The Eyes Have It

It has been a very very long while since I posted anything here. I was learning so much I didnt have time to keep notes. I've got some amazing creations and really love my building experience.  Then I was on hiatus from SecondLife (SL) for a very long time and so much has changed. It is a lot like learning it over again.

I popped in this week for a bit of fun.  I have been working on photographing the Iris of someone with hazel eyes. After a lot of photographs, various experiments with lighting and a lot of Photoshopping to remove glare, and eyelash reflections and eye lash shadows and then to slice and rescale it so it fits into the SL mesh correctly... I finally had something I could import into SL.

I discovered several months ago the temporary upload for images.  That was fantastic for collaborative work.  I used it to get some advice while I was creating a portrait avatar of Jang Keun-suk. Sadly, I discovered this week that they have removed that feature. 

Not all is lost however, they have replaced it with a new feature that lets you use 'local' images. There are a couple advantages with this. They are right there on your computer, so no waiting for downloads, as soon as you make changes in Photoshop (or your image editor) and save them, they are immediately updated in your SL. This is great for working quickly alone but it shoots collaboration in the foot.  The disadvantage is, only you can see the local image.

I am still hoping they will bring back a version of the temp image.

So back to the hazel eye...  I tested it out with local and am very glad I did.  I had to flip it several times to get the reflection hot spot in the corner I wanted it in.  Silly how Linden gives you a template but never points out that you actually need to rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise.  I made a few other discoveries and tweaks and made a second lightened version that would be better tint-able.  I discovered (well maybe rediscovered as this was a little familiar once I realized my mistake), the blue eye example with the eye white and red veins is misleading. You need to leave the eye white out and save your image as a transparent png.  If you save it with the eye white intact or as a jpg (which fills in the background), you end up with tintable eye whites. Not usually what you want when you are just trying to modify your eye color.

Now I have an amazing pair of hazel eyes on my avatar.