Floating

I recently visited the SL Pose Fair 2010, and in between bouts of freezing up due to the high amount of lag, I was able to pick up some very nice poses. If you create a photo or SL style blog, having particular poses comes in handy, because it allows you more creative freedom when taking screen captures “in world.” After picking up a pose from pda while I was there, I decided to do a little bit of photoshopping, to create a vision of how this particular animation made me feel. As always, feel free to just go ahead and click this jump if you want to obtain references to what my avatar is wearing below.



In my SL viewer, I manipulated the sky settings until the ground I was on was totally bleached out (but you could just as easily create a one prim green screen backdrop), then I further tweaked the light settings until I had just the amount of shading on the face and body that I wanted. Then I took a screen capture and saved it to my hard drive. For some reason, activating this pose gave me the feeling that I was hovering next to a wall of ivy. So I decided to create a background using a stock photo. A quick search in Google for “ivy on wall” brought me to this site, offering free use of textures. I opened up the texture I settled on in Photoshop and rotated it to my liking, then desaturated it to give me the feeling of totally white leaves. Maybe in my mind they were leaves that had been covered in ash from an exploding, other worldly volcano. My mind is warped that way.

Once I had the background the way I wanted it, I opened the screen capture and extracted the image of my avatar. Then I duplicated the extraction layer and filled my avatar shape with black to use as a shadow layer. I then used one of the distort filters and transformed the shadow to give the effect of the avatar casting a slightly wavy shaded area on the leafy background. I duplicated this shadow layer twice and erased some spots in each duplicated layer to give the illusion of unevenly lit shadows, then I grouped all three shadow layers. Then it was just a matter of applying a slight vignette to the background layer using a marquee tool, lens blur and adjustment levels. Then I flattened the image and saved it to a png format, and voila, another insane in the membrane creation is complete.

Style Card

Hair: Grace night - Truth.
Eyes: summer cool night - Lano Ling.
Glasses: No.22 - *December*.
Skin: Abyss Neutral Full Beard - Fallen Gods.
Shirt: big 1 - Ninikoboy.
Tank: under2 yellow - Ninikoboy.
Tat: slit my wrists it will taste delicious - H&V
Necklace: Naive - Singing Moth.
Earring: Nornir - Rozoregalia.
Ring: Archelon - Rozoregalia.
Taped fingers: Sinistyle.
Pants: Black - Ninikoboy.
Shoes: All Star Low Top Used - White - Hoorenbeek
Shape: My own.
Pose: (pda) is dead on the floor. FOUR.
Location: Somewhere in my mind.
Special thanks to: Mayang's Free Texture Library.