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| Totally excellent cocktail party dress from The White Armory ... in action. |
This may have happened to you. It happened to me just this weekend. I put on a gorgeous gown and went dancing ... but the skirt didn't work. While my avatar's legs went all over, the skirt hung relentlessly down between her legs. Despite the dangers of changing in public (especially with someone like me around who's always taking pictures), I put on a different dress.
Designers, what I'm telling you is that we don't all stand around stiffly like Barbie or shifting our weight seductively with an expensive AO. Avatars go out to
do things. We dance. We get shot out of cannons. We sit on poseballs. We're
animated. I get the impression that you all don't take that into account when you design outfits. No one is going to put on some gorgeous dress with flexi-prims all over it and not shake them to watch them move!
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| If It Billows, It Needs Glitch Pants. |
And another thing - glitch pants should match the relative length of the skirt. I had to quickly make some longer glitch pants for the above pink outfit. You can see them; they're the pink without the print. Lludmila's interesting bits had been covered, but the skirt billowed so much that it looked like she wasn't wearing glitch pants. Please re-read the name of this blog. [I'm touchy about that, even though I was sent to the principal's office in high school for an outfit that was
almost exactly like this only the skirt was sheer. It had matching bikini pants. I still don't understand that whole incident. You could only see through it if I were standing in front of a bright light.]
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| A natural amount of leg showing. |
In the above ensemble, there was enough gravity on the skirt that it didn't billow out so easily, even with this amount of exaggerated movement. Lludmila doesn't need glitch pants to the knees with this because the gravity and flexi-ness were nicely balanced. It might have been accidental, but it gave a very natural look to the flow of the fabric.
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You know the dance ... the one where you soar in the air, spin, and float down again.
No outfit could possibly stand up to this - I'm not expecting that. |
Ideally, in an ideal virtual world where you can control absolutely everything and all the pretty clothes are free (whoops, got carried away there!), there will be clothes that will look realistic when they need to and surreal if that's what you're looking for. I'm not suggesting that virtual clothing are not allowed to do things that real life (tm) clothing can't do or that you should never go around flashing thigh all the way up to your waist. I'm just saying that's what
I'm looking for: virtual clothing that looks real and thigh-flashing ... in dresses that are cut that way.
Before you put something out for sale, take it for a spin on a dance ball. Is it behaving naturally? If this were in a real life (tm) location, is this what you want your creation to look like in action? Or, if you conceived it to be used in a zero-G environment, does it work in that? If not, don't put it out, not even for free. If you do, I'm not going to review it anymore - I'm just gonna throw it away.
Give us clothes that make us free - free to dance, free to spin, free -
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| Free to fly ... in a dress from Paris Metro. |
