Yesterday I attended the Faces of the Darklands fashion show, and when I was getting dressed for it, I wanted to limit prims to help with the lag I knew we would all encounter at the event. At the time, I didn’t have the current release client installed, so I was making some educated guesses about what to wear rather than using the avatar rendering cost (ARC) numbers. For my final outfit, I decided to take off the shoes and keep my hair to put my total number of prims at 58.

This outfit started with the pants from the Hacker set at Exile because the shading on them is so flattering. I wanted to balance that out on top with something maybe just a bit more feminine. I thought a jacket of some sort would work well, so I did a search for “jacket” in my inventory. Because I do so much mixing and matching, I’ve added the layer information to the name of many of my items to make it easier to just look for items on the particular layers I have free as I’m building the outfit.

I found the jacket from Seraph set, but it’s a short jacket, so I knew I wanted something underneath it. The cutout in the back of the jacket reminded me of the back of the Lolita top from silentsparrow‘s Beloved set, and I love the way the two pieces mirror each other to create that diamond-shaped opening in the back. Hyasynth’s clothing always has such amazing details, and the bows and corseting add that touch of femininity I wanted. With so much black and gray going on, I decided to wear one of my favorite Exile hair shades, violet dawn, to add a bit of fun color.

After the fashion show, I found myself wondering more about ARC, so I downloaded and installed the release client. In this outfit without shoes, I was in the green zone with a rating of 242 and even with shoes, the rating stayed green at 527. It was actually an interesting exercise to go through several of my favorite items and outfits to see how they stacked up. While it was easy to add on things to take the rating into the red zone, my favorite looks maxed out around 1500 or so in the yellow zone, so I learned that it’s actually not that difficult to stay in the green zone for large gatherings like fashion shows. I was a little surprised that just taking off my prim lashes shaved about 150 points off the score, so those will definitely be coming off before I go to areas where I’m anticipating lots of people and lag.

Details about all the items in this outfit after the cut.

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Hello, everyone! I’m Brandy Rasmuson, and while I’ve posted some of the new releases to the blog in the past, this is my first time introducing myself here. I have a blog of my own at Writing the Sonnet, but Kavar, the genius behind Exile and my closest friend in SL, has also invited me to hang out here with him. It’s just taken me a while to make it over here for some reason.

One of the things I love doing in SL is mixing and matching outfits, and I often use a piece or two or three from Exile because Kavar makes beautiful modifiable things that I can tweak and tint to my heart’s content. The outfit below started with the hat from the Nymphetamine’s Boutique set called Pandora’s Penchant, and then I just filled in with a few other pieces including Jordin hair, Lush shirt, and Audrey skirt from Exile. Full credits for the outfit are available in the cut after the photo.

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Right, so you might have heard I have recently released a slew of new hair texture options at the store. What I want to share with you now is how I managed to retexture 18 hairs in 30 different colors over the span of a few days. The answer to this would be the Extremely Lazy Coloring Machine (ELCM), created by KStarfire Rich.

When I made the first series of textures, 12 of them in total, I was doing them by hand. I recall the second night I did 5 of them in the 12 new textures and it took me about 6 hours, and basically I was losing the will to live. Thankfully my friend Brandy had read about this amazing machine on a blog and sent me a link so I went to investigate.

After reading about the ELCM I was determined to find out if it actually could take the hair I have and make copies of it using all the new textures I had created. The answer was a resounding yes. The ELCM could indeed copy my prototypes and apply my new textures flawlessly, with the textures all placed exactly how they are on the prototype and no halos or texture rings around the alpha textures.

I will try to explain how this all works in this post for anyone who is curious, though if you are very interested in the machine you can contact KStarfire Rich in game. He is great about explaining how it works and answering questions regarding the machine.

Basically the ELCM currently can apply 6 different textures to a prim object at once. These textures can be full textures, alpha textures, various colors, etc. The 6 scripts come in 2 different preset versions. The first is the full side script which will color the prim on all sides with the texture that corresponds to that script number. The second script will change only the front side of the prims texture. For someone like me using it for hair, this is very important, as using alpha textures on certain prims requires the bottom and top of the prim to have an invisible texture on them to prevent halos or the strange rings you see on some hair from time to time. These are the two script options that come with the ELCM, but KStarfire Rich is also willing to get you custom scripts that will texture only certain sides that aren’t the front if you need one that only colors the bottom side or top etc.

So basically you have the corresponding scripts in the prims you want to color. My first texture, on layer one would be named sand. It is the full texture and I would choose the first script, the full sides version, and it will apply that hair texture to all sides of the prims that the script is in. The second texture would be named _2sand. This is the alpha layer of the sand hair color, which when applied to prims will give the look of strands of hair. While I’m talking about this, it’s a good time to mention this naming of the textures is the way the ELCM knows which textures go with which. So it kind of looks like this inside the ELCM with your textures:
Sand
_2sand
twilight
_2twilight

So these hairs use 2 of the possible 6 textures you can apply. When everything is set, you just add the root script to the root prim, which comes in 2 forms to choose from – one which textures the prim and one that doesn’t. After that just drop the root script in the root prim of your hair, which comes in a 2 versions, one that will apply the first texure to the prim and one that won’t texture at all.

And after that, it’s quite easy. You rez the ELCM and load the textures you want to use in it. Then add the prototype to the machine, and hit texture. There is also a test run feature you can choose to make sure you have the hair scripted correctly. That will only do the first 2 textures sets. Once the hair has rezzed, you hit the clean up button on the menu and that will remove all the scripts from your hair so that it doesn’t change your permissions, and then you simply take the hair copies into your inventory. After it’s all done you can save your prototype and any time you want to add colors or update the old colors you can use that same master copy to do them all again. Also, the ELCM allows for you to add other scripts, and the clean up will only remove the texturing scripts from the prims. So if you have a texture changing script for a hat for instance, you can add that set of scripts and the textures you want it to use to the hat before you run the texturing process, and it will copy the texture change script and all of its texture options to each copy.

In the end the ELCM made things so much more viable that I added 30 new colors of hair. And now when I make new hairs it takes all of 5 minutes to do them in all 30 textures.

On a final note, it’s easiest to use the scripts as you build the hair, by placing them inside the prims you are using and copying those prims over and over to distribute the scripts throughout the hair. However in my case I had 17 styles I wanted to add the new textures to that were already completed. KStarfire Rich has a solution for this as well. He has a script copier script available to anyone who needs to do an old style or completed prim object. It’s easy to use once you do it once or twice as well. How this works is you drop this script and the first texture script (or whatever texture is over most of the prims) into the root prim and then it copies this script to all the linked prims. Then you simply change the ones that require different scripts. For me this was a simple matter of deleting the texture 1 scripts out of the prims that used the alpha texture and replacing it with the texture 2 one side script. Trust me that it sounds more complex than it really is, and KStarfire was great about answering my questions.

In closing, I would recommend anyone who is making hair and either uses a lot of color options or wants to add more color options to check this system out. You will be amazed at what it can do and how easy it is to configure. Also I feel I should mention that even though it’s perfectly suited for hair, there are many things it would make much easier to add a lot of textures to including shoes and various clothing attachments but really any prim creation that needs to be recolored with various textures over and over. KStarfire also offers lifetime upgrades and tech support for the ELCM when you purchase it. Thanks to KStarfire for making this great system!

If you’re interested in the system please contact KStarfire Rich in game. The system as of this post is only available personally through him though I believe he is working on releasing it for purchase in other ways soon.