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Dragons 9 & 10 + Future Plans


Dusting off the Shop

I've been gone for a long time but I'm returning to SL and I have resumed sculpting.
Even though I've fallen pretty behind, sometimes breaks are necessary in life. Interests come and go.. and sometimes.. they even return.. usually with the help of badgering from friends.


Dragons 9 & 10

Dragons IX and X have been released today which mark my first releases in ages.
They are SCULPTED. Why? Maybe it's because I stopped building for years, and fell behind on mesh.. OR it could be that I'm just a stubborn old school builder.. who knows!
Update: They are also MESH! I just updated both dragons to include a mesh version with.. drumroll please... MATERIALS! After what seemed like an endless stream of failures I've finally managed to produce functioning normal maps without all of those crazy artifacts and glitches I was getting.



Update on Mesh

I would like to say mesh statues ARE coming - but there are a few things still holding me up:

1- Land Impact VS Unlinkable Parts
2- UV Mapping that mimics sculpts

Land impact seems to go up when you have unlinkable/movable parts.
It's important for these statues to be animatable/unlinkable so that they can be used for various projects. Low land impact statues are easy to make - if you can't do anything with them that is..and the same is true for sculpts. When a sculpted statue goes under 20 prims it starts to seriously limit what can be moved, animated and unlinked as well as overall quality. A nicely animatable sculpt statue will be around 30 prims. If I can keep a mesh statue at the same number I'll be more or less ok with that but so far the mesh statues I tried making with parts that can be unlinked drives the land impact into hilarious figures. No really, it's funny how high the land impact goes!

As for UV mapping, I would love builders to be able to texture them the same way that sculpts can be textured. This won't be possible with 100% of mesh pieces but I believe it can be done for the most part. I just gotta.. figure that out..and even if I can't, hopefully the first mesh statues I make will still be easy enough to texture.

Once I've got those two obstacles cleared, I'll have mesh that sculpty lovers and old school builders actually won't mind working with. In the meantime I'll continue to use sculpts until that happens.. but hopefully it won't take me too long to figure it all out. Sculpts are arguably better for these statues, for the most part it will be 1 prim per movable part with a few exceptions and the land impact doesn't go up when you scale them up in size. I found mesh to be more ideal for static statues that you can't unlink and make stuff out of.

New Textures

All statues will come with random texture material themed packs. ( Different Metals/Stone etc )  These new textures look a bit different from how I used to do them but still capture an overall nicer feel and 'Personal Use' textures which weren't full permissions will be discontinued and replaced with the new packs as I go through the older statues to remake them, which will take some time.

New Statues

I have a handful of new statues planned including remakes of older ones. I won't make any promises but that IS the plan. Remakes will have an 'R' at the end of the name once updated and will be free for anyone who has bought the original version, just send me an IM to receive the remake versions as they come out.

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