British cut, mens suit in rich brown

A gorgeous rich brown suit for men is now for sale in my store. I am really pleased with the colour, it is rich, dark and businesslike. As always the material is made up of subtle colours and textures that catch the light and make it look something special.

Available at identity mens outfitters

Expressions - changeable look

After making many body shapes I noticed that the position of the eyebrows made a big difference to your character. Raised eyebrows, sad, wistful could all be achieved with just eyebrows, so I made twelve different looks.

Available at identity mens outfitters

British cut gray suit finally released.

This is my first suit in a series, a British cut gray suit with pants, jacket and seven shirts in one pack. The suit has subtle texturing and stripes which give a more interesting look. Available at identity mens outfitters

This is my first suit and took about 50 hours to create in Adobe Fireworks with about 60 layers, most of them shading and shadows.

The hair is ETD Matthew, shoes by are City Walk by Shiny Things, body shape by identity (available in my shop) and the skin is Lila Natural Skin.

identity name and logo

From Designs by Asp

I rejected this brand name weeks ago but instinct and intuition keep drawing me back. Under the identity name I will be making mens and womens clothing. I hope they will be as distinctive as the name suggests while allowing my customers to achieve a personal look with different styles and variations on each piece. Personal looks can be made with colour change and accessories.

Dutch Business Park - Photos

Dutch Business Park is ready to open! Here are a few pictures of my work.

Apart from the trees and a few other things the landscaping, buildings, furniture and shops are my own work.

From Designs by Asp

The entrance to the RPM Car section of the Region uses car shapes and 1950's car-parts including bonnet shapes, chrome, lights, pistons and oil. The entrance is a teleport to the car display 250m above.

Taking a break beside one of my waterfalls.

The view from reception looking over the surfing area. We have a shop at the waters edge selling surf gear including surfboards, windsurfers and kite boards.

I have tried to bring some of the best of SL to the Dutch Business Park region, with attractive landscaping and many things to do. My vision is of a company coming here and having their employes from around the world meet and have fun doing things together and learning about each other in a place with little stress and a lot of freedom.

The boat area in Dutch Business Parks. This is the mooring for the boats and sits over the top of the Underlake ballroom. I managed to get a sailing course onto the sim and this is the mooring point for the boats. In the background are my shops. The boats are Flying Tako by Kanker Greenacre.

Lights, atmosphere; Action

Linden Labs will change the look of Second Life with new weather (lighting, cloud, atmospheric and water effects after) acquiring Windward Mark Interactive and its shader technology. Second Life will have a more realistic look. Beautiful sunsets, smog choked cities, tropical skies and science-fiction looks can all be created in the new browser and later within Second Life itself.

See Torley's slide show on Flickr.

When the new software is released I am keen to change the look of Dutch Business Parks. A Beta Browser is available which allows us to experiment with looks on our own computers. I cannot wait to see this in action and change the look of Dutch Business Parks, enhancing the atmosphere and general feel of the place.

Beautiful regions like Apollo or Svarga will definitely benefit from the new weather, but they represent less than 1% of the places in SL. You can fly over the mainland for miles and see a patchwork of buildings made to fit each small plot of land with no gardens or landscaping.

SL will look more realistic and bad buildings will stand out with the new weather. See Torley's slides for examples. Rather than increasing the realism of SL, the contrast between the sky and lighting will make the bad buildings more noticeable and draw attention that you are inside a computer game.

The custom built Islands made by professionals will benefit most from these changes. They can integrate the architecture, landscaping and planting with the weather. The average resident will find it hard to achieve the same effects with houses and gardens limited by prim usage.

With these changes it will become more diffcult for business to get started as the overall quality of SL improves. There will be fewer people who can do everything needed to make clothes, gadgets, vehicles, buildings or landscape simulators. There will be experts in different areas and an elite band will be providing the top quality goods. They will probably be supplying the people who can afford these services, i.e. the commercial companies coming in to SL.

Improving the lighting shows up other areas in SL, such as illumination, the sim terrain, particle and body shapes. The prims have just been tackled with the new sculpted prims.
- You can only have six illumination sources at one time
- Terrain is set at the corners of a sim and only 4 textures can be used over the entire sim
- Particles look pretty crude and it needs real skill to make a good looking particle source.
- Body shapes are based on one 'perfect' shape. You cannot go too far away from the perfect shape so you cannot reproducing some real-life faces. Orlando Blooms chin, Angelina Jolie, Dita Von-Tees forehead and Schwarzenegger's body shape are all difficult to do.
- Faces are made hardhiveer as you cannot change the nose length, or eye vertical positions.

I predict we will soon be seeing improvements in these areas.

Improving the weather has lifted the quality of one area of SL and shows up other areas as being poor. I am looking forward to these changes and the improved looks that we will be able to achieve, but not so much to the increased skill levels and time that will be needed to use all of this.

I moved the code

I moved the code and examples to another blog, Code by Asp so this blog is purely about design.

I will put my tutorials and notes at Code by Asp.

Lighting at Dutch Business Park

This is a photo of the light I was working on for Second Life. All the lighting effects are added by the light on the wall.

My light throws a nice soft, circular light onto the wall and floors with good light inside the building and little going outside.

The light starts to come on as dusk approaches so you can enjoy the wonderful Second Life lighting effects without them being drowned out. By the time the sun sets and darkness falls the light is fully on.

