Cae Dazzle Set photo by Cajsa Lilliehook
My introduction to Caelan Hancroft was on Plurk where Second Lifers have found a new community outside of SL®. I read her blog and was excited to see her make the leap from blogger to designer, particularly when her choices filled a void in the jewelry market. There were many jewelers producing luxurious gems designed for the most formal occasions. There were also s few jewelers creating avant-garde designs, modern chunky jewelry and naturalistic hippie designs, but what about the more everyday to semi-formal jewelry. While there were a few, there was definitely some wide open spaces in the jewelry market. Since then, she has gone from success to success and is now a go-to jeweler for many of us.
It’s Only Fashion: What was your first day in Second Life® like? What made you stick it out through the learning curve?
Caelan Hancroft: My first day was in early December 2007 when I was given an assignment to research Second Life for work. One of our directors had seen SL mentioned in an article and suggested we look into it. I logged in and wandered around Orientation Island and a few other sims to finish up my report and then logged out. I thought I was done. I’ve never been a gamer and was always bored immediately after the character creation process of most games, but I was a new mom with limited opportunities to socialize and thought SL could be a social “fix” so I logged back in. At the time I started, Last Call was having its 100L closing sale and I quickly discovered Celestial Studios and ETD so I managed to skip the super-awkward noob phase (at least for 2007). Continue reading
CG: Anything you see in SL has to be downloaded to your computer. The more complex it is, the longer it takes. Mesh is made up of individual shapes, called polygons. The lower the amount of polygons a mesh object is, the easier on your computer it will be. To add all of these details in as mesh, increases polygons, which in turn increases the Land Impact, which not only increases how much prims it takes up (in the case of furniture), but increases how long it takes for your computer to load in from the server. Many designers compensate for this by using textures to add in the detail so you can have more mesh visible without it taking a long time to load.
TR: This is something we don’t do anymore unless an item just isnt going ot have any options (or need to turn something off). How I learned to do it was to bake it all together. Now I just don’t see the point. Maybe I’m reading this question wrong. So I’ll answer it a second way (because, i’m not sure if I got confused here sorry!) we don’t bake all the details in to our stuff because unlike home and gardens, we’re not really trying to save on prims. I know, okay, that it’s probably not the best way, but for the most part as a fashion designer we follow what our customers want. PC’s be damned, they want detail. So we’ll generally model it in, but use the lower poly, or decimated versions. I know earlier on I personally went a little nuts >.> with face count. I don’t think fashion design can get away with the same stuff home and gardens do to cut corners. When people shop home and gardens they look for the lowest possible prim, with best look. With fashion they just want the most detail, come hell or high water.
SD: Some users have a hard time downloading mesh to their clients due to hardware limits or bandwidth . Some computers aren’t as updated to render current game graphics. I live on a 5 MB DSL connection that limits my streaming. Before mesh, I had a hard time building anything with prims as it would lag or double up. I think of this as a standard for my clients. That’s why I personally prefer to do most of it on texture and normal maps. As a character artist, I try to keep my mesh in good topology and low in polycount with proper LODs. This is industry standard. There are details you can’t sacrifice and there are weighting issues to address with unnecessary polygons. In 3D movies or next gen games, you decide which area requires more details as the camera focuses on it. In SL, everything is in scrutiny, everyone is a hero character. My challenge lies in balancing these issues with the overall style in mind. 
