This year's Relay for Life Fantasy Faire is now over - aside from the grand "Key of Hope" hunt, produced by Mad Pea Productions (an incredible in-world artistic group), which I believe goes on until the end of the week.

This year, the Fantasy Faire blew through the previous year's record of $25,000 US and sailed right over the $30,000 US mark. This was an incredible achievement, for everyone involved - the organizers, the merchants, the volunteers, and the sim builders.

I can really relate to the sim builders. This year, I had the honor of being one of them! So, as you can probably surmise, I'm pretty tired right now. It's been an extensive, tiring and complicated month for me.

THE DRAGONSPIRE

After several prototypes, I finally managed to churn out a Mesh hair that I hope challenges the quality of many current, rigged Mesh hairs.

In developing new Mesh hair for Second Life, I've done my best to make the hair as versatile as possible. I've done several things in developing the hair that may actually make Mesh hair an easier experience in terms of fitting their avatar.
The hair is partial-rig, instead of full rig. I've made it so that it deforms quite well when you adjust your shape with the appropriate sliders. It includes a whopping 18 different rig styles for better avatar fit and customization (as it won't deform to things like facial width, forehead slope, and the like).
Giving customers freedom to modify their purchases, while moving forward in terms of quality, low-lag/low ARC hair, has always been of the utmost importance to me - especially in light of the fact that you can't directly modify rigged meshes.

Lightening the load time and resource consumption of often prim-heavy hair has also been a main concern of mine. Counting in at about 30 PE at rezzed size, Sylvan Dojo 2 is probably one of the lowest-resource-heavy mesh hairs out there right now. This is NOT a mesh hair made out of sculptie shapes, and imported as mesh (like many other mesh hairs currently available). This mesh hair is professionally modeled from scratch, textured by hand, and rigged to the extent that SL's skeleton will allow, in all its imperfections. You really can't expect anything less!

In ye olde Wylde Style tradition, Sylvan Dojo 2 comes with 3-way wear facial hair (which makes the very fetching mustache/goatee combo you see above when all put together) and a Hat/Hood friendly version of the mesh base. An Alpha layer specifically created for the hair to hide the scalp is also included, as are matching Hair Bases for all the colors in whatever package you choose to buy.

My Mesh hairs are now also implemented with low-lag, deletable resize/texture change scripts, to offset some of the weight that the overabundance of Rigs will put on your inventory. Simply wear your hair, click on it, and you can resize or change the color on the fly - just remember to make a copy before you play with it!

Many more colors are now available, each in their own separate pack at $250L apiece. You can also purchase a pack of Natural or Colorful shades for $400, and a whole Fatpack for only $600L. The textures are hand-painted to give the hair a nice, soft realism - colors are picked with just as much care.

Be sure to try on the DEMO before you buy. They are available for free in both my In-world store and on my SL Marketplace. The available Rigs will look different on all avatars, so it's always best to make sure they work with your 'look'.

If you like the EYES that they're wearing, be sure to check out my hand-painted Bright Eyes. You can buy them for $150 a pop In-world. Each color comes in 3 iris sizes, and they include prim eyes for glow usage, odd-colored eyes and so on.

As always, click the ad to get to the corresponding Marketplace page. Enjoy!

Two new Pewter Totem Necklaces released this week: Raven and Lion. I have quite the little assortment of these necklaces now. As usual, click the images above to go to the respective product pages.

As you can probably guess, I had many inquiries about whether or not I'd be putting my new assets from the Relay for Life event up for sale. My simple answer was: Of course!

You can now purchase the Crystals in 4 flavors: Classic, Blacklight, Pastel and Dark. 85 colors in all. 6 cluster styles (ranging from a 2-4 Prim Equivalent, depending on the cluster) and 3 single crystal styles (1 Prim Equivalent each at rezzed size).

That's a total of 765 separate crystals.

These things can be sized UP HUGE or shrunk down really really tiny. You can mess with the shine, the glow, and even make your own clusters from the single crystals.

Relay for Life in Second Life 2012 ended with a donation total of $348,919.

And no, that's not Lindens.

I think everyone was pretty happy with the general outcome this year. While this year was quite a bit less than last year, repeating a donation of over a quarter of a million dollars is definitely nothing to sneeze at.


To all the donators, coordinators, committee members, organizers, builders and teams:

Thank you!


As I explained in my last blog post, I had been asked to bring back "Paper Boats in a Paper Sea" for the main Relay for Life event in Second Life. I think I under-estimated exactly how much it would take to fill 1/4 of a sim without making it look like my shop and art display exploded all over a parcel. I had decided to create custom content for the event. I also had to display the names of the committee members, somehow.

