Thank you, Tenyene

Today I had the pleasure of visiting EPIC and chatting with its owner, Tenyene Beaumont. She's doing some wonderful things for prim breast users, though I think the office she's set up for consultations with those who express interest in adjusting their bosom is the most wonderful.

(Simulblogging again... sigh. Got to avoid that in the future.)

A new blog for prim breast users

Don't miss Big Booby Girls in Second Life, a very new (as I type) blog for prim breast users. Cindy Melgund intends for it to become "a place for all sorts of how-tos, news, pictures, tips, and gossip about our gang".

Thanks to Minka Pearl for posting about it!

Lining up

Sigh. Prim breast textures intended to work with matching tops have the same problem as texture "clothing" in general: they're tied to the specific configuration the designer used when creating the textures.

This is a problem, because one of the wonderful features of prim breasts is that you can resize them. (And these days, it's often via a HUD rather than by editing.) Go far enough from the size the designer used when creating the texture that goes with the top, and it doesn't go with the top any more. This happened to me today with a lovely top I bought. I adjusted to the size I wanted... and noticed a jump discontinuity in the collar. Oops.

What can be done about this? To have any chance of working, one would have to be able to modify the texture to suit the size and position of the prim breasts. Not an easy task, but I've made a similar proposal in the past on the SL JIRA, VWR-10839, and it would have to be something of that sort.

AvPainter

I recently saw mention of a program, AvPainter, that looks like it would be extremely useful. Too bad it's Windows-only, at least at the moment--and by "Windows-only" in this case we mean "XP SP 3 or Vista", so if you use Windows 7 you'll need the version that lets you run XP on a virtual machine. (If anyone's found a way to make it run under Mono, please let me know!)

It started out in life, as you might guess from the name, as a way to let you create clothing by painting directly on the avatar figure in 3D, rather than having to figure out how the shapes you intend have to be distorted to go on the flat texture so that when they're wrapped around the avatar shape they look the way you intend. (The computer graphics term for it is "UV mapping"; think of it as if you're Mercator trying to come up with a way to draw a map of the spherical earth on a rectangular piece of paper.)

That's all well and good, and I'm sure that clothiers find it a highly useful program, but why do I mention it here? Because the current version supports painting sculpted prims, and hence should be extremely useful for making tops for use with prim breasts, especially if they could be positioned on the avatar shape so one could easily deal with the places where they join.

I'd be very interested in hearing of peoples' experiences with AvPainter.

On Modesty

In the past I've joked about being modest by virtue of incompetence, i.e. I didn't know enough about UV mapping or was too lazy to experiment with texturing to create a texture for a top with prim breasts and decolletage. (Or both.)

Now that there are clothiers who cater to (most!) prim breast users, though, I'm modest by choice. Part of it's the theory that when the meter is a reasonable unit for measuring one's cleavage, one needn't call attention to one's bosom. Better to distract with something low cut in back, or to favor one's legs. But another part is self-respect; I don't care to wear a T-shirt announcing myself to be a slut or the like. (I have to admit I've been tempted to commission a T-shirt that says "Gee, your breasts are small", but I've not succumbed.)

Low cut can be lovely, but I don't wish to expose my nipples or areolae, and whenever I see those shirts that display the lower portion of one's breasts, they just look like they weren't laundered properly and shrank. The above is about as daring as I would ever be (aside from visits to nude beaches or the Minoan Empire)... but it seems that many clothiers who cater to prim breast users concentrate on very immodest clothing. (I'm very grateful for those who also sell items for the more modest.)

What do you think? I am certainly not privy to the sales figures for any business, but I'd love to know whether I'm unusual in my preferences.