[ akami ] ~ Halloween Fashion Massacre

I couldn’t find a chainsaw for this outfit, but I’d like to say this before we go on… someone make one, because despite loving the Primitive Design baseball bat, I secretly wanted a chainsaw… or an axe. ^_^

But I digress, Maddox dared me one evening as he logged off to catch 5 minutes of sleep, to “look evil” by the time he got back. Well… I don’t know about evil, but I think I definitely hit the “unhealthy appetite for skinning inner-city students alive on their summer vacation breaks as they stumble innocently into my run-down hilly billy country house, where by I fashion them into nice lamp shades and other furnishings using various parts of their anatomy before eating that fat kid who was in the wheel chair” nail on the head.

Sorry about the mess… there was a fashion massacre.

Halloween costume.

Well it started with the top hat from Kari, coupled with the Mohawk hair from abyss, sticking out the back. I had an idea for something along the lines of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the kind of unwashed, covered in blood look. Hint of cannibalism on the lips there, with the Abyss skin. I took a trip to Sinistyle, which was awesomely helpful supplying me with the snake armband, the holsters and the blood. The blood layer came with gloves also. The No Mercy vest, I had sitting in my inventory for ages, comes with the blood stains on it so it was a perfect match. Carrying on the theme I slipped into an awesome pair of Primitive Design jeans which I have been wearing a lot recently. Then I saw the sinistyle holster bags and decided to grab those too. After buying the baseball bat from Primitive while I was there, I decided that now was the time to make an excuse to buy the Tonk Tastic War Boots. They are scripted, and come with alot of options to colour change, hide and reveal certain things. For this occasion, I decided to reveal my nasty, smelly yellow toe on the left boot. Yummy.

The cigarette is funnily enough not from FNKY, but from Primitive Design, and the cut on my cheek is one I made myself. Its simply a prim with a red blood streak texture on it. I saved it as a PNG file, making sure the area around the red was not white, but transparent. Transparent areas will show up as chequered areas in the program you use. I used Adobe Photoshop to do that, but its possible with other image editing suites.

STYLE TIP

The necklace, which I owned already, has a little sculptie heart attached to it behind the skulls. I wanted the feathers and the skulls, but not the heart, I didn’t think it would exactly work. This is where the alpha texture comes in very useful. All I did was apply it to the heart shape [ thankfully the item is MOD! ] and it disappears. Very useful. I did the same with the hair. I positioned at the back of my head so that it sits properly, and then I apply the same alpha texture to all the strands that stick through the hat, naturally making a copy first of course. This is a very useful way of getting hats to fit hair, if the hair pokes through the hat or hood, just apply the texture!

Also, when your avatar has a lot of objects attached to it, they will move about depending on where you attach them and how often your AO changes. I always try to balance the position of any object according to each AO position, so the baseball bat for example looked good in one position when I had a FORM animation enabled. But when I turned on the AKEYO AO it moved the bat to a totally different, unnatural position. So I tried to gain a balance between the two, so that it looked natural with both. The same really goes with anything that you attach to your body. Trouser leg cuffs I think are my personal nightmare, chins in scarfs also, ties in chests too! Its always good to watch out for things going into something else your wearing and trying to compensate for this. Of course, due to the nature of Second Life we’re always going to have problems, but generally it can be avoided without looking like your hips are swallowing your belt.

Either that or just Photoshop the glitches away!