FREE - Artiste SimplePoseball
While I assume most veterans have something they use to pre-position dancers, it occurred to me that some newbies to the dance world might not. So keeping in the holiday spirit, I am offering a gift to the Dance Queens communities newest members.
It iis a very basic poseball that has a single pose in it that you can replace with your own.
1) When you sit on it, it goes invisible
2) You can adjust your height using the PgUp/PgDn keys
3) You can change the hover text
4) It is Mod/Copy so you can change its color, size, and shape
5) You can change the animation.
6) FREE updates for life for it.
Happy Holidays to All
Yummy
Watch our video Christmas card HERE
Our last show of the year at Sinner's Burlesque turned out to be a very special one. Every act was performed using The Artiste.
Skye has took up the baton only a week ago and used her sequencer for the dance routines. Sanne has been using the Silver for a long time now for sequencing but she has upgraded to the Gold and did her first palette fade on part of the set. WTG girls! I am sure we will see some very creative ideas in the coming months and its very thrilling.
Even though I have now been using The Artiste for 3 years (where did the time go?) it's still a buzz to try out something for the first time and get it right. This time it was the new ABC feature of the Advanced Mover System. It meant that I could divide the 5 of us up into 3 groups, each with their own sequence. I chose not to use dances as I thought there was enough going on in the routine already. Instead I wanted to add an accent that would be memorable and so chose poses as a highlight in the dance where it fitted the music.
On the stage we are placed in a subtle V-shape with myself at the point. I am assigned the A position which in this case was the lead. Skye and Sanne, either side of me were assigned to B and Pepper and Yummy took C.
I could have used different poses for each sequence but I had been demonstrating an idea to Yummy, during testing, involving timing offsets. So instead of differentiating with movement the groups are each offset slightly in time to give a "Mexican Wave" effect.
My polar bear is a palette..in fact he is two palettes, one for the body and one for the head, so that I could get him to shake his head. As he wasn't going to do that for very long I just used ordinary movements rather than repeated motion. This also allowed me to make the moves slightly different each time so it had a more natural look. The quips from the polar bear were just me going "Hang on, what am I doing..penguins are South Pole..."
We did also have a Santa in a sleigh zooming across the sky in the live performance but someone *coughs and looks a bit coy* forgot to send the palette back home between takes :P *shrugs* It happens!
Oh, and in case you are wondering, the music was originally from the cast of Glee...but we had to make it sound a bit different for upload so Sterling did his magic. Just think Penguins, not chipmunks...
I was really pleased with the choreography on this piece, it all fitted together really nicely and I just love the little shoulder shrug just as they come out of the poses.
So, THANK YOU to everyone who has supported Sinner's and promoted The Artiste in 2015. There is so much fun yet to come and we can all share it together. I am just thankful to be a part of it all and to be surrounded by such amazing people who inspire me.
Special Thanks to:
Yummy for being such fun to bounce ideas around with..the inside of your mind is my Disneyland!
Sanne and Skye for letting me boss them around on a deadline and being such great fun to work with :)
Sterling for being patient with me and so creative and just...well Sterling!
MJ, Nancy and Zed for flying The Artiste Flag at MJ's Burlesque and letting me perform with them!
Kat Feldragonne for her promotion of The Artiste on her blog and elsewhere :)
The "Sexy Brits" for their incredible support at shows...always love having you guys there!
And many thanks to all of you who have watched our videos, visited the blog, read the FB posts and so much more. I may not have named you all but your contribution is every bit as valued.
Happy Holidays and a Merry Solstice to all of you and here's to a very exciting 2016. The best is yet to come!
Much love to you all,
Aura x
Sale days are couting down towards the end of December 2015.
I have provided detailed features lists for all of the packages for those interested. I had one inquirey so i assume others may have as keen of an interest
Option #1: $5,000L - A-50 - Features List
Option #2: $7,500L - A-75 - Features List
Option #3: $10,000L - A-100 - Features List
Option #4: $25,000L - A-250 - Features List
Feel free to contact Lat Lovenkraft directly.
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"I'VE GOT A ROCKET..."
I've Got A Rocket VIDEO
Sometimes an idea comes along that you are burning to do and it just seems like its going to be a superhuman effort to pull it off. Thanks to more forward-leaps in the development of The Artiste this year, I managed to make this one a {virtual} reality.
The idea for "Rocket" first came about a couple of years ago when Jemma showed me a stage set that she had built with the "Sillywet" built into it. The "Sillywet" is essentially just two prims linked together using transparency, which through a glitch of SL creates a silhouette image of the avatar.
I begged her for the stage, fired up with ideas of what I wanted to do with it, but it then sat on the shelf for a long time. I periodically brought it out and looked at ideas again, but at the time the Artiste was not far enough along to accomplish all the things I wanted to do.
Eventually it was ready, with the first incarnation of Yummy's rezzer, which allowed a transition fade between one set and another. It was all set up to go at the Artiste Venue but then other priorities took precedence and once again it was put away.
Although the transition between the sets in this video is done with camera fade, it gives a good representation of what it would have looked like as a live piece.
Specific techniques:
Avatar mover:
Use of the palette mover to direct the avatar from behind the "Sillywet" and to the middle of the stage.
Doors and Lights:
Originally, the opening of the doors and the on/off switch for the down-lights was controlled with a separate HUD built by Jemma to go with the set. By the time I put the routine together we were able to move doors and have the lights not only going on and off but flickering, by replacing them with palettes. The doors are on a simple MOVE command and the lights have a flicker and an on/off.
Planting the bomb:
Unfortunately this is one area where things have not caught up to us yet. There are not sufficient subtle animations available to cover every eventuality of motion so I had to settle for a mere suggestion with a crouch. The mover palette was used to adjust for height differences in the avatar between the dances and the couch animation.
The bomb is detached from her hip by strip function and then appears on the floor in front of her. The front of the bomb on the floor is an animated palette texture and the bomb "appears" with show/hide. It then slides across the floor and bounces off the barrels (palette move).
Noxious fumes:
The "bomb" triggers a reaction with the "toxic" material in the containers and the "fumes" are particles from palettes, triggered by *autofx. The one point I would have changed was the rising "green screen" which was meant to be the level of fumes rising up from the floor but perhaps a fading screen would have worked better. Our fearless astro-girl has adorned her gas-mask by this point and then by adorning a tunnel particle stream she teleports out of the doomed ship.
Safely back on board:
I took a copy of Jemma's set and redesigned it to make the interior of another ship, which was the target destination for the teleport. In the live setting there was a fade between the two sets at this point, using the rezzer fade ability, so the two sets were aligned with each other for a smooth transition. Our heroine gets to do her celebratory dance while we see the first ship in the window behind her shortly before it explodes. The "ship" was a textured palette against a moving background. which then used fade/hide to "vanish" and had triggered particles to announce its destruction.
There were quite a lot of subtle effects used to create one routine. I ended up with 10 palettes in all and it took a lot of planning and tweaking. I think all the effort was well worth it from the feedback I have had from people who have seen the video.
Many thanks to Jemma for the use of her set; to Yummy for answering so many technical questions and to Sterling who filmed and edited the project with a real vision and made it something really "awesome-sauce" as Jemz would say!
