I've got a feature suggestion I thought some of you might want to know about.

There's a new experimental feature that's been added to the SL client, called RenderGlow. You can read about it here. It adds a pretty glow to any objects that are light or set to full bright. To wit:



See? Very pretty.

Except most businesses set their vendors/product boxes full bright, so that they present an easy to read and accurate picture regardless of the time and local lighting. And when those glow, they become, well, like this:



That's not just unreadable, it's painful to look at. And if this feature is implemented as is, that's a lot of broken content.

Over on jira, I proposed that the glow be something that can be toggled on and off for individual objects, like full bright itself is. It's proposal VWR-927, and if you like it, please go vote.

This week's release from Miriel is Belle, an Edwardian style bun. Perfect for hairpins, and it looks great with Victorian clothing, too.

Available in fourteen colors, and sold both singly (L$100) or as a collection of all colors (L$290). Permissions are either copy/modify/no transfer or no copy/modify/transfer -- you choose when you buy.

Demos are available in all colors.

Get it at my store at Nouveau 115, 205.


(Skin: Tete a Pied; dress: silent sparrow)

Oh, for the love of-- Look, you don't even want to know what I think about 99% of the complaints about LL, but this is ridiculous.

The sim rental page says that you should email the Concierge Team if you want to rent a sim. So I do, because I want to rent one for Jewelry Exposition. (No, we're not getting Platinum. I know, I know, but it borders a mainland sim.) And what do I get back? An email saying that the concierge email address has been closed, and to go to their support page. Which says that I'm not eligible for concierge service, and gives me absolutely no information on renting a sim.

I'm going to bug someone in world, I am.

I'm going to let my classified ad expire. It was costing me about as much as I was making each week, and I'm not getting many more sales per week than I was back when I didn't have a super expensive ad.

I'm also making large versions of all my eyes. Every now and then I get custom requests for bigger versions; I figure this will get those people, along with the folks who want bigger eyes but don't want to bother with a custom order. (Plus, elka's been bugging me to do this.) This'll take a few weeks, as I have to box everything up and redo the vendor scripts.

I've also got some other big projects that I'm slowly working on (the vendor, a jewelry set, and a dress). The jewelry set in particular is stalled, because it's huge and every time I think about working on some part of me starts moaning about the tedium. And the vendor's going to take forever anyway. Even if I ever do stop fiddling with it, it needs to be beta tested.

I've been pretty lax about learning to work with Blender. I can make sculpties at this point, but I can't texture them, and there are a wide variety of tools that I don't know how to use yet. Since I primarily make jewelry, sculpted prims aren't a huge deal for me, since I don't think you can make them very small.

Oh, and next week's release will be more hair.

Maiden is a Medieval inspired hairstyle. It comes with a (nonremovable) simple circlet, which changes metals on command (choose from gold, silver, and black).

Sold singly (L$100) or as a collection of all fourteen colors (L$290). Available in both copy/modify/no transfer and no copy/modify/transfer versions.

Demos are available for all colors.

Get it at my store at Nouveau 115, 205.


(Dress: Pixel Dolls; skin: Tete a Pied; eyes, pose: me)

A preview of what's coming on Tuesday:

This week's release from Miriel is a collection of four eyes, called the Spring Collection. All eyes are entirely hand drawn, and have a smaller iris for a more realistic look.

Sold singly (L$50) or in a collection of all four (L$125), and in both copy/modify/no transfer and no copy/modify/transfer versions. Demos are available, too, if you want to check if the size is right for you.

Get it at my store at Nouveau 115, 205.

Drat, the fantasy dress fell apart. So much for that.

This week's release from Miriel is Moon and Tide, a jewelry set consisting of a necklace and earrings. The necklace has a mother of pearl pendant and pearl accents, while the earrings have pearl accents. Both the pearls and the mother of pearl are entirely hand drawn. (And believe me, that mother of pearl was tricky.) I actually threw the prim work together in a couple of days -- the design just popped into my head, and so I made it. A good choice, I think.

It's available in four metals (gold, silver, copper, and black) and eight different mother of pearl colors, and in single versions or collections of all gold, silver, copper, or black sets. The copper never sells very well, but I thought it was appropriate for this piece.

Both copy/modify/no transfer and no copy/modify/transfer versions are available.

Demos are available, too.

Get it at my store at Nouveau 115, 205.


(Skin: Gala Skins; hair: ETD; lashes: Sin Skins; eyes: me)




In other news, I've seen one of the new things that Tete a Pied is working on. I don't think I'm allowed to tell you what I've actually seen, but I assure you, it's jaw dropping. It's one of the best in its class. I do not exaggerate.

It's up!

http://www.sljewelryexposition.com

I may have actually sort of figured things out for sculpted prims! Getting good at them is going to be a whole different thing, though. So far I've only made a terrible, terrible leaf.

The expo website will be live tomorrow. Yes, really! I just need to make up some header graphics for each page, which is taking longer than it should because PSP likes to crash when working with vectors.

