Sinespace Creator Spotlight: BlakOpal Designs

One of the nice things about avatar clothing in Sinespace is that you can incorporate in-world cloth physics, as shown by the skirt of this dress created by BlackOpal Designs, in a recent video posted to YouTube:

In a recent interview with 80 Level, the couple behind BlakOpal Designs explains how they got started creating content for virtual worlds, starting off with Second Life in 2008:

We are BlakOpal and Trilo Byte, based in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States. We’re artists in both the real and virtual worlds. Together and separately we’ve worked on real-world projects such as bespoke clothing (like pirate coats, corsets, and dresses), custom bars and furniture, a human-powered carousel, a 40-foot long space pirate ship, and even a large climbable ziggurat. BlakOpal has a strong background in graphic design, 3D and animation, while Trilo’s background is a bit more varied and also covers advertising, marketing, and industrial design. We love art and technology and have been doing this for most of our lives.

We got into making content for virtual worlds in 2008 when we were taking a year off from Burning Man (an arts and culture festival in northern Nevada) and had a lot of time on our hands. At that time, we discovered a BBC documentary called Visions Of The Future presented by Dr. Michio Kaku – a brilliant theoretical physicist and futurist who we are big fans of. In the program, he talked about virtual worlds, specifically Second Life, and he even mentioned that they had a virtual version of Burning Man that took place in-world. We decided to look it up and check it out and were immediately hooked. We had been making 2D and 3D art for years at that point, and immediately started making things and playing around to see what we could do.

When BlakOpal and Trilo Byte discovered that Sinespace had in-world cloth physics, that was enough to get them hooked! They were the first people to create avatar clothing with working cloth physics in Sinespace, in December 2016.

Trilo is quoted in the 80 Level interview:

One of the great things about making things for SineSpace is that it’s based on the Unity game engine, and Unity can work with almost anything. You can use whatever 3D modeling program you like, as long as it can export an FBX, DAE, or OBJ file. You can use anything from free programs like Blender to commercial programs like ZBrush, Modo, Cinema 4D, Marvelous Designer, Maya… the list goes on and on.  It’s just a matter of finding a program (or programs) that you like and is within your budget and learning how to use the tools.

For texturing, you can use free programs like GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) or Krita, or commercial programs like Pixelmator, Photoshop, Substance Painter or Mari. A lot of modeling programs have pretty good tools for texturing built in, too. The choices here are endless, it’s about finding the right program for your budget and learning how to use it.

For more information on BlakOpal Designs, you can visit Trilo’s website or follow their Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube.

So today, I decided that Vanity Fair would pay a visit to the in-world BlakOpal store, and do a little shopping. You can also do your shopping using the in-client Shop button, or from the Sinespace Shop website (here’s a link to take you directly to the BlakOpal Designs store).

Here are a few of the outfits she picked up today:

This is the Bettie top and matching miniskirt, available for 149 Gold each. This outfit comes in red as shown, as well as purple, blue, green, and black:

The next outfit Vanity models consists of:

• the Crescent Hoop earrings in Ripple Gold (only 39 Gold!);
• the gold Mirabelle Wrap Dress (physics enabled; 179 Gold); and
• the black Misty Ballet Slipper (99 Gold).

Watch how the skirt of this dress moves as Vanity walks! You will never see this kind of cloth physics in Second Life, folks! (Even Sansar only has cloth physics enabled in Lookbook mode as you dress and style your avatar, not in-world cloth physics.)

The following, final outfit consists of four separate pieces:

• the blue Moto Jacket F Dragonfly (149 Gold);
• the black Lillian Lace Top (79 Gold);
• the blue Marco Jeans F (99 Gold); and
• the blue Sineverse F Dragonfly Sneakers (149 Gold).

As you can see, the detailing on this clothing is remarkable!

So hurry on down to BlakOpal Designs and pick up some wonderfully crafted outfits for your avatar! They sell menswear as well as women’s clothing, in styles ranging from modern to steampunk to pirate!

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my new role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).

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