New from Dutchie: Sexy Swimming Pool With Custom Animations & PBR Magic! (NWN Partner News)

The new Dutchie Swimming Pool for Second Life from my longtime media partner Dutchie is full of stylish PBR effects and swimmer animations, and was long in the making:

"I’ve always wanted to make a pool like the one in La Piscine, the French film from 1969 with Romy Schneider and Alain Delon," she tells me. "I was aiming for that stylish, slow, dreamy, sensual, atmospheric, lazy heat." (Watch the highly Gallic and sexy trailer here.) 

Getting the swimming animations right was key; dissatisfied with existing options, she went about creating new ones herself:  

"Swimming seems like a simple, repetitive movement," as she explains, "but in Second Life, you can’t just lay a path for an avatar to follow like in animation software. Every twist and rotation had to be manually animated, and that can easily break things, limbs start spinning uncontrollably, avatars drift off course."

It took her a month to create animations for breaststroke, backstroke, and front crawl.

"Once those were done, everything else started to fall into place. RohannaRaven Zorbino’s stunning new pool animations for RNP were a big inspiration, they have exactly the slow, sensual feel I wanted for this build."

Onto building the pool itself, and giving it that PBR polish:

"The pool itself might seem simple, but it was actually designed around the animations rather than the other way around. A lot of effort went into avatar placement, ensuring that when people move, they don’t bump into each other. I wanted the pool to be realistically sized, and making that work with four avatars moving simultaneously was a challenge.

"Working with PBR was a joy, it captures shine, glitter, and reflections beautifully. The mosaic tiles PBR inside the pool was handmade in Photoshop, the surrounding travertine was created in Substance Painter, and the water texture is an old one I converted into a PBR material." She notes that some SL viewers might display a bug in the textures that stops an animation, but it's one that Firestorm developers are working to patch.

For new owners setting this up, she recommends the Dutchie Serene Sky preset (available free here) for daytime scenes, but says the real PBR magic is most evident at night: 

"Turn on the optional underwater lights, set your sky to Midnight, and watch the PBR shine, glitter, and reflections bring the pool to life. It does add a little land impact, but honestly? So worth it."

Go here for all the details.

Comments

[sirhc desantis]

This is the kind of build that makes me feel I should give up my nomadic build platform life and settle down to a house in SL. There again i saw 'La Piscine' when I was 10 and wanted to be RoseMarie. Beautiful work.