Since I had a strange corner parcel that worked best at a diagonal, I had to wait until I actually saw the parcel in-world before I could begin designing my display. I sketched my draft the day the sims came online.

I had 9 days to complete it.

Issues began cropping up immediately, importing sand sculpts. The technique I used for the Fantasy Faire display, for some odd and unexplained reason, was no longer functioning. Not that this is a surprise. We're in Second Life, after all. I ended up scrapping the sand and decided to just terraform instead. To make matters worse, the entire week we struggled with crippling lag and repeatedly crashing sims. A few times I had to retreat to my Home sim to complete assets and position objects because I could not do it on location.

Admittedly, most of the time working on the parcel wasn't creating content for it, or managing out how the interactive display would work. It was setting out all the bleeping grass. Grass, stepping stones, flowers, trees. Landscaping. At one point my two helpers (Iloh and Saikatsu Epsilon) and I did nothing for several hours but set out grass. The lag certainly didn't help. Eventually Iloh shoved me aside and decided to take about 75% of the gardening into her own hands, if not more. Thank goodness, too. She did a stunning job!

While I'd never seen Iloh do any landscaping before in Second Life, it was as if it came second-nature to her. With minimal instruction and critique on my part, she managed to help churn out exactly what I needed. It took a lot of stress off the fact that I was sleeping in 4-hour chunks and working in 8-9 hour intervals.


I made several clusters of stepping stones, customizable wooden signs and some of the most beautiful crystals in Second Life from scratch. All low-prim and customized Level of Detail for optimal performance. I coordinated the positions a few of my sculptures and my new Dancer's Triad. Rocks, plants, particle effects. The finishing touches on the installation itself. We decorated the seating areas with 'chairs' in the form of floating bubbles by HPMD*, and put out some of their wonderful trees and bushes. The crystals were a mad dash (I created them in 8 hours) but they were worth it. They definitely tied everything together.

The last object was placed at 5:56 AM July 14th. 4 hours shy of the start of the event.

Surprisingly, I managed to stay awake and coherent long enough to witness the opening of the event.

Then I took a 12-hour nap.

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

I have officially nine days to finish my display for Second Life's major Relay for Life event.

I have never done this event before, and I am stoked.

40 sims large (that's a lot of sims) and packed with artistic displays and themed events, users follow a gigantic track that spans through the sims in a large circle. Users continue to raise money and follow the track over a 24 hour period.

I've been invited to display on one of the major campgrounds along the side of the track. Once more, Kadmon Wytchwood and his incredible scripting talents is making sure "Paper Boats in a Paper Sea" can return for the 24 hour event!

As the event only lasts a day, people won't have enough time to customize their own boat textures, so the boats are being limited to a dedication that will broadcast over instant messages.
After you make your donation to the vendor and receive your boat, you'll be able to wear your boat and click on it. This will rez a boat that will go out on the water. Follow the instructions to make your dedication with a chat command, and click on the water to place your boat. The boat will then remain on the water until the end of the event.

If there is one grid-wide event that I can completely get behind, it's Relay for Life in Second Life. Many donation events in Second Life are questionable in terms of where the donations actually go. There are quite a few individuals who have used donation events in Second Life as a means to scam residents, taking their money for charity and transferring it right into their own bank accounts.

Relay for Life in Second Life is one of the handful of charity events that are not only backed by the American Cancer Society, but use very specific donation vendors that go directly to their custom-legacy-name avatars (in other words, avatars with last names given specifically by Linden Lab), which you can obtain from the American Cancer Society's very own in-world sim.

If you're interested in joining the in-world event on July 14-15th, be sure to check out the Relay for Life in Second Life website. It's sure to be a lot of fun, with themed walks every hour and prizes for most outrageous costume or how many times you can lap the track in the 24 hour period.

So I've been doing some re-pricing and marking down of older Refined Wild builds that were created somewhere between 2005 and 2008. These builds were top quality for their time and sold very well over the course of several years, but I think it's about time they get demoted to prices that better reflect their current quality in accordance to the rest of the market.

Of course, this means good news for the thrifty people out there who like to get quality stuff for a fraction of its original cost!

Considering that I've been making stuff in Second Life for such a long time, over such a long period of time, the age gaps between pieces can become pretty apparent. At least to me, anyway. I may or may not make more aging pieces 'Classic' as time goes on. I think it will really depend on the quality of the piece and whether or not the price fits the form anymore.

I will eventually be doing this to a handful of my older Wylde Styles, as well. Which ones and when? Only time will tell.