OBSERVATION ARCANA

I CANT AFFORD A NAME CHANGE THAT SHITS EXPENSIVE

I'm a stylized, relatively low-poly artist that works in blender, clip studio, substance painter and photoshop.Feel free to ask about anything I've made, I love talkin 3D.I'm still learning, and hopefully we can learn from each other!🍀
Busy IRL often due to various health issues, sorry if I don't always respond asap!
I have qualities of dissociative amnesia along with losing files at times, so please be patient.Part of a fictive-heavy system.
On HRT since early 2019!

DONUT STEEL
is my old store brand, mostly full of junk sculpts pre-2016. I usually only put pony or chibi/pastel things here, but as I grow old and give less of a shit, it'll probably all go to Found Footage now. In short, this is a defunct brand, and most of it is discounted inworld.

FOUND FOOTAGE
is my new store brand, with more generic or strange items. The stuff I make here is an homage to all that's unusual, pioneering into random shit no one else has done much with yet. I tend to collab with my partner, who owns their own store, Salamandrian!

Looking for more stores? Check out my friends at...

Salamandrian - My partner's shop; handpainted feral texture mods (learning mesh)
GHOST - A good friend of mine's primary shop, he runs a bunch of other stores too!

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Partial kin list above, partial system list below.
Feel free to talk to me about this
if you already know what these words mean!

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Various tips for content creation!

Program Suggestions:
Photoshop pen tool for clean shapes and setting up/finalizing layers. Substance Painter for rendering semi-realisticly or for seamless patterns. Blender Cycles for painting on shaders or fur patterns onto the model, or for making UV-scale-accurate noise/cloud/etc textures (use Emit shader). Blender 2.79 is good for hard modelling and rigging, but always use 2.9+ for sculpting or if you're doing artistic renders.Texture Size:
Four 256s can fit in a 512, four 512s can fit in a 1024. If your texture isn't detailed enough to need a 1024, use 512! If your texture requires normal and spec maps, or your mesh could easily be multiple 512s, fit multiple 512s into a single 1024. It will make your texture space well-used, and load faster than several smaller textures.
To use this on a model not made for it, set it to 0.5x0.5 texture scale, and change the offsets to 0.25 or 0.75 for their respective squares. I suggest only doing this for personal mods, as it's a little advanced for for-sale modkits.Transparent backgrounds in Photos:
Use a static pose or right click your avatar to freeze it. Take one picture with a black background, and one with a white background. In Photoshop or Photopea, set one copy to 'difference' over the other. Invert if needed, your subject should be white on a black background. Use this as an alpha mask on the original image to erase the background, raise the contrast if needed using Levels to tighten the alpha's edges.
An animated background prim and visual tutorial for this is available at my parcel's sandbox area and at Whinny Hollow UniversityTransparency in SL: USE .TGA!!
Make your texture how you want it, then make a copy of the layer. For the bottom layer, make the background entirely opaque, using a filter such as Flamingpear's Solidify or bucket tooling. For the top layer, lock the transparency and make it entirely white, then add a black background under it. Copy this monochrome layer, go into Channels, and make a 'new layer', which will automatically be called Alpha 1. Paste it into here. PROCESS GIF This is doable in photoshop and photopea, but I am not sure what other programs can use .TGA properly.

This page updated periodically, feel free to send me an IM if you want more information on any part of the content creation process in SL.My Blender Tutorials (WIP)Other links:
Unicode for Second Life
Internal Texture UUIDs

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>PSD FILES
>OPENPONY
>HELLHUNDGENERAL FAQ
!! ALWAYS READ THE NOTECARD !!

IF THE FAQ PAGES DO NOT HELP, SEND IM OR NOTECARD.
I AM NOT NOTIFIED OF MARKETPLACE REVIEWS.

How to I change the textures?
- Only a few of my items include texturing HUDs, for ease of use on many faces. However, as I see my mesh to be the 'main product' in most cases, I often give out my textures full permissions. At the cost of having to manually apply them, you can save and edit them freely.
- To change the textures, simply right click edit the object, select face / edit linked as needed, and drag the texture in to the texture window.How do I apply no-transfer textures?
- In the case that a texture is no transfer, you must drag the object from your inventory to the ground, select the area you are applying to, and drag it into the texture slot.What is BOM? (Bakes on Mesh)
- BOM is a 'revival' of the old system of how SL avatars wore clothing and makeup, but now usable on any item. This allows multiple layers of textures to stack onto each other, and be individually recolorable. When an object is set to BOM, you can wear 30 different layers, thus we are able to create fully tintable mods and body parts. Note: layer order matters.Can I get [Model, no-trans textures, etc] full perm?
- No. Texture mods (where the textures are the main product) and my 3D models will not ever be full perms.
- I do not approve of my models being ripped and edited/ported to other games. Currently any rigging data I'd share would be non-UV'd, sorry.
- Ripping my textures for personal use is fine, though, as long as it is in SL and not given out to anyone who doesn't also own the same product.Are your commissions open?
- My inworld profile will say if they are. Prices depend on the complexity of the object, and they are often closed because of my energy levels and IRL situation. I am open to suggestions, though.

