How to get the most out of a fashion event.

NEW SHOOTS II (feat. GHOST! and Aphrodite Creations) was held this past weekend, and I’m pleased to say we had great attendance (Sunday’s show filled the sim) and the models, hostesses, and live MC/DJs did a spectacular job. It’s thanks to the great team at Metro Models that our fashion events run so smoothly and appear so professional.

Any event attended by large numbers of avatars puts strain on the sim’s server, and lag is inevitable. It’s unfortunate when this happens during a fashion show, because the entire point is for the models to rez. The good news is, there’s ways to cut down on lag!

Much lag is actually client-side, meaning, it’s on your computer, not the server. By understanding a bit about how your graphics settings in Second Life work, and tweaking them a bit for the show, you can have a much more enjoyable event experience. I’ll show you the settings I tell the models backstage to use… load up your preferences (Edit > Preferences, or, Ctrl + P).

Under the General tab, change “Show Names” to “Never”. You can just change this back after the show… turn it off once you’ve had a look around at the glitterrati attending the event.

Under the Graphics tab, change your Draw Distance to 64. If the runway or stage area is further away, you may need to play with this a bit… the Metro stage, however, will be visible at 64.

Lots of things to change under Graphics Detail! Turn OFF Vertex Shaders. Turn OFF Ripple Water (you won’t need it for a fashion show!) I leave Bumpmapping and Shiny on because some accessories will use them. Change Avatar Rendering to Normal. Set your Lighting Detail to Sun and moon only (the stage is ideally orientated to look good under either forced Sunrise or Sunset.) Change Terrain Detail to Low. Lastly, move all the Mesh Detail sliders to a mid-point.

Now, under Advanced Graphics, change the Max. Particle Count to 0. This will get rid of ALL particle effects for Second Life, including mist, bling, poofers, fireworks, and the like. You’ll probably want to turn it back on after the show, so when you do, just increase the count to between 2,000 and 4,000. You won’t believe the amount of lag particles cause on your computer.

You can also do your part by attending the show with minimal attachments and accessories. You won’t need your AO because you’ll be sitting down in a chair to watch the show. You won’t need your facelight because you’ve turned off local lighting anyway. You should check on your hair, shoes, and any jewelry you’re wearing to see how many prims it is… to do this, right click on your attached item, select “Edit”, and under general info that comes up it will tell you how many objects, and how many primitives your item is (if that info doesn’t show up, click the “More” button). But keeping your outfit low-prim and low-lag doesn’t mean you have to look like a new player!

In this outfit, my only prims are in my shoes and hair. I’ve avoided sculpty prims because they take so long to rez, and I’m wearing a non-prim skirt. The dress is by Paper Couture, and they’re a great choice for low-prim style because of their high-quality texturing and use of the skirt layer. PC also draws a lot of their jewelry onto the outfit, so you don’t have to wear anything else to accessorize. Because I’ll be sitting down to watch the event, I’ve put on some tights under my skirt for modesty and a layered look. To match the lace trim on the tights, I added some lace fingerless gloves. My shoes are simple black wedge Mary Janes I’ve had in my inventory for ages, and the hair is a 40-prim fashion-forward style by Calla. Full credits below.

hair: Calla Narcissus in Black
skin: TaP Vivant Lustrous 3 in Buff
dress: Paper Couture Railway in Ocean
tights: OPIUM Everyday grey lace trim leggings (tinted dark blue)
shoes: JHD Mary Jane wedges
gloves: homemade fingerless lace gloves (bug me and I’ll send you a copy.)

How did she do that? Or, CC plays with The GIMP.

After having joined the Metro Models agency and visited the new headquarters one of the first things on my mind was: “How did Alaska make the “METRO MODELS” logo stand out like that on the building.?”.

At first I thought the actual leters were prims, but they’re not, it’s just a texture. Then I thought, “Cool, I wonder how you do that in The GIMP”

In case the reader doesn’t know, The GIMP is a free and open source image editor often referred to as the free equivalent to PhotoShop. I have used it for my very simple image editing needs for years, having first been exposed to it in 2002 on my Linux machine, in it’s older GTK1 using 1.1.4 version. It served me very well, and I have continued using it for image editng for SL and not-SL related to this day. However, as I said, my uses of it are very simple. Cropping, resizing, saving in various formats, that was pretty much it until last year when I began playing a bit more with it. Learning to do collages for example. I’ve not really explored the more advanced features of it. But I decided to try to duplicate the effect that Alaska created to see if I could do it with my limited skills. Which I did.

Basically, what I did was create a blank canvas, put a text layer on top of that using the Kartika font, use select by color to select the actual letters, create a drop shadow using the function in the Script-fu menu, clear the black pixels of the still selected letters and replace the black with a pink marble pattern. Then I simply used the Emboss filter. Not bad for a first try and a good example fo what exploring and playing with the features of your software can teach you.

I decided to play some more when I saw the model “Polaroids” here on the blog. RL model agencies themselves use Polaroids for various uses, as seen in reality TV shows depicting the modeling business, so I thought that was a neat touch. Again, I decided to try my hand at making some “Polaroids” of my own. I googled and found various tutorials for doing so manually and also found a “Polaroid” script to add to the GIMP’s script-fu functions. Using the script, adding some drop shadow and a plain backdrop I was able to get something similar, but not as nice looking with relatively minimal effort. I figured RL model agencies might write model’s names on the Polaroids so I used a Brush script font to add my name as if written by a felt tip marker.

So no matter what your skills this goes to show you that anyone can do fun and interesting things with their imaging software with a little bit of experimtation.