The last couple of weeks have kept me busy chasing down free heads and bodies that have come available in SL during this period of global lockup. Collecting freebies was the easy part. Trying to decide on what skin to use on them was more difficult – especially since I now have more heads than I expect to need to illustrate my story.
So, when the weekend was nearly over, it was time to relax and it seemed that Kyashi had been locked up for a while – even her last trip out of the closet was a working one. The result was that she took off and had a great evening listening to music and dancing her feet off.
Not all was play, though – she did stop to allow me this one photograph as she was leaving Taox Tattoo…
This image was another exercise in Black Dragon. I think I’m slowly getting a handle on it which is somewhat ironic because this week I also decided to start uploading poses that I have created to my marketplace store. The problem being that Black Dragon eliminates the need to create poses in world and unfortunately, is not able to export the poses you create in browser.
Back to the image, though. There were two glaring issues I noticed while taking the photographs. The first was that while using depth of field to blur the background – the viewer did not initially blur what was behind the windshield. As I considered how I was going to address that, I found there was an option to leave alpha channels out of DOF consideration. Great! That eliminated that problem.
When I toggled that option, I noticed that something changed around Kyashi’s head. I toggled it a couple more times and saw that there was alpha in the edges of her hair and it was causing problems I hadn’t noticed. Unfortunately, no matte which way it was toggled, there was still a problem. I opted to turn the alphas off and tend to the blurry hair in photoshop because it seemed that would be less noticeable and easier to fix.
I’m sure the second issue is also related to the alpha channel. Kyashi’s dress is full of alpha and it was playing havoc with the shadows being cast on it. The shadow was so dark that it was nearly black. Additionally, the shadow edges were sharp and jagged but that has always been an issue for me with Black Dragon.
I ended up using the stamp/clone tool in photoshop to soften the shadow edges and a curves/blend-if solution to reduce the super dark shadows on the dress to something more reasonable if not still a bit on the dark side.
In closing, I’ll praise Black Dragon for it’s poser. Actually setting poses without twisting something into a pretzel – especially fingers – is a challenge. The flexibility is just so awesome that I’m sure I will keep working at it long enough to get the knack of it.
Finally, I used this image in the following video – Are you coming back…
