Shiny Symmetry

Alexandra Mensing is a woman after my own heart - combining organic, symmetrical artworks with a beautiful natural surrounding in her Kaleidoscope Walk installation at Bliss Gardens. Alexandra create wonderfully mesmerizing works that include shifting, animated patterns swirling through detailed 3D shapes arranged in symmetrical patterns. Easy on the eyes and soothing to the mind. :)

The pieces are interactive as well. You can touch to change the texutres, animation speed, and other features of the works. You must see them in person to enjoy the full effect.

Virrginia Tombola Gets Animated

Virrginia Tombola has posted a great tutorial about how to create animated sculpted prims with zBrush and version 2.1 of 2k’s Sculpty Maker. Woot! I am so psyched that 2k has added these new features to his converter, and Virrginia’s tutorial will save us all some time with our experiments.

For the past several weeks I’ve been having troubles with my Blip.tv hosted videos loading a bit slower than usual, so I’ve created a Shiny Life channel on Veoh. Veoh is a pretty cool video hosting service that also includes a desktop application that can function as a sort of Internet TV channel. You can watch the videos on a web page, or download them to your computer to watch them with the VeohTV player. If the problems with Blip continue I’ll go aheas and switch all of the videos on this site to the Veoh hosted versions.

Tune In, Turn On - and Dance!

Stumbled on this set of vids while setting up a new channel on Veoh - Moebius Surfing TV. It’s a series of machinima vids featuring live recordings of DJs as they do their thing in SL. Cool scenery, funky Avs, and some tasty dance tracks.

2k Suisei has been busy lately, updating his zBrush to sculpted prim converter several times in the last few weeks. This newest v2.1 includes several exciting additions. You can now rescale objects while converting. This provides a higher quality conversion and keeps the physical bounding box closer to the shape of the actual sculpty. There are options to help you animate sculpties in-world, either by changing the center axis of the final object or aligning multiple ‘frames’ of an animated shape.

2k has also added the ability to import multiple object sculpties. You can create an object in zBrush using several individual obejects, convert them, then automatically re-assemble them in world with 2k’s Sculpty Rezzer object. Shiny!

Check out the Sculpty Maker forum thread for the download and other info.