Tea Sets, Doll Tea, and Bears, oh my!

It's been a busy week for me in Second Life®, and I've gotten a fair amount done!

Just yesterday, I got the 2009 Holiday Bear finished. He'll be available from now until Jan. 1, 2010.



This year, he's a chocolate brown bear with bright green eyes, warmly dressed in a Holly green knitted cap with cheek flaps and a bright red tassel, and matching scarf. The year is on the scarf in gold yarn.

Like all of my bears, this fellow has arms, legs, and head that are carefully sculpted so that they move like the limbs on a real stuffed bear, making him very easy to pose. For your convenience, there are already 5 poses in the pack, including 3 "carry" poses with animaitons, so you can hold him in your right hand, left hand, or cuddled to your chest.

Copy/Mod - NO Transfer. Please use the Gift option on the vendors if you are buying the bear for someone else. 15 prims. L$150. Available now from the Kick the Can main store, and also from XStreet SL.

I also got the Christmas Tea Sets finished, and out in the stores.



These are the updated, version 2 Tea Sets, with new, smoother sculpts, and faster more efficient scripts. (Anyone in the same group as the set can now serve tea, and clean it up.) They're seasonal, so they'll only be out for a few more weeks, too. But they'll probably be back next year.

Totally interactive, with tea that serves itself on a click. You or anyone in your group can also change the linen colors, choosing from 3 sets, with different embroidery on the napkins. Your guests can get tea to sip and a saucer by touching the teapot, and a plate of petit fours by touching the luncheon plate. Once you have a cup, you can choose from 11 different kinds of tea to drink simply by clicking on it. They're very cool tea sets. :D

Come and see them, and play with the demo, at the Home and Garden store on Livingtree, or buy them from XStreet SL. Besides the Snow Children set pictured, I also have a Christmas Tree pattern and a Christmas Sleigh pattern.

All three are also available as Doll Tea Set, in a smaller size for little hands, but with full size petit-fours, and various kinds of pretend tea (and a few flavors of real tea) in the cups. You can get those from the main Kick the Can store on Livingtree, or wherever Kick the Can toys are sold. Come take a look!

And, if all of this isn't your cup of tea, and you don't care about SL at all, there's a new Photoshop Tutorial, too; because it's Tuesday. (Or was, when I started this.) You can find that on my my Facebook page. Enjoy!

Photoshop Tips, and Candle Scripts!

I've started to post weekly Photoshop Tips over on my Facebook page. If anyone reading this isn't interested in facebook, and would like to have me post them here, too, let me know and I'll do that.

This week it's a Very Short Tip, because I've been working on candle scripts for Second Life® and kind of ran out of time.

And before someone points out that I'm really posting this on Wednesday morning, no I'm not! It's Tuesday for me until I go to sleep, and wake back up, and I haven't done that. So it's still late Tuesday night, local time. Very, very local, but it counts!

Anyway, the tip is about using the Bracket Keys, which are very useful in Photoshop. You can use them with the option/alt key to move up and down through your layer stack. You can use them with the Command/ctrl key to move a layer up or down in the stack. You can just use them by themselves to change Brush Size. And there, now you know the tip, but go look anyway, because I put an extra one at the end that's not about the bracket keys at all.

In my second life, I've been working on updating the scripts in my SL candles for the last few days. I'll post a picture when they're finished (I'm told it's not necessary to put a picture in every post. Please let me know if that's wrong.)

Anyway, the new scripts are much more efficient, and because of some changes in LSL (the Linden Scripting Language) over the 5 years since I first made these candles, I can cut down on the number of scripts that are required to make them work. (More things can be controlled in the Linkset, so I don't have to put scripts in as many prims.)

The new scripts also use Glow, if you want it. (You can toggle it on or off, for both the candle itself and the candle flame.)

I also know a lot more about how to make things work in SL than I did five years ago, so the candle flames look much, much better.