I hope to have the fantasy dress I've been working on ready for release next week. Fingers crossed! It can still all fall apart so easily.

I'm continuing to bang on my vendor for sale. I'm trying to rewrite the guts of it so that it can handle more than one order at once. I'm going to have to call for beta testers for this, once it's in working order. Even with my testing alt, Indis, seeing how it handles multiple concurrent orders is not something I can test. Current features slated to be included:

* Fully configurable profit splitting between multiple people.
* Record keeping: vendor can keep up to 50 records of who bought what, when.
* Email and/or IM upon sales.
* Optional notecard upon touch.
* Multiple restriction settings: restrict access by whitelist, blacklist, or to the vendor's group.

I already cut an option to restrict the vendor by avatar age -- the newbie items I've seen just don't tend to warrant a vendor like this. If I chop anything else out entirely, it'll be some of the restriction settings. The number of people who'd find the whitelist and blacklist useful is fairly small.

From a tutorial I'm using: "...Which you were told you should select earlier but actually you shouldn't have."

Truly, Blender 3D: Noob to Pro, you are a god among ebooks.

To do this weekend:

1. Put together latest release. (Something in the regular Miriel line again, finally!)

2. Put together the Jewelry Expo website. Oh, boy.

3. If there's time, try to find and go through a Blender for total beginners tutorial that works well for me. I've been looking for them and I haven't found any that I didn't detest. (Well, I did find one, but it's for a slightly different version of Blender and things don't quite work the same. Mostly, I could figure things out, but I reached a point where I wasn't able to reproduce what the tutorial was doing.) And I won't use video tutorials, so that's right out.

Argh!

I coded the jewelry expo page by hand, checking it in IE. I don't really understand CSS very well -- it seems to make sense, but nothing ever looks the way I want it to -- but I managed to put something together. So I uploaded all the pages and graphics to the site, and open it up with Firefox.

And it was a total mess.

Sigh. That's a bunch of hours of work, all down the drain.

The Jewelry Expo website should be live in a day or so. I'm not good with CSS so it's not fancy (in less generous terms, it doesn't look all that good), but you get what you pay for. Try not to make the window too small when you're viewing it; everything starts to overlap and wander.

I've been trying to cut down on my L$ spending, with much success -- up until Fallingwater released her flower jewelry, Jackal put a bunch of shoes on sale, and I discovered Siyu Suen.

I met Siyu at the Linden Lifestyles party (which I had to skip out of after about half an hour) and saw her wearing this, which is absolutely stunning. So the next day I bought a copy. And went to her store. And bought a bunch of other things. Like this hat, which I paired with an outfit from Silent Sparrow and didn't take off for days:


(Skin: Tete a Pied; hair: ETD; clothing: Silent Sparrow)

I also bought this mask:


(Skin: Tete a Pied)

I absolutely adore her stuff. Most goth things in SL make me go bleah: they're harsh, they're punkish, and they usually have a bunch of chains and spikes attached. But Siyu's stuff is elegant and pretty. It's such a welcome change from all those stompy, spikey boots.

I've also been trying to convince her to sell this stole, which is not goth but nonetheless wonderful:


(Skin: Tete a Pied; hair: ETD; dress: Simone)

Oh, yes, and if you pair her top hat up with one of the Tete a Pied Death skins, well, life is good:


(Hair: ETD)

(I never get around to doing much blogging of other people's fashions, though I always want to -- taking the pictures ceases to be fun about halfway through. But I already had to take a bunch of pictures for new ads, so I took a break to snap these.)

I put together this bracelet and just didn't feel right charging for it, since it's so simple. (Nine prims, including the invisible box that's there to make it easier to position.) So I'm releasing it as a freebie; get it on my new products wall or on the freebie display stand I've put up. The picture only shows one color combination, but it actually comes in twelve different ones, with copies for both your left and right wrists.

I've also dramatically cut prices on my Miriel Everyday line, a line of casual and semi-casual jewelry and clothing. (Okay, one piece of clothing.) Everything is now L$50 and under for a single item. (Frequently quite a bit under -- I think the average price is L$30 for a single thing.) Some examples of what's in the line, with linked pictures:

* Bauble, necklace and earrings with color changing glass beads: L$30 for a single; L$80 for all three metal colors.
* Bauble II, drop earrings with color changing glass beads: L$20 for a single; L$50 for all three metal colors.
* Geisha II, a geisha style hairpin with color changing discs: L$30 for a single; L$80 for all four metal colors.
* Geisha III, another geisha style hairpin, this one with flexible (but stiff) metal bits that really sway when you move: L$30 for a single; L$80 for all four metal colors.
* Little Retro Dress, a handpainted dress: L$50 for a single; L$140 for all sixteen colors.

Get it all at my store at Nouveau (115, 205).

And here is the bracelet:


(Skin: Gala Skins; dress: Pixel Dolls; hair: ETD; eyes: me)