Chopine Aura

Chopine Aura and her ‘Chopine’s’ are a Second Life avatar and a (currently still upcoming) shoe store in SecondLife. It’s run by the alt (alternative account) of the same person who runs Wunderlich’s historical Garb. At the time when this posting was written, she had already put about three months of work into this project, and is very willing to put much more work into it.

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Well I’ve been very busy over the last week. First, I made a dress; next, I made matching shoes!

This is, obviously, the dress and shoes in SL. Click the image to get to its Flickr page to read how I set it up.

The image above shows my SL visualization of Lucas Cranach’s ‘St. Mary Magdalene’ painting. I photosourced the dress from my own, selfmade RL reproduction of a Cranach gown. Here’s what I call the ‘evolution of a dress’:

Now, while the dress is of course available at my alt’s store, Wunderlich’s, since yesterday, I’ve just released the shoes to Chopine’s store. As usual, they’re available in two versions – “Flat” and “High”…:

…and just like the dress, they come in no less than 16 colors:

As already said, the dress is available at Wunderlich’s, while the shoes are available at Chopine’s.

Hope you like the latest release

The day has finally come!

I would like to invite you to the Grand Opening of the new store!

The official opening will take place on Sunday, the 28th of March, 2010, from 9.30SLT to 12.00 SLT.
At 10.00 SLT, we’ll have the Metaverse Shakespeare Company as guests, who will entertain us with a play.
We’ll give gift cards and free shoes away at the opening!

The store is already up and running right now, there’s just some freebies missing, which I will put in place just before the opening. So don’t hesitate to already have a look before the Grand Opening!

I hope you will like Chopine’s – the work of more than four months went into the store and the shoes

Here’s the SLURL to the new store:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Falcon%20Bay/187/55/22

In case you should have any questions, please don’t hesitate to IM me, Chopine Aura.

Best wishes,
Chopine Aura

…of Chopine Aura’s shoe store!

Which is why I take the chance to tease you with pictures of some of the upcoming shoes!
(Click them to see larger images!)

Marine Stilts (will be available in several colors):

Paint Stilts (available in color shown below and some metallic colors):

Black lace stilts (will be available in several colors):

Velvet flower chopines, as previously shown in my blog (will be available in several colors):

The historically accurate attempt on what Cinderella would have worn (will be available in several colors):

Spanish tooled leather Chopines, also a historical reproduction. The picture shows the ‘flat’ and ‘high’ versions in which I offer all my shoes.  These, too, will be available in several colors:

The grand opening will take place on Sunday, the 28th of March, 12.00 SLT, at my Main Store.
In case you’re an SL journalist or blogger and would be interested to blog any of these shoes, please read this entry in my blog.

Hope you like what you see – thanks for reading

Best wishes,
Chopine Aura

This bed is actually a single prim only!
However, even IF it is one prim only, it can morph into three different appearances – this is controlled with a blue menu, after clicking the bed.

Have a tidily draped bed; an undone, ‘thrown’ bed or lie in the bed – the comforter will morph into the appearance you desire, and the entire bed will STILL be just one prim. This is NOT a temp rezzer, it’s a morphing, single prim sculpted bed with built-in poses.

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While waiting for the shoe scripts to get finished, I entertained myself with creating some single prim furniture.

Each of these furniture pieces is one single prim only. They (currently, but that is subject to change!) come without any animations, but they’re copy and mod, so you can add your own:

They’re available as fat packs on XStreet, as pictured above, and also as singles at my inworld sculptie main store.

Also, I’ve created some single prim sculptie draped shelves, which work perfectly with the above shown furniture in a house as well as in stores.

In case you fail to believe that this is a single prim, I recommend taking a look at the following picture – click to enlarge:

The shelf is available in no less than 40 different material combinations (combinations of materials for shelf + drape) at my inworld sculptie SL main store:

A single prim bed, which can morph between various stages of ’neatly draped’ to ’someone’s lying in it’, and which will come with a custom sleep animation AND of course in several materials (all matching the ones already shown above!) will also soon be available; I’m already working on it – here’s a preview in Blender:

Here’s what the bed looks like in SL, with me lying in it:

Hope you like my low prim SecondLife furniture

Well I haven’t blogged for a while since I was busy making stuff for the store. Here are some things I’d like to share:

Feet retinting / retexturing HUD preview (not the final version, but you’ll hopefully get an impression!):

A first draft for the redelivery terminal, just in case customers mess their shoes or the HUD up – first picture shows the terminal from various angles in Blender, second picture is taken in SecondLife:

Preview of a tooled leather Chopine (which will of course be available in several colors for SecondLife!) – this is a straight SL snapshot:

And this:

is actually a Hippo network vendor, which I made to look like a shoe box. It even has a gift option, and is just three prims.

Oh, and in case you want to take a look at the terraforming of the land Chopine’s store will be occupying in SL (and maybe even want to know where it will be?), then have a look at the map here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Falcon%20Bay - I’ve terraformed the store logo into the sand of the Second Life island

Hope you like what you see so far! Not much time left until the opening

As you may know from The Chopine Aura Store in progress, part 1, I’ve been working on an entirely sculpted store in Blender.

Well, I’m finished, I guess.

This is what it looks like in SL now. NO postwork on this image, that’s a straight snapshot from SL, taken with ‘midnight’ settings:

Of course, the products are still missing; meaning the shoes. As you can see from other postings in this blog, I’m already working hard on them

By accident I created a very bubblegum pleather material in Blender, and thought I should try it on the Chopines.

Very bubblegum, very stylish, and still – very Chopine. This would, by the way, be a modernized version of this extant Chopine:

Have no idea yet if this modernized version will actually make it into Chopine’s store, but I nevertheless found it interesting to show the screenshot from Blender

Here’s our first teaser ad, which will go live in the Valentine’s edition of the Primgraph magazine:

The Chopines shown here by the way are the ‘embroidered Italian’ ones, which you may already know from one of the previous postings. This is basically a straight snapshot from SL with considerably minor photoshopping.

Here are some pictures of my SecondLife reproduction of an actual, extant chopine.

Here’s the original Chopine which dates to c. 1600, from the Ashmolean Museum, London, England:

That Chopine is covered with silk which was embroidered with colored and silver threads – just like this Court Mantua, which dates to c. 1740-45 and which I photographed at the Victoria and Albert museum, London:

From my photos of that Court Mantua, I photosourced the textures for my reproduction of the above shown Chopine.
This is what the finished textures look like when applied to the sculpties in my texturing software:

The trims around the vamp are still missing and so is the insole (which is actually another sculpty), but I guess you can already see how beautiful the textures turned out