Chopine Aura

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

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.

(more…)

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

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.