Day 45: Last Halloween with Flexi Wings

Come here, little kid. Want some candy? :P Here I am, wearing my Halloween costume in front of the Emerald Falls Casino & Haunted Train Ride. This *FREE* attraction takes you through an entire haunted sim in a little kiddy train.



There are ghostly noises and some scary parts including a dark tunnel. I dont want to spoil it for you, but its definitely worth checking out. ***Update: Sorry, this is no longer here after Halloween***

OK, Halloween was a little over a week ago, which technically makes it like Day 37 or something. I figured that Halloween isnt coming around for another year, so why waste the chance to write about my cool little devil costume? :)

A lot of the textures for this costume came from the Devil Avy class run by Tui Neo in SL, right before the holiday. This included the wings, skirt, and shirt textures. This is a beginner class that walks you through the creation of your own little devil costume. They provide the guidelines, you add the inspiration.

Of course, mine is a little...um...mischievous. How else would I look if I were trying to get you to be naughty? ;P

I created a small set of shiny curved horns (tapered toruses [tori?]). Much more feminine that the standard class ones that stick straight up.



And since it would not do for a pretty girl devil to lug around a gigantic pitchfork, I made little pitchfork earrings. Again, much cuter! :) These were made by using tricks with torus and cylinder to overcome the 0.01 meter min size limit. My right earring even feature a particle emitter that drips a drop of blood every second or so. Gruesome, isnt it? :)

Wings are one of the common accessories in Second Life. Outside of AV communities like dragons, furries, and pixies, there tend to be 2 groups who wear wings: First are newbies who just discovered a box of free wings. Second are people who want attention like me :). There is no better attention getter in SL than wings. You can load up on bling, but its hard to compete with someone sporting a 3 meter wingspan.

However, the common freebie wing has a major setback: They look stiff. They are basically 2 textured boxes sitting on your back. As soon as most newbies realize this, they dump the wings.

The standard bat wings from my class had the same problem. They look like giant cardboards on my back.

I made the bat wings flexi. You cant tell from the picture, but they move nicely in the wind and when I move around. I made them a bit stiff (high tension), but still responsive to wind and drag.

This is much easier said than done. Flexi prims "flex" along the Z axis only (the up/down axis).

Once you create a prim, you can rotate it around, of course. So you can put the Z axis horizontally or upside down to allow the "flex" motion to occur as needed. Most flexi hair has upside-down flexi prims, for example.

Unfortunately, most freebie wings are built with the default orientation, meaning that the bottom part is anchored, and the top part flexes. If you just turn on Flexi under "Features", your wing would look like its melting.

To make a flexi wing, you need to rotate the Z axis horizontally. The part that attaches to your shoulder blades should be the anchor, and the wing flexes outward from there. This is effectively a 90 degree rotation relative to the prim itself (change to "local" coordinates). Once you rotate the prim, you need to resize the prim and rotate the texture. I didnt say it was very easy to do... :P

But once you try it, you will be hooked on flexi wings. There are many freebie wings you can add "flexi" to, not to mention uploading your own wing textures.



Wings make a great addition to your list of accessories. They are great attention getters at a dance party! :)