Introducing the new Zaph Creations Hair Line; D’ Pelos ZC

Since I began Second Life I spent money on hair. That is one the most important pieces in an avatar look. I cant tell you how many pieces of hair I have but are more than 300. From Analog Dog only which is my favorite I have like 33 styles. I do like others designers as well but she is my favorite. From Armidi like 12, from bewitched like 22, from ETD like 30 something cus I took advantage of the L$25 sales, plus all the friebies, I also has some cake styles, some Taunt Style, Some SS styles, some pazazz , some Calico styles, Sirena, all Naughty, 0, CC, etc and such and such.

Since I started creating I knew that hair was one of the creations I wanted to do. Just that I suspected the hard work behind it and leave it for after doing other stuff less complicated for me. For a lot of people, jewelry is complicated due to the use of very tiny prims. Nevertheless, for me those are the easy ones. Shoes were another one I needed to start and I did it. So now was the time to start with Hair.

While creating and working with special hair textures in Photoshop; I decided to give a try with the Textures available in-world and start. First to have an idea how to handle the hair prims and some styles and 2nd to see how hard the work really is. Believe me is hard. But what is hard is not what I thought would be. Making a style is easy when you know how to handle prims. The hardest part is the texturing one. Specially changing textures once you have the style all done and every prim on place. Why? Because some of the flexi prims cover the entire back part or you hair prims base and are hard to reach to retexture. In addition, the flexi prims are another issue when you use a lot and some behind others. It is hard to get to them for retexture and you need to be careful cus part of them are transparent. So you need to select to change some part of the prim textures. Going beyond that, comes the shooting phase. Taking pictures and try to position your model in the same way every time trying to have the same shooting for all the hair. That is so boring to me. I hate to work with the same type of picture over and over again. Then come the clothe and the look you want to create for each hair style. uff finally another problem when you have more than one style in like, lets say 19 shades or tones. SL gives you the chance to name the first picture but the 2nd, 3rd and so on uses the same name with just a sequential number. When you get into your hard drive to work with the photos; you need to open SL and wear the hair to remember the name you use and the name you gave to each particular texture. All this is the hardest part. Exhausting and boring to hell. All this pictures phase is harder when you are not a photographer and don’t know all the tricks to make your life easy.

Anyway, I started with the hair creations with like 6 styles. But i just released 4 of them. I was so exhausted that stopped at one moment and decided to go with what i had so far. Here is the logo of the hair line:

A nice silhouette that I worked a little bit and added the rest to make it look unique and different.

I will show you some pictures of the hair already on sale in-world. But want to let you know that I will post here some of the textures I have been working with for the next hair styles I will be creating. Textures very realistic and colors very natural that I haven’t seen in SL until now. Let start with the already in stores styles.

Romance – flexi

This is a very nice style that is different from all the hair I have from other designers. Nicely worked and textured to create amazing shades within hair. It looks fantastic with my wooded set of necklace and earrings. I decided to use flexi prims just in the back to avoid the avatars costs which produces lag when we use a lot of flexi prims. So the sides were worked twisting some prims and placing them in a way that did not required to use flexi prims.

Alana – Flexi and non flexi

Both really looks good. I create these two choices due to a recent posting on SL Blog about Avatar Rendering Cost. ( “…Who me? Yes you! Couldn’t be! Then who?…” INTRODUCING AVATAR RENDERING COST). They published this blog and a lot of concern raises in the residents about the potentially dangerous this knowledge could be due to the fact that maybe a Sim owner or parcel owner can ban a person just for being the cause of the lag. I will not place here my opinion on this but just in case, i wanted to give choices for you not becoming so laggy . Nevertheless; flexi prims are wonderful and I love them and will continue to use it; just that I will try to use it wisely.