Chopine Aura

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

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

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.

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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Hello everybody,

I’d like to show you some pictures of the Chopine Aura store in progress.

The first image shows the store in Blender. As you can see, it’ll be a round room, to which further round rooms can easily be attached, in case we run out of space. All textures and materials are custom-made.

Here’s another picture of a first version of the very same store in SL. That was still a much larger version than what will be used in the end. You can see how large it was by looking at the avatar that’s sitting on the stairs.
The shadows of the columns on the walls and stairs are, by the way, baked into the material. They’re not some fancy shadow viewer’s trick, they’re a store feature

And here’s what I call a ’semifinal version’ of the store in SL. As you can see from the avatar standing in it, it’s much smaller now – more cozy, more comfortable.
Also, I’ve redone all textures, added a (sculpted) logo to the wall, and also already added what will be the centerpiece of the store – a very fancy chopine, which we affectionately call the ’stilts’ version.
Again, the shadows and highlights you see are baked into the textures – that’s precisely what you’ll see in SL, no matter what viewer you’re using.

I still have to redo some of the textures (like the wall texture, of which the hue doesn’t quite match that of the ceiling and floor). And I may have an idea for a fancy statue as well, which will be used to enhance the appearance of the store. Other than that, I’m already pretty satisfied with it. If you have any recommendations for improvements, don’t hesitate to comment

Best wishes,
N.