What with Snow White, Snow White and Snow White, it’s about time we had some mirrors in Second Life. It seemed a logical next step after the reflections in the previous tutorial, though I was more in the market for a homey little mirror rather than some grand baroque masterpiece with a talking head. Though, that makes me wonder if there were a talking head on a prim just under the water…
Way back in January, I saw a fantastic tutorial by Graphic Dix for Modavia Fashion Marketing on using Second Life’s water in an innovative way to capture reflections. We’ve all stood on the bank of a river or waded into the ocean and admired our reflections, but he took it to a new level.
I wanted to do something similar and experimented a little bit and ended up going in a slightly different and, perhaps, easier direction, though achieving the same effect. I began by finding a texture, in this case some mossy pavers from Zooboing Creations. I made a copy of the texture and using a big soft-edge eraser, I erased part of it, leaving it open alpha areas.
I was not excited about the advent of mesh, fearful that new technology would mean new reasons to crash and new problems to solve. In part that is true, there are new fitting problems. In order to fit the mesh to your shape, you do have to make the central core of your shape conform to a range of standard sizes. In exchange, though, you do not have to fit five separate sculpts to your shape, then edit them every time you change your pose. FaMESHed is a monthly sales event that has formed to celebrate the glory of mesh and this second month is even more exciting than the first. By the way, look at the wide sleeve of the top, lines so it does not disappear, it is far superior to the melting flesh that lines a bell-shaped system sleeve.