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

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

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 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

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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Here’s an example of a pair of Chopines I’m working on for the SecondLife store. They’re still a work in progress:

This picture is a screenshot of the shoe with the foot in Blender, which I use to actually make the shoe- and foot sculpties, and of course to bake some textures:

This is a ‘high heel’ chopine with an Italian Chopine Heel and a ribbon ‘upper’.

The next pictures show the ribbon ‘upper’ and a ‘narrow Italian Chopine Heel’ with the foot in SL – no texturing on the shoe yet, and the foot textures haven’t been tinted correctly to match the skin of the leg. However, as you can see, an unedited ’system shoe’ with a heel- and platform height of 100 and pointed heel and toes looks, uhm, relatively weird compared to the sculpted Chopine shoe. You’ll notice that compared to the first picture, this is not a ‘high heel’ chopine but a ‘flat’ chopine. That’s just because it’s using a different setup of my sculpted feet and a different heel of course.

Last not least, here’s a picture from DeepPaint3D, which I use as my texturing software (Blender’s basically just there to bake ’simple’ materials and shadow / highlight maps, but when it comes to photorealistic texturing of the sculpties, I do prefer DeepPaint!):

As you can see, the foot is missing from this image. It’s because I’ve turned off the visibility for it in DeepPaint. I don’t need it to texture the parts of the shoe.
The textures you see here are, by the way, tooled leather, which I hope is obvious
That’s again the ‘ribbon’ upper and the ‘narrow Italian Chopine’ Heel. I know that tooled leather wouldn’t necessarily work in RL for a tooled leather shoe ribbon (which, basically, would be a belt…) like this, but in SL, it works and looks pretty ;-P

Of course, I’m making quite a few different heels and uppers (you’ve already seen a few heels in this posting!). Also, of course, I’m making quite a few textures for them, not just tooled leather. As I said, it’s a work in progress