Eyewear SecondLife

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, due to RL complications. Now that I am getting back into things, I’ve been checking out some of the major SL fashion blogs, and I’ve noticed there is less eyewear coverage than ever before. To find any eyewear news on the fashion blogs, you often have to search back into their archives as far as a year. Everything else gets covered. Hair, clothes, hats, purses, jewelry, shoes, you name it. Except eyewear.

Why is that? Do people not consider eyewear as fashion? Do we, the eyewear creators, collectively suck so bad that nobody considers us part of the fashion world? It really feels like we’re the least appreciated branch of fashion.

So I want to know. What’s the reason? Give me your opinions, maybe we can figure this out.

I just released several new sculpted prim glasses at my main store in West Sunset and at the iWear store in Pyrrhia. Here are the details:

First, the Aviator Two. My aviator style glasses were one of the first pair of glasses I made, and I never liked how straight they looked. Now that I’m getting better with sculpties I finally managed to make them the way I wanted them, slightly curving for a more realistic look.

Second, the Mode, a pair of glasses similar to my old Retro style. Sculpties lend themselves very well for these kind of glasses, giving them nice rounded edges and a nice curve for some depth.

And third, the Streetracer. This one is similar to my earlier Redline mode, it has thicker and slightly more curved frames and a different bridge.

All three are priced at 350L$ like my other sculpted prim glasses. The redline model has been reduced in price to 350L$ to be in line with this.

For a nice review of the Mode model, check out http://kallistodestiny.blogspot.com/2008/03/shades-sunglasses-specs-hater-blockers.html at Kallisto Destiny’s excellent SL fashion blog.

As far as I am concerned, sculpties are the way of the future for prim eyewear. They allow for very realistic shapes and minimize the amount of prims used in a pair of glasses. I’ve been seeing more and more sculpted prim glasses. Look for some reviews later this week on some of the better ones I’ve found.

-Aenea

While browsing on SLX the other day, I found these nifty examination glasses by Pavig Lok. They reminded me of the glasses Johnny Depp wore in Sleepy Hollow.
While not something you’d wear in your every day second life, these nicely detailed glasses seem perfect for a good steampunk look.

There’s a lot of lenses, and the object has copy and modify permissions to enable you to remove or modify lenses as you see fit, something the creator encourages you to do. There are 3 versions inclused in the box, with different textures and colours, and this lovely little item costs a mere 210L$ on SLX, so if you’re ever in a steampunkish mood, you can’t go wrong with these.

When a famous real life designer enters the Second Life market, it’s interesting to see how their designs translate into the virtual world. For this reason I checked out the Armani sim, and found a Second Life replica of one of Armani’s designer sunglasses.

In the “Real World” Armani stands for high quality, high priced luxury items, unfortunately in Second Life, only the high priced part remains. The sunglasses I found here were simple texture based glasses. I’m not a fan of textures over prims, but some designers pull it off very well, however, whoever made the armani glasses obviously didn’t. These shades are completely invisible when viewed from behind, since the texture was only applied to the front of the glasses, making them look odd when viewed at angles. The different parts of the glasses don’t match up right, either, showing big gaps in the design. It’s also impossible to fit them to my face, because they disappear into the sides of my face before the center even touches my nose. The best way to describe these glasses, would be to imagine printing out a front view of a pair of glasses and wrapping it around your face.

For this contraption, you pay 180L$. Honestly, I’ve seen better freebies. A real shame, because the RL Armani has some incredibly nice eyewear designs.

-Aenea

Sergey Wollongon started in the eyewear business around the same time I did, when good glasses were hard to find. Sergey knows his way around the tiny prims and it shows in the detail of his work. His Potsdam Blue glasses are a fine example of this.

Well formed frameless lenses with a finely detailed nose bridge and arms give these glasses a delicate and stylish look.
The glasses are not scripted, but the detail and the price more than make up for this. Also available in a dark tinted sunglasses version.

detail

Available at:
Sergeys: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stellar/124/119/25
Price: A mere 100L$

I came across the Solar eyewear shop a little while ago and found this very well crafted pair of glasses, the Naos model made by Solar Flare. What caught my attention was the attention to detail in these glasses, the nose bridge and the arms look very delicate and detailed.

Another interesting thing about these glasses is that the lenses seem to be sculpted prims, which is a really nice new approach and a good alternative from the alpha masked textures used for lenses by most manufacturers.
The glasses have a nice menu system that lets you set the lens and frame colour, shine level, and lens opacity for nearly unlimited customizability.
If I have to nitpick one downside, and I do, I’d say that the 445L$ pricetag seems to be in the upper price range for glasses.

Available at:
Solar Designer Eyewear: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Gandvik/36/31/26
Price: 445L$

To start of, I’ll write about one of my own products just recently released. I realize I’m hardly impartial when it comes to my own products because obviously I like them a lot, so I won’t even try to review it. Maybe someone else would like to review them for me.

Last week I released my Glacier model. I want to do more with sculpties, because they allow the creation of more rounded and organic looking glasses. I’ve been wanting to make some sportive wrap around glasses for a while, but with regular prims I’d have to use flat 2D textures, and while some creators pull this off very nicely, my own texture work just isn’t up to par for it.

I created the sculpty for the lenses using Blender, and used regular prims for the detail/finishing. This was my second try at making sculpty prim glasses, and I think my sculpties are improving.

These are for sale now at my store.
Nea-Ban Eyewear- http://slurl.com/secondlife/West%20Sunset/99/92/22
Price: 225L$

-Aenea

Hello, and welcome to Eyewear SL.

I started this blog because of the lack of attention eyewear seems to get in Second Life. Most of the attention is focused on skin, hair, clothing, and other accessories. Well not here. If you enjoy wearing eyewear, be it regular glasses, sunglasses, eyepatches, masks, this will be your place to visit. I plan on keeping up to date on all the developments and new eyewear creations. In the coming weeks expect the layout to change around a bit as I play around with the settings. So again, welcome, and stay tuned for eyewear news!

-Aenea