Hi everyone!

Just a quick message from me telling you I’m out of town a.t.m. I’m in Hugary right now writing this message from my hotel lobby in the lovely sunny, clean and pitoresque village called Szeged. I’ll be here during this week for a conference. This will be a latexless week for me ;) (I’ll manage…) I hope to start Hugo’s next week of releases next week!

Apart from that I’m currently working on items and releasing more than one set at once every time. Sometimes it takes a while before a new set that is announced is actually released… I’m thinking about changing that. Release notices will still be the same. But I think I’ll be releasing new items more often so you don’t have to wait so long :)

that is it for now, I’m going to explore Szeged some more before the conference starts!

Cheers!

When I’m thinking about what to tell here about making your own clothing textures, a lot of things come to mind… Let me first give you some global information about how I start a design (and in a next item how finish it). After that I’ll cover more detailed stuff. If you want to know something specific, let me know! When you start making clothing for second life there are numerous different things you need to know, or they are at least handy to know. Here are a few…

• Are you going to wear it yourself, or are you going to sell it? Or both? If you wear it yourself and there are some mistakes in it, no problem… If you are going to sell it, people in most cases will not tolerate mistakes (depending on the price too…). They may not complain, but will never return to your store for new items…
• What will you make? The better you know this the better you can work on a collection of items that work together (so you can mix and match!) and if you want to sell it people will know that to expect from you. You can always change if your choice isn’t working out for you.

How do I make a typical design from scratch? It is in most cases done in three steps:

• (have a good idea in your head and) sketch it on paper
• draw the design (in lines), this is the base for your design
• fill in the lines, add all the details, save and upload it

Sketching on paper

All my designs are mostly hand drawn. this means I draw the lines myself (doh…). It is also possible to use a picture from a piece of clothing or fabric and ‘paste’ it onto your avatar (photo sourcing), this can sometimes look spectacular, and sometimes like crap :) On the left you see Ellen wearing a never sold design (the only design) in which I used a picture of a blouse / shirt. (the original picture is from my rl gf who posed for the picture in one of my white shirts). The rest is hand drawn… A little note to that is that some of the details on my items are (part of) photo’s: small parts of belts and zippers.

When you have all these kind of figured out you can start without even touching your computer… The best way to get your ideas into shape is by drawing them on paper. You can easily correct things or start over… and more important: complicated software won’t break your concentration. When I started I’ve made that mistake so many times… ended up with no work done, forgot what I actually wanted to make in the first place and completely frustrated…
I know it can be hard to draw a human figure before you draw your design on it. So what you can do is put your avatar on a poser, against a white background and make a good frontal snapshot (and one of the back too) and print both images on a piece of paper. This way you only need to draw your idea over it.

Then there are some limitations in designing clothing for an avatar, most of them you need to find out while designing as I did in my first designs (which took me weeks and a lot of L$ while uploading the textures). Lines and textures sometimes just don’t look the same on an avatar as when you were drawing them in your texture. Textures get wrapped around the avatar body en there are places where the texture is stretched (a lot). (how this works can be seen in this blog of SL Natalia) Typical area’s that cause a lot of problems are the side of the boobs / under the armpits. Boobs in general (the bigger, the more stretch, the more blurred the detail will look…) and between the legs of an avatar… So basically don’t put (too much) detail in those places. On other places a straight line can show strange twists and the only thing to change that is to redraw your design.

Next item, more stuff about the use of programs and how I finish a design!

looking at my site I noticed it has been a while since I posted something here. As my friends in-world already know, rl has consumed me almost completely at the moment. I still have images for my photo Flickr stream waiting for me to edit them and post them… And I still have a list of clothing items I want to put in store. I hope to get to those things soon! And for the photo’s. I won’t take on projects anymore. The time that people have to wait until I finish something is simply too long.

Then there is Second Life itself… The grid and the in-world services that seem to be very unreliable.  Somehow it amazes me that so many people still come back to second life (me included). For some SL offers the possibility be creative (like me) or even make dreams come true. On the other hand… If lets say my newspaper had some pages missing almost every day, I would stop my subscription within a week, even if there would be no other newspaper available.

Don’t worry that I’ll stop designing… I’m just getting really fed up with the fact that Linden labs seems to be unable to provide a stable grid and services for weeks now.

This short week (over here the second day of easter is a free day) went by extremely fast. I started releasing new products which I will name later… Next to that the only update on this website was the addition of the slurl to my in-world shop (thank you Karina for bringing it to my attention!) It had dissappeared from my site when I switched to the new blog design (and taking the rest of the old website offline…

Buying (and selling) items in Second Life right now is/was a big pain (items won’t be delivered, transactions go stale, balance isn’t updated or showing right)… This has resulted in almost no sales the last three days. I really hope Linden Labs is going to fix the problems soon (Like the broken contact list…)

Items I managed to get into the store this week are: a version of the stellar corset (black pink combination). Number two is a new shirt called ‘Iris’ and number three is THE new corset ‘Solar’. Some of you may remember the picture of the corset worn with a black cat suit underneath. That item will be in store this weekend! Check em out in-world or at onrez or slexchange!

Slowly things are coming together. This is the new website design. It isn’t completely finished, I will continue to work on it in the upcoming weeks… The old website is now completely offline… The product pages in the old website will return soon, in this new lay-out. The menu on the right is very empty now, it will be filled soon. Two main items you will be sure to see soon are ‘photography’ and something like ‘fashion’. The first one for my Flickr photography and I will put the models section back here too. The fashion part of the website will show all my items witch are for sale with links to slexchange and onrez.