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PSD FILES

I still need to figure out what filehost to use
I'll put stuff here eventually though

Mondmotte wing UVVapofox
Tail PSD
Head fins PSD
Neck Frill

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OPENPONY FAQ

Can I get a rigging dummy for this part you made?
- If a link doesn't work, IM me!
- Ponkey kitI put the BOM layers on and they didn't change anything!
- Did you enable BOM on the pony? Did you make sure you're not wearing an alpha mask? Make sure to press Add instead of Wear so it layers over your base coat!I can see the BOM layer but it's not in the right place!
- Ensure you enabled BOM through the OpenPony HUD, and not through any third-party applier systems. There are now two different layouts, make sure to click the bom button once, not twice. My products currently only work with the first layout.How do I tint these layers?
- Right click and edit the universal layer, at the bottom is the tint button, click to open the color picker.The colors are wrong!
- Do not tint your pony via the HUD. Make sure it is white! Tint your pony's colors by editing the Universal layer.How to I make the pony BOM?
- In the Customization HUD, click Main and Cell, set to pure white, then click the BOM button. Make sure to remove your alpha mask!

HELLHUND FAQ

Reminder to read the notecard!How do I currently get the Hellhund?
- You can buy vouchers on marketplace, or be patient, as Zexen has a BOM update planned. There is a temporary fatpack on his marketplace as well, if you have the money for it!I'm deformed!!
- Relog. Make sure you're wearing the deformer objects and AO. Most of my Hellhund mods don't have deformers.Where'd you get [MOD IN AD]???
- If it's not a texture mod I'm selling, check my partner's store Salamandrian. They are new to making mods and handpaint all the fur and scales themselves! But they are anxious about making fully black/white mods, so please respect that and do not harass them to sell it to you. You can ask them about commissioning custom mods, though!Can I get a rigging dummy for this part you made?
- Maybe! I'm not used to giving them out, but IM me and I'll try to get one ready for you. The UVs will not be intact, sorry! Also if I say no, it's... probably because I lost the file.

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I like modifiable objects.
Most people, in fact, heavily prefer modifiable objects.
Here's stores that sell modifiable objects.
KEY:
⚧️ = Mostly Unisex
♀️ = Mostly Female
♂️ = Mostly Male
🥺 = Fatpack Only

HAIR

Aii & Ego (BOM!!!)

CLOTHES

⚧️🥺Toksik

ACCESSORIES

Text

HUMAN SKINS/MAKEUPS

⚧️ Gloom.

FURNITURE

NOMAD
Dust Bunny
DRD - Death Row Design
Fundati

What are normals and how do I destroy themZexen's tutorial for seamless and UVmapped fluffies

Normals within blender are the faces, edges, and vertices' "directions" they face in, to be short about it. Similarly, Second Life has 'bump maps', which use OpenGL styled baked normal maps, which are different! These affect the normal maps of the object, but can not replace them.This quick guide is for 2.8+ UIs, if you are using 2.79 or earlier you may need an add-on called YAVNE (Yet Another Vertex Normal Editor).

Above is a visual guide to enable the overlays to show where your normals are facing. For most standard models, the only important thing here is the Face direction; they either point outwards, as typical, or inwards, for items like skybox interiors and celshade effects.
It is also important to note that every face on a 3D model can only go in one direction at a time, at least in second life, so you would need to create the interior as well as the exterior if say, you wanted to make a room inside your cube. See Solidify Modifier tutorials on youtube for more on that.

Above, the cubes have the same Normals directions, but the right has been set to Shade Smooth. This can be done by selecting the model in Edit Mode, and using the dropdown Mesh > Shading > Smooth Faces. You can also keep some faces Flat, for example if you want a Smooth cactus coming out of a Flat square plant pot. For our purposes, this can be considered a 0 to 1 binary on the normals weights, and going between those takes more work.

Selecting faces in Edit Mode gives a range of options for the drop-down menu, and to fully control what is hard-cut and what is smoothly blended, you'll want to play with the above buttons. If any edges highlight in blue, that means they have been marked Sharp, and you can use the Edge menu's dropdown to add and remove these marks.