This light will be available at my stores in Dutch Business Park and in Tammora. Search for my shop name "Furnish IT" or look in my profile for links.

Website efficiency and effectiveness

CodeTron (Rob) commented on one of my posts. I looked at Rob's blog and that reminded me of something I did a while ago. He was analysing the Google page-rank and mentioned the probablity of being on a web-page.
I ran an internal website for a couple of years and wanted an efficient and effective design. There are many programs that will analyse your web statistics, but few that tell you how to improve your site.
Running our website we wanted to provide information quickly and efficiently and I used one simple measure; for each page I counted how many pages were viewed before getting to the current page.
The number of web pages viewed is a stopping probability and followed a geometric distribution; the probability of stopping gives a measure of how good you web-site is at providing information. The higher the probability of someone leaving, the better the site is at providing information. i.e. The user found the information quickly and left.
Re- reading that (25OCT07) I need to explain. Assuming the site is an information site or product catalogue you want the person to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible and you do that by having found whate they want in as few clicks as possible, i.e. they found what they wanted in the minumum number of clicks and left the site. Most analysis programs count the number of pages viewed per hour/day/whatever and you want that number to be increasing. There are a few ways of doing that, increasing the number of visitors, increasing the number of visits, increasing the number of pages viewed per visit.
Assuming they left on the page they were looking for , then I moved the pages that were most frequently stopped higher up the hierachy (search).
By moving the pages I effectively increased the probability of finding the answer. Within a month I had doubled the probability of finding the required page (as measured by the slope of the geometric distribution). At the same time the number of hits increased dramatically. As the site became more useful, it was used more frequently. I had more visits that viewed fewer pages but my overall traffic (visitors per day) increased substantially.

My store in Dutch Business Park

I am sitting in my store in a rare quiet moment one one of my new Sofa's which is made from simulated snake skin. Behind me is a glass topped office desk and far off are the matching conference tables. The sim is not open yet, so my store is sitting here waiting for people to come. My shop, Furnish IT, in Tammora has a selection of my furniture.

I spent a while designing the furniture to be low prim (prime shapes), so that you can get more furniture onto your land plot. The sofa is 12 prims, the conference chairs 10 prims. There is some fantastic furniture in SL but much of it uses a lot of prims. The best furniture uses over 30 prims for a sofa and chairs. I am trying to make good looking furniture but making every prim count.

I am looking forward to the new prim that Linden Labs will be including in the new release. I have already started looking at how to use it and will be including them in my furniture to reduce the number of prims even further.

Shops, names and business

As part of Dutch Business park I am building shops selling essentials for business within the park and outside. This photo shows my office furniture shop on top and the mens clothing shop below that and out of sight under the mens shop is the womens shop.

As always I have been struggling with names. Currently my furniture shop is called Furnish IT, but I want a strong name that would be suitable for all three shops. At first I came up with the name 'identity' as a robust name showing my designs were distinctive but the word has too many negative meanings for people. The name 'identity' is not good for searchs as Google gives hundreds of hits even when adding "Second Life" to the search. The search for a name continues.

I must seem very brash starting three shops when three weeks ago I had no stock and no designs. I started with the furniture and made ten different lines and 40 different colours, designs and colours. I still have a few pieces to make, but the basics are all done.

I will be doing mens suits, shirts and ties next and hope to have my first ones ready in a couple of days.

Having furniture, office essentials, clothing and other avatar essentials is all part of the business strategy for Dutch Business Parks.

Reception area - Dutch Business Park

This is my first building for Dutch Business Park. The design brief is to be very modern although my style drifts into a more homely style. I like my textures to be a bit grunged up, scratched, abused and interesting. I held back and kept the look fresh and unabused.

The main textures are made in TextureMaker. The planking is from a royalty free wood texture that I manipulated in Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks. In Photoshop I took the contrast down using a high-pass filter (see http://www.taunt.com), then adjusted contrast, hue and brightness and finally blurred the image. In Fireworks I added thin parrallel rectangles for the planking, then embossed them to make planks. The glass uses one of my multi-use textures; gray background, noise, blur using a gausian filter, then exported to SL, coloured black and made transparent (transparency 40 to 60%). The aluminium is a light gray background with noise and motion blur. In SL I added a low amount of reflection.

In the future hope to show how I processed the textures.

The garden is bought from The Heart Garden Center.

Arrival

Here I am a virtual character in Second Life, living a different existence from my real-life self. In SL I can create, realise dreams and am always discovering new abilities and things I can do. For 8 months I have been learning about Second Life, not just the physical things like building but about society, friends and how people behave.

Second-life has a fascinating enigma; when people hide their real-life selves they are less inhibted and express more about their real selves. I belive that in real-life we project what we think others want to see. In Second-Life we project more of what we really are. Relations in SL can be more open and but when they go wrong, also more raw.

I have been given the opportunity to build an entire private island for Dutch Business Parks. I am buying trees, sound effects, waves and a few other things, but the rest is made by me from terraforming, planting, building offices, furniture to scripting and making custom poses.

The Island is owned by Duke Amsterdam and will be a prestige office area with my shop selling items for the Island. Fortune Babii and Duke Amsterdam will be running the business side once I have handed over the completed Island.

Edited 14MAY07 to say that I have moved scripting and building to Code by Asp.

This blog is about me about the things I make. For coding and tips on building in SL, see my other blog at Code by Asp.