"We love you!"

Those are words I grew without, and maybe because of that, I didn't suspect of the lies that could be hiding behind them. Once adult, I started hearing those words. But often they were associated to several people pulling from me to their own benefit, at the same time, while concealing their true intentions under the soothing veil of the sound of those and similar words. Unused as I was to hearing them, needing to feel that some people could really like me, I fell for them until I reached breaking point. Once. Again. One eventually learns, but also ends up developing cold answers and wariness to the sound of we love you, a phrase I now loathe.

Yesterday I slept about three hours (Entirely my fault: I decided reading in bed, and that always ends with the Sun rising, saying "good morning".) Because of the lack of rest, I could not have my guard high, getting lost in memories, not even realizing about it. While I was trying to do some work, my mind was entertained in its own thoughts, distracted on a dark background, and suddenly, an image came to my mind:

"We Love You!", original raw snapshot, in Flickr.

I dropped the writing of the Blender book from my hands, and started a new project in Blender: the poses for this. The idea was so insistent on the back of my mind, that I knew I could not focus into anything else until I had done this. I wanted to show the breaking point, how could I do this in SL? It was actually easy, thanks to the myriad of different and versatile mesh avatars that we have at our disposal. If you're curious, the following snapshots show how I prepared the picture shown before (which is a raw snapshot from SL, with only a little bit of color enhancement).

The pose was prepared for three avatars in Blender:

Once uploaded to SL, and prepared the pose balls for three avