Hi everyone. I guess its about time I introduce myself. I should have done it earlier but I am busy creating a range of male skins at the moment and a completely new skin range is a very time consuming thing.
My name is Doofus Mayo and I am very proud to be the skin designer here at Platinum World. It is an amazing sim with a great collection of designers and I am honoured to be a part of it.
A little history of me.
My born date is 6/2/2007 which I guess makes me still quite young as a skin designer, but I kind of have a head start over most people. I have been working as a freelance 3d modeller and texture artist for about 6 years now after being a hobby 3d modeller for about 5 years before. Mostly my work is architectural stuff, but the hobby side of 3D has always been making characters and animating them. So becoming a skin designer seemed perfect for me when I arrived in SL.
I use a few tricks of the 3d gaming trade to perfect things like seams which looking around I guess a lot of skin designers don't know about. Most skins you see in SL just kind of fade away at all the areas that might cause the designer trouble like the hips, but I like to paint detail right up to the edges of the texture maps and then go back and fix the seams properly.
I still spend a crazy amount of time in Photoshop though, cause I really believe in hand painted skins over photoedits. Even more so since Windlight came into general circulation.
SL has a great lighting system that casts accurate highlights and shadows, but with a photo skin the highlights and shadows from the original photo too often remain and override the SL lighting. When viewed from the perfect angle and with coinciding lighting these can look really good, but much of the time, the baked in lighting doesn't match the SL world lighting and then things start to look strange. Also you get much more pronounced problems with clones.
In a photo skin, the highlights and shadows are as I said, often too prominent and become 'Shape Information'. Something like the shadow under a nose actually defines the shape of the nose. But in SL the shape should define the shape of the nose, not the skin. That is why people look so similar even when wearing vastly different shapes. So I paint my skins 100% by hand using photos only as reference and I strive to remove anything that will come across as shape information and override the shape that the avatar is wearing. Hopefully this ends in a far more versatile skin and one that allows more control over your look by adjusting your shape.
All in all, in the time I have been in SL I have created over 2,000 skin variations (not counting demos). Most of these have been discontinued over time or reworked and I have come down to a fine collection of high detail, hand painted, realistic skins. One of the things most important to me personally is to have as wide and as realistic a range of skin tones as possible. I am sure we are all familiar with the stories of unfair representation for ethnic minorities and I dare say that was once the case, but as a half English, half Jamaican artist, I am very proud to say that I cover as many skin tones as I can, from the whitest (so white it is almost blue) Willow selection to one of the darkest and most natural looking black skins around, Sauda.
Take a look at my skins. Try on some free demos. (They are actually free. I wont charge you a L$1 to take a look) Indulge yourself!
Here are a couple of my favourites. Thanks for looking and I hope you enjoy the sim. :D
Yukiko
Mariella
Drew
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