Jackie Graves

7 thoughts on “Jackie Graves”

1. Haha, looked like you all had a lot of fun.
   Here’s a noob question: When people make clothing in SL, do they use a specific LL program or something? Or how does that work?

   Reply

   1. Well, Jackie could give you the REAL tutorial on that!

      But here’s the lame-o version from me:

      There’s actually a few different kinds of clothing:
      • System Clothing
      • Prim Clothing
      • Flexi
      • Sculpt
      • Mesh

      The original, 2003, and still very much used clothing is “System Clothing” this is “painted” on top of your skin. I think most peeps use a program like Photoshop or Gimp to paint / airbrush these layers of clothing. You can have multiple layers of clothing and they can have transparency. So if your jacket is open, and your t-shirt is tattered, then you’ll see jacket and t-shirt under that, and bits of flesh thru the t-shirt tatters.

      System clothing is nice because it fits. You can be short or tall, thick or thin, and the clothes just wrap around you. Even though it doesn’t have dimensionality above your skin and even though it doesn’t reflect light sources in the world, it can, and in the hands of a talented designer, does, look fantastic.

      And even if you aren’t a talented designer, you can take anything, like your favorite poster, and stick it on a t-shirt or a pair of leggings.

      Prim Clothing is a prim you attach to one of 20 or so attachment points on your avatar. You an attach anything: a dress, a watch, a parachute, a sword. Unlike system clothing it has it’s own dimensionality beyond your shape, and it does reflect light sources in the world. However it no longer “just fits” and you have to “adjust” it for the many different avatar shapes.

      Most nice clothing today is a combination of System Pieces and Prim Pieces. In the case of the now famous “Poison” outfit from Graves, the black “dress” base, the black stockings, including the buckles on them, the red-green-or-purple jacket, and the black gloves are all System pieces.

      And then on top of that she adds many small prim pieces to add dimensionality: the wicked syringe is made of a few prims (you can’t see it in the pix, but inside the syringe is actually an animated, bubbling liquid)

      The jacket collar is a prim attachment, and so on.

      You can also make FLEXI and SCULPT which are types of Prims. Sculpt is “Sculpted” and can have more complex shapes than normal prims. Flexi are Flexible prims. This is used a lot in hair.

      You’ve never actually seen an SL avatar with 2003 System Hair! It’s so ugly that the entire avatar race has shaved it off (technically buried it inside their heads) and everybody wears wigs!!!

      Prim hair often uses a combination of Transparency and Flexi. If you don’t have a high end graphics card, looking at peeps with fancy prim / transparency hair will crush your pathetic excuse for 3D Client-side rendering! 😛

      (this is why peeps with low-end cards often live in skyboxes or zoom in on the ground) (haha, kind of like the “Black-and-Whites” in Snow Crash)

      Because of the many layers of transparency on top of each other and on top of the world, and the flexi hair blowing in response to your avatar movement and/or the SL wind in your region, looking at, and rendering, prim hair is, I imagine, one of the most complex “game math” computations out there, in terms of calculating massive and endless translations and rotations.

      More importantly… it looks hot! 😛

      Finally, the newest thing on the grid is Mesh which is used for clothing, building, and avatars themselves. Some mesh clothing is the nicest stuff you’ll find and it moves with you in remarkable ways. But there’s also crap mesh clothing that’s, well, crap.

      I think you know about mesh since we talked about importing some of your 3DS Max avatar creations in as SL Mesh.

      Oh yes, back on the software: so system clothing is textures mostly made outside of SL in a graphics program like Photoshop or Gimp.

      Prims are made in SL, but use textures similar to system clothing. Similar with flexi and sculpt. And Mesh is made outside with apps like 3DS Max or Maya or Blender.

      ---

      PS: As you noticed in this post… your comments on that 7 July Jackie Graves photo were partly responsible for this performance happening — HEY — thanks for that! 😀

      Reply

      1. Yay, I did notice! 😀 And thanks for this long and detailed comment reply, which is like a post in itself.
         I’m impressed by the fact that Jackie Graves outfits are a combo of system and prims, it must take some serious talent to make it look so good with all the various material types in photoshop.
         I textured Carl myself, but he didn’t come out that well, except for the renders, where I thought I was a genius, then when I put him through Unity into a mini world as a showcase (it was part of the hand-in) he was so ugly and amateur-looking, my blown up ego got all deflated again. I’d probably cry at the sight of him inside SL, haha!

         Reply
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