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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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.