And some niggling things have been fixed, because I'm a better scripter than I was. So I think you'll find these candles easier to use, too!

Anyway, they're mostly done now, so I should have pictures and things posted on Thursday. Talk to you then!

Winter Holidays on Livingtree!

First; I want to apologize for not posting for so very long. I just got a new laptop, though; and perhaps now that I can write on the blog and put my feet up at the same time, I'll be better at keeping it up.

So, on to the news!

I've been working in Second Life® a lot the last few weeks; getting things ready for the Winter Holidays.





My island Sim, Livingtree, is all frozen over now, and I just finished making an Ice Castle where you can stop and warm up after skating up and down the river.



The skating is great there! You have the whole river to skate on, with various interesting things along the way; traffic cones, a barrel jump, and the Ring O' Fire, to name a few. Then, at both ends of the river, there are ice floes. Jump from one to another to hear different musical notes, or phrases of songs.



There is more coming, too! But I won't say what, because I don't want to spoil the surprise.



When you're finished skating, come into one of the rest areas.



There's tea, served in one of my new, upgraded tea sets. (If you have an old one, and you are interested in having a new one, IM me in world.) The new ones have better Sculpts (especially the spoons) and there's a small change in the scripts that allows anyone in the Group to serve tea.



Or you can help yourself to one of the other delicious, virtual snacks and refreshments. I have new things planned there, as well.



The Ice Castle was an interesting project, especially the roof. From above, it looks like a snowflake.



To keep the number of prims in the roof down, I used an in-world tool that makes a sculpt out of a collection of prims. It let me turn the 150 prims that made the roof into only six! (But the sculpt did need to be tweaked slightly in Blender to reduce the size of the bounding box.) I'll be happy to explain more, if anyone is interested. Just let me know, in the comments.

In the meantime, if you are a resident of Second Life, stop by! We'd love to see you!

Second Life Tutorials now Frameless!

As mentioned last night, I've decided to just go frameless with the various sections of my website, and then do the actual revisions after that part is finished.

That way, at least people will be able to navigate around a section, instead of having a difficult time getting to the newer tutorials.

So, the Second Life tutorial pages are done now!

There's one new tutorial there, about Alpha Channels of course, and all the old ones that weren't so old they are being retired. It took a long day's work to get it all done, but still, it was just one day, so I'm quite hopeful about doing the other tutorial sections the same way.

The best part about this is that I can add new tuts as people ask for them, or as I come up with something I really want to do, instead of just grinding away on old stuff behind the scenes for weeks on end.

So... What do you guys really want to see a new tutorial about? Let me know!

Website Revisions

I've come to the conclusion that the website revisions are taking too long. There is too much time while a section is being worked on, when some of the new pages are finished, but others aren't, and the section is in flux, and difficult to navigate.

So, after thinking it over for a while, I've decided to get rid of all the frames first, which should be relatively simple, and just move the tables and things to the new pages.

Then, when that's all done, I'll go back and revise things, and get rid of the tables.

It's not a prefect solution, but it should at least mean that people will be able to find what they are looking for relatively painlessly.

With any luck, working like this, I'll have the Second Life tutorials done in the next few days, which means that I can put up a couple of new ones that are done, but not really linked into anything.

And with any luck, the whole project will move a bit more quickly.

It's not Best Practices, but it'll be better than what's there now, and it will give me enough breathing room to not go nuts while I'm working on the rest of it.

Wow... has it been more than 3 months?

I'm so very sorry. Life has just kind of been like this.

We've been house-hunting, and I've been working on my website, and between the two of them, I haven't had much in the way of discretionary time.

So, in the last three months (and a bit) I've made quite a few new things for Second Life®; most recently a washtub full of soft drinks, made with modo 401, Sculpt Studio, and Photoshop.



I'm inordinately pleased with how they came out. If you touch a can, you get an open can of that kind of soda that you can drink. When you "wear" it, so you can drink it, it makes the hiss-pop of a real can of soda being opened.