For those who like to know how all works… The blog is powered by wordpress which I built my own theme for. The rest of the website will be powered by Drupal. This is done because the blog was allready built in wordpress, and I didn’t want to move all content. Drupal on the other hand, is better suited to handle the product catalogue you will see here in the near future…

Clothing news? There is some… New corsets are on the way, some new shirts and I’m working an lots more :) Subscribe to my blog and you’ll know when you can stop by at my shop!

Yes… after thinking very hard the first decicion has been made! I’m going to keep the name I allready have. I like it and most people I know, know it. And it is ‘Hugo’s design’ from which I can extend the ‘hugo’s’ part to other things: Hugo’s photography, Hugo’s fashion… you name it, Hugo’s got it… well sort of…

Second, I just had a week from hell in rl, numerous things went wrong (internet failure at my ISP for a couple of days - this sucks when web development is your core business) , my colleague was ill for most of the week and the things I had to do were boring… I ended up with three days of splendid migraine. I haven’t been in world since last week and the stack of work that still remains on my desk indicates I won’t be the upcoming week.

There is a lot of exciting stuff I have planned… which will have to wait until I have some (more) free time on my hands. Building a new website, doing new shoots with beautiful avatars, post process them and post them, make new clothing and put it in my store… Hope to have something new out soon!

Yes, things are going to change around here.. two weeks ago Truus and I decided to stop working as business partners in-world. We have built up our business together, renting shops and selling our products there. Since we are both busy in rl and since my product range shifted from lingerie and clothing to lingerie, clothing and the fetishy latex designs, the combination of our products became a bit odd. So we are going our separate ways, still as good friends! Truus now decided to sell only through slexchange.com and onrez.com. She may open a little shop in-world again, and when she does, you will read it here.

So… what is going to happen to this website? Well… I am going to change it… I want to think up a new name for my business. Hugo’s design is a nice name, but I think I want to have something a bit more unique and catchy. Next to a new name, the site itself will change too, a nice new design and i’ll move the blog to the front page. Next to the blog the other two main elements will be the products catalogue and the models page. The content of this blog will change too… i’ll still post my new releases here. Next to those, I would like to share with you the lessons I have learned so far and am still learning as a content creator and seller in-world and sl-photographer. More than enough to write about!

That is a lot of things to do, and since I run my own company in rl, I will have to see what I can do and when… Exciting times!

I also would like to thank Ryker Beck for her super review of my clothing on her blog. (A bit late… I know..) She is (re)opening her shop on the 1st of March to start selling a complete new range of products. Check her blog to read all about it!

Last days have been a little hectic (for a change) and so it took me a while to update this blog… I had a little time left to finish three outfits which I had created earlier. The first two are basically created from the same idea. They are named ‘Lucid 1.0′ and ‘Lucid 2.0′. Both sets are full bodysuits, made out of different layers to give them a special deep color and shine. Three version are included per set: a set which is open, a normal set and a a set with a print on the front (Lucid 2.0 has one on the back too). The versions with the prints look coolest (me thinks). Just click on the image on the right to get a bigger picture.

The third item is a combination set, it is the Ava white set combined with a bright red catsuit. This item is special, I noticed some people like it and some don’t, there doesn’t seem to be a way in between. This set will be released in other color catsuits too… I will also make Ava 2 packages and Ava 3 packages. And Ava 4 is on the way (when will it be finished?? could be tomorrow, could be in four weeks… haha) The way they look now, Ava 4 and 5 will look a bit more like bathing suits…

Next, I created… or am creating new templates which have a more ‘glass like’ look. You can see a preview here. The arms and back aren’t finished yet and black / grey transparent are the only flavors available (grey transparent look HOT b.t.w.). The front of the legs still need some work too… The thumbnail has all naughty bits covered up for people who do not like to be confronted with nudity. When you click the thumbnail however, a larger uncensored version of the picture will pop up and.. ohlala…. The choice is yours…..

I also rented a new store in a shopping area which I’m decorating right now… I will let everyone know when it officially opens!

Hope to get new stuff out soon, and tell you about it here! Untill then, happy shopping!

Items mentioned above can be found at slexchange and at onrez, and for those who want to buy it in-world, stop by at my shop!

I would like to focus on a problem that has risen in SL. At this moment people, or better, thieves are stealing textures due to a bug in the sl-client software. These stolen textures (skins and clothing) are being resold in sl or handed out freely… The creators who have worked so hard and devoted all their time to make all these beautiful things see their work being reduced to freebies.

This weekend I learned that Emilia Redgrave (who has created high quality clothing and who I admire very much) will possibly leave sl because of this. I completely understand this… If I learn that my creations are ripped and resold or given away, I’d stop designing too…

You can let Linden Labs know this matters and has to stop. You can do this by voting for fixing this bug in LL’s bug tracking system called Jira. You need to log in and then click on votes, to add yours. Here is the link:

Support SVC-676. Vote now

As you may have noticed on the website, I haven’t updated it lately. I’m currently looking at a way to incorporate some kind of tool to easilly update the items in the collection, and I have found it: Drupal CMS. It will however take me some time to figure it out completely, especially the graphic design of the system… And for the rest of the website… I noticed that some people somehow look over the main menu, and others who use it, look over the sub menu’s…. A redesign will need to be made somewhere in the near future.

One more new item has been released: Spark (why use only female names, I figured… ) This is the first complete outfit with a shirt and a pair of pants (and a lovely pair of panties haha..) The set has a ‘Trinity - Matrix’ kind of look… I hope to get some more stuff done this weekend… We’ll see :)