Culture Shock 2012

Culture Shock is still running until May 26th, so there is still some time to swing on by and do some shopping.

As a reminder, we have two items that donate to the event’s chosen charity Médecins Sans Frontières. Sales of the Bauhaus Face Jewelry Set and the Red Wassily Jewelry Set will donate 50 and 100 percent, respectively. Additionally, all the items we have in our booth are 25% off until the end of the event (they will be available in our stores and on the marketplace after at full price).

Mesh build for [HANDverk] booth

This is Tobias here, long-lurking companion of the prolific Daph that has good-naturedly been semi-ghostwriting my entries for all too long now. It is time that I stepped up my game and contributed to this awesome blog that Daphne has set up and maintained. Hopefully this will be the first of many posts, as I have long-intended to do some blogging and I have a store of ideas that I have accumulated.

Enough of the chit-chat, on to business! I would like to tell you a little about the [HANDverk] booth that I designed and built very recently for Culture Shock 2012. We are excited about it because it is a foray into Second Life© building that I am more than qualified and to do, but have been looking for the right opportunity to start. Daph has been encouraging me for a long time to throw my hat into the Second Life© build-creation-ring and now with the full-fledged arrival of !MESH! on the grid I have no reason to jump in with both feet. First though, one little dirty secret about my “other life”. Motions the reader closer and whispers, “I am a real-in-the-flesh designer/architect.” This will be perhaps my sole confession about that, ahem, other part of my existence.

I have been a power-user of the awesome 3D building app Sketchup almost since its appearance in 2000. Using it for both personal and professional purposes it dragged me into the 3D creation world gently and easily and has become a powerful tool for me. Now I was always eager to take advantage of my skills for Second Life© building, but it never quite meshed (no pun intended) with my needs or workflow. I never quite bought into the sculpty experiment as it always seemed like an awkward work-around to a bigger problem, the problematic prim-based creation mode that was Second Life© content creation. BUT in 2011, mesh arrived on the scene to save us all from that prim-counting-purgatory! I was not deterred by the common conception that “Sketchup was not a good tool for creating mesh” and was determined to make it work. Maya was brought into my workflow, and low and behold, I could create that elusive .dae file for import to Second Life©. With a little bit of massaging and coercion, I’m now able to bring in a low-prim Sketchup model into Second Life© as a low-prim mesh object with texture mapping included! /me gestures with a flick of the hand to the man behind the curtain, “First slide please!”

The mesh shell comes in-world as only four prim equivalents, but with the baked lighting and textures packs a lot of punch! The curved panels contain the vendors for Daph’s and my exclusive creations for the event, for which our theme was the Bauhaus.

For my exclusive Culture Shock Bauhaus items I created a few that were based on actual objects created by the Bauhaus, and a few that were inspired by the same. The “Wassily Chair” was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1923, The “Tea Infuser MT 49″ and the accompanying “Sugar Basin” was designed by Marianne Brandt about 1924. The Floor Lamp was designed by Gyula Pap in 1923. All of these items were not commercially produced at the time of the Bauhaus, but were produced as replicas later, a testament to the forward thinking that was typical of the Bauhaus.

The remaining items in my little collection were designed by myself as companions to their inspirational Bauhaus objects to create a cohesive set for the event. I hope you will visit our little booth at Culture Shock 2012 starting on May 4 to see Daphne’s and my first entry into the events of Second Life!

FaMESHed Launch

Last night was the FaMESHed grand opening, which was quite exciting unto itself. Tobias and myself haven’t really been in any events, so it was very nice of Cracked and Vanity to invite us.

There is a ton of great stuff, and a bunch of top designers. So if you love mesh, it’s an event not to be missed. New stuff will cycle in on the first of each month, the last week of the month it will be closed.

So what do we have for our customers? Jewelry and furnishings, handmade in whatever painstaking programs of choice we use (Tobias uses Sketchup and Maya while I use ZBrush and Maya).

FaMESHed will run until May 21st, then a new round will open the first of June.

Available in gold, silver, and steel.

Culture Shock 2012

Poster by Kiera Seerose.

Tobias and I are excited to be in Culture Shock this year, it’s the first big event we’ve been in. Although it opens in two weeks, we’re still (furiously) working on the items we will be having in our little shop on the sim. What I can say now is that everything will be mesh and it will be a mix of furniture/decor (by Tobias) and jewelry (by myself).

The second annual “Culture Shock” event in May 2012 (May 4th – May 26th) aims to be an important event for the Secondlife fashion culture. Celebrating trends and trendsetters within our business, and incorperating music and art, all with reflections of our own personal first life cultures depicted in our creations. ~ from the Chic Management website.

 

 

Gorean Room (13th Round)

Have you been eyeing some of our unrigged mesh jewelry, but have been intimidated by the price? Well then, if you make your way down to the Gorean Room between now and the 15th of April, you can pick up a pair of our Gold Cylinder Anklets for only 50L.

Gorean Room (Round 12)

This time we decided to do something a little different at the Gorean Room, by releasing our Gold Triangle Earrings for 50L. They’re great for a gold adorned kajira, or for those rare times one ventures off to explore the non-Gorean side of Second Life.

Note that these earrings are unrigged MESH, so they require the use of a mesh enabled viewer to see, but they can be manually resized.

[HANDverk] @ the Gorean Room (March 1-15th)

This round at the Gorean Room, we have our Wema Face Paint for only 50L. Stop on by to pick up yours today, and check out the other great things at the event.

[HANDverk] @ In the Mood for 2046

So Toby and I have been trying to focus more on not only churning out new products, but promoting our store and becoming more recognizable. We recently rented a small satellite store in the In the Mood for 2046 mall. It’s small, but we have a lot of things in there for people to see when they are shopping. The other stores in the build are: SLUG, Anthem., & Le Primitif. We decided to rent here because the mall looked really cohesive with a small Chinatown alley feel. We even made a red store sign to match.

Come check it out if you can, you might see something you like at one of the other stores, or just get a few neat shots around the street (there are poseballs in a few spots if you feel the need to loiter, like us).

The Gorean Room (15-29 February)

We’re in a new round of the Gorean Room until the end of February. This time, we’re offering up our Sascha Body Paint for only 50L. Drop on by and check out the other offerings before the room changes over!

The Gorean Room (1-15 February)

There is fresh stuff in the Gorean Room for this round, everything is either 50 or 70L. Come on by and check it out, we have our Brude Body Paint out for 50L. It looks pretty great on men and women alike.