If you're in SL, and you want to buy a washtub, you can do so from the appropriate page at XStreet SL.

While I was at it, I also made a set of Soda can textures, so you can make cans, too, if you're in SL. I'm selling them through TRU (Textures R Us) which is why that link goes to the TRU website. The sculpt for the can is included, of course.

On other fronts, I've been working on the tutorials on my site.

It's taking some time, because I've been making videos to explain things, with short text descriptions, and then more detailed stuff in a javascript Accordion, in you want to see detailed information.

This is so, if you can use the program in question, and just want a quick description of how to do something, you can just skip the movie, and read the text, and be back at work in a minute or two.

If you want to see what I'm talking about, you can watch the movie. Or, if you want detailed instructions, or additional information, you can open the Accordion panels that deal with that specific thing.

Hopefully, it'll mean that it's not so completely overwhelming, when you open a tutorial page.

In any case, the Photoshop pages are all finished, and there are some new tutorials up there. You can take a look at the newest, which is all about Cel Shading, and is the result of a conversation at the convention I attended a month ago, on my site now.

Other tutorials will follow, and then the final section, which is Livingtree Grove, until there are no more frames and tables, no markup in the HTML, and the pages look like they belong in this century.

The other thing I've been doing since April, or, really, since January, is dealing with a bum knee.

I finally went to the doctor about it on Monday. (I know, I know, but I've always just expected things to heal on their own.) The upshot is that I've got a couple of inflamed ligaments, so I'm on massive doses of Motrin, with instructions to ice it for 20 minutes on, 40 minutes off five or six times a day, a referral to a Physical Therapy place, and a gift certificate to get orthonics to correct the "bad Q angle" caused by my "wonderfully flat feet."

Which means I've been sentenced to wear shoes. All the time. For the rest of my life. Or keep reinjuring my knees over and over, and frankly, I've had enough of that.

So I'll have a bit of extra time while sitting around with frozen peas on my knees to do things like get caught up on blogging.

See? Silver linings!

New Texture Set for SL™

If you like Victorian millwork, and you're in Second Life®, you'll love the texture set I just finished!

I designed it to use as a porch for my Wheel Cottage textures, but it makes great free-standing buildings, like gazebos, as well.



There are 30 textures here, including millwork railings, spanderels, and two kinds of brackets, both single brackets and double brackets (which work great as the inside of a box, so you can save prims on your builds.)

There's a seamless banister texture that matches the railings, beadboard for the ceiling (in two colors,) and a porch edge with either vertical siding or lattice below the facing. You also get stair edges to match, with seamless siding or lattice. And, because lattice is good, you'll also get two seamless lattice textures, one diagonal and one square, to make arbors, trellis, and windbreaks.

And of course there's gingerbread for the gable roof, both "painted on" and freestanding (with a matching shadow texture for the gable,) and a mask so you can recolor it easily in your graphics program, if you choose to do that. Or, if there's a limit to the amount of millwork you want, you can use the gable with no gingerbread decoration.

Best of all, you get sculpts to make a beautiful turned porch pillar and newel post, with shaded textures to match them, so you can have a lovely porch with surprisingly few prims. (The porch in the picture, for instance, is only 15 prims!)

All of this goodness comes with railings, banisters, spandrels, siding and lattice in either white or green. (There were too many things to put both in the same package.) If you want to recolor it, I strongly suggest buying the green, because it will give Hue and Saturation something to work with!

L$950 for the package, in either color (or splurge and get both; they look fantastic mixed!) 30 seamless, full permission textures. TRU license applies. (You're buying a license to use the textures, not the textures themselves, so you cannot resell them or give them away as textures, or on a single prim. They must be part of a build, consisting of at least two prims.)

On sale now, at TRU, and at the Texture Library in Livingtree (113, 97, 25). Come check it out!