Category: Poser

Urban Design Tutorial in Inkscape

Syllie
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Inkscape tutorial for a simple urban design using circles, swirls and clouds.

I am still sorting through my designs and repacking stuff to make things available at our new website. But I did find some time to explain how I created an Urban design, so a new tutorial for Inkscape is published too. Cool circles, fancy clouds and flourishing swirls in trendy colours. It is available, as usual, on verysimpledesigns.com. I also made the resulting illustration available in eps format, free for personal use.

My mate Dakka made a cool set of photoshop brushes, the set is called Affects. He uses them to add cool neon coloured flying objects to his art work, but I use them quite differently. I use them to create cool feathers, fluffy fur, flower petals. They are awesome, and I figured you may want to know about them too.

The rest of the week will be a bit quiet, as someone figured we should have a fancy dress party with the Wild Wild West as theme. Now we figured to go as cowboy and indian, but when we looked around for costumes I was a bit shocked. As it is a party amongst friends you dont want to spend heaps on it, and at the same time you don’t want to look like horrible. But the costumes around here are made from bad materials, and do not even come close to something a native american would ever have worn. Now, I am not an expert in subject matter, but I thought I should at least get some things right. So I did a bit of research and I came across this beautiful online exhibition Identity by Design which gave me all basic information I needed. How the dresses evolved over time, how they were constructed, what symbols were used, beautiful beadworks and so on. With great respect to the ladies that made these dresses a long time ago, I decided to create my costume based on a beautiful Cheyenne three-hide dress. And whilst I used a cheap suedine fabric for the work, and replaced the beautiful beading by just a simple bias band, at least it looks like something traditional. The dress reaches over the calves, the ladies were very modest, and they would wear high mocassins so no bare skin is visible. Of course my dress is no where near so beautiful as the real thing, but it looks like traditional wear.

Continued design

Syllie

Today is one of those days that I want to work on all things at the same time. Impossible of course, so I have to pick something.

WordPress Theme

The work on the WordPress theme is progressing nicely. I was thinking to create an ’empty framework’, every template must adhere to basic rules and any theme has a pre-defined minimum set of files. So basically I am rethinking my workflow for creating templates. And as a developer I of course figured that someone else probably did this work already. There are many frameworks for WordPress readily available (just do a search in Google), but most of them are more than empty and not so lightweight anymore. I stumbled upon the WordPress Starter Theme project and have decided to give that a go.

Graphics

I did install the new version of Blender and everything I did before is still working 🙂 now to experiment with the new stuff. Today I will experiment a little bit with conforming clothing for Poser. I start modeling the clothing in Blender, and I have a design for a 50’s dress planned to ease into it. I have done similar work before, but not with Blender nor with a version of Poser that allows dynamic clothing. So hopefully it won’t take too much time to make something decent. I eventually hope to be able to create complex models that would fit in a steampunk environment. I love the victorian style in combination with extravagant designs of common things. Also the typical materials that are used in these designs – woods, brass, leather, lace – appeals to me. Just planning ahead, but I already have an idea for a bustle dress.

Further work…

Syllie

Sometimes life is interupted by reality. I am currently enjoying a long break and use this precious time to improve my graphical skills. Events occur tho, the world does not stop spinning because I put things on hold for a bit. And sometimes goal posts move unexpectedly. Something like that happened recently and those events resulted in some delay in work, and I went back to browsing certain forums and providing as much feedback to those affected as possible. But where does that leave my plans? In limbo.

So today is a day of new things. I have completed the Blender course, and today I will try and model a first freestyle prop. And I will start with a Poser tutorial, as a lot of things have changed between version 4 and version 6. I know there is a newer one.. but hey.. long break means not spending to much money on trivialities.. so P6 will do!

Getting some work done…

Syllie

Tempting… sitting in front of my PC… staring at the screen… casually browsing a bit and have nothing to worry about for a while… and time slowly moves on… and on… and on…

Then suddenly it hits me! Ohw man… I FINALLY have some time to make real progress and work on all the stuff that I want to work on for years already and I let it waste! So today I kicked myself back into shape and decided to actually be – somewhat – productive.

Cool.. so what is the plan? Well.. I once was proud owner of Poser 4, upgraded to Poser 5 and last year when ContentParadise had this crazy blow-out sale I picked up version 6. But where I actually used Poser 4, I never came to installing version 6. And I have HEAPS of content for it too! So that will be todays job, read up on creating a good install.. what to do with runtimes and so on. I also ‘use’ DAZ|Studio and that one does not really care where content sits on the PC, but I remember Poser does.. so back to browsing I guess.. tho not so randomly now *grins*…

Update: wow… so many sites around! But I bumped into this one: morphography and I absolutely love it. Concise and to the point info and heaps of usefull links and downloads.