, and I really doubt anyone's going to notice, and the most problematic area is already over near where the pixels start to get really jagged when worn. And I am not going to do anymore solid colored outfits after this one, I don't think, unless they're darkly colored. Without patterns to break it up visually, things look very, very painted on.

Oh, yes, and the skin's by Pete a Tied Tete a Pied, the hair's by ETD, and the lovely necklace is from Shiny Things.

I return! My Internet connection was down for nearly a week.

I uploaded the top part of a dress I'd been working on and... it sucked. I don't know what happened. I used to be able to make clothing that didn't suck. Very discouraging.