Uncanny valley

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

Is an interesting link . It gets me thinking about sl the photo realism thing. u can take photos of a real thing and wrap them around the prim shape of a thing in sl and it will look like the real thing but in secondlife it will look wrong will look outta place. The freeby shops are full o clothes made this way by people who think all u have to do to make a coat is take photos of a coat. The best clothes are generally hand drawn many of the skins are 2.This skin is is a composite taken from photos of ma gf. The plan is to strip it back and refine it. if you compare this image with the earlier one u can see the eyebrows have gone. Dirty has been photoshoping this further reducing the detail more down to shadow and tone. The plan is to get an entire skin that were able to add make up layers 2.Many of the skins in secondlife use the same base freely available here http://sites.google.com/site/another/resources

Its a really good starting point that I'm not knocking. I just would like to go a little deeper into the process I'm happy to fall flat on my ass and fail at skin, as the texturing process is reflective and feeds back into my shoe work. I became aware that numerous skin designers in secondlife are sourcing this image http://lh6.ggpht.com/_KZ5kc2Sghp0/S8FW5LDk9uI/AAAAAAAAAX4/OlNVr2BZN80/Devon.Aoki.2.bmp of the model Devon an example of which is here for use in skins such as this http://www.brinksie.com/2010/11/11/seductress-of-bums/

It's a really good image I do understand why it's used and I took a photo of my gf in the same manner to obtain the even coverage over the mesh.

I feel using Zbrush I will be able to create my own skin shaders sampling lighting and tone information , Then be able to create original lighting bakes and hopefully produce some exciting new sl skins, inspired by but without sourcing the work that has gone before me.

But as I said I could quite easily fall on my ass 2.If the worst comes to the worst should improve my shoe textures