Work in progress – Organica & The Wilds

Work in Progress: Drider Week 4

This week has been a little crazy in meat-space; after taking care of some familial obligations and picking up some supplies, some long needed house-painting took place on Monday. A little later in the week, I was able to put in a couple more sessions working on this staff sculpt for HelpfulNerd, who’s printing, painting and finishing this for one of his clients’ costumes!

In particular, I’ve really been enjoying ZBrush 4R8’s new live boolean functionality! It takes a little bit of figuring out, but once you get the hang of working with positive and negative shapes, you’ll probably find that it’s quite flexible and like playing with invisible clay.

That doesn’t mean progress has stopped with the Drider, though, and I’m happy to show some sneak peeks of the looks that’ll be available:

Moving forward, I’ll be seeking out testers, tying up necessary animations, packaging and doing some more detailed photography for promotional reasons. We are getting very close to release and I’m super excited!

Finally, here’s a quick snapshot of some #inktober – related artwork I put together a couple days ago. It still needs a few tweaks, but I’m glad I was able to rattle off something topical for this event!

Support my content creation in SL and other virtual worlds by becoming a patron on Patreon! Along with keeping up with new releases, you can keep up with personal and work project writeups, see sneak-peeks of upcoming content, be informed once new videos are up, access to Patreon-exclusive content, giveaways and more! Check out my Patreon page, here: (link)

Work in Progress: Kitten update progress

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, a variety of changes have been in the works for the kitten avatar. This week has been characterized heavily by creation of two new series of coats for them – you can look forward to bi-colour and siamese coats in the short term future. Additionally, updates are being made to the existing tabby & cheshire coats which take in to account new geometry and animations.

New mouth textures. Tooth geometry to follow.

There’s still a ways to go – part of the new work on these kittens has to do with a new mouth – and I still need to propagate these to all of the head textures. Teeth will also be added. Edge touch-ups and tail coat matching are also necessary.

I’m still thinking about the best way to implement facial animations for this avatar – In all likelihood I’ll be implementing it in much the same way that facial animations were handled with the FishEyes and Yetis, although this would confine the provided animations to a maximum of eight. Additional tinkering will also be possible using facial HUDs like the one put out by LightStar.

LOD optimizations are complete. Some tweaks to the top level mesh are also in order. Setup for compatibility with the exchanger/updater is in the works. Testing and repackaging are on the horizon.

I’ve had the chance to explore SL a little bit as the drider this week and (apart from a common unease around spiders 😉 ) generally have received positive response. Animation for the avatar continues and I’m looking forward to making at least one version of the avatar available some time in October.

Additionally, some time this coming or next week I’ll be working on landscaping and accessory items for both the Halloween and Xmas season, with Candy Fair stuff next week as well. If there are particular things you wish existed in SL that fall in my wheelhouse, do give me a shout via IM and I’ll consider putting it on my list!

Skin Tone Progress

A bit of skin tone comparison underway. I’m probably going to send out test skins some time soon either today or tomorrow, and am hoping to remain sensitive to ethnic colouring. Having some concerns with screen to screen colour calibration, but there’s really not that much one can do to control the end user’s experience 🙁

In any case, hoping to push through this as soon as I can so I can get to some of the makeup options.

Inaugural post

Welcome to the first post at Kitheres Industries’ blog!

There isn’t much here yet, and I’m working on adding a customized template fairly soon to coincide with some new content I’ve been working on, but i figured I’d kick off my postings to this blog while I felt like posting (and also since it’s pretty late and I don’t really want to start filling my head with CSS and HTML 😛 )

In any case, those who are familiar with Kitheres will know that it’s mostly been my scifi/fantasy based hobby/business, which has mostly taken a backburner to my tree business, Organica.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at developing Kitheres further though, because I have always been interested in avatar customization, coming from an illustrative and character design background. So within the next couple of months, along with a bunch of other personal and location changes, I’ll be posting a bit about various things I’m working on as well as products that I am releasing.

Elyion Alecto modelling a work-in-progress skin for Kitheres

For one thing, I’m pleased to announce that I am working on a new set of skins for general and genre use. I’ve sent around several editions for testing, and will probably begin working out skin tones based on their finalized bases within the next couple of days. After that, probably some basic makeup options, finalizing a building for my store, and then prep for some major changes to my overall presence in SL. Basically, I will be upgrading Sylvan to a full region, so my first point of order is to move over all my Organica stuff, set up Kitheres in the sim as well, then completely re-landscape the sim to take advantage of added primmage, etc.

And then hopefully work stuff will catch up with me ;P

Sooo yeah. Busy busy next little while. Pretty optimistic though, as long as I keep the pace up, i guess!

Anyhow, I wanted to publicly thank the folks (Leilany Lafollette, Vivianne Draper, Zorena Deckard, Zuleika Deere, Kira Zobel, Vertigo Paris, Dahlia Eilde, Arilynn Karu, Charlemagne Allen and Ash Garden) who have been a great help with testing thus far. There’s a bit of testing left yet, but i really, really appreciate the help you’ve all provided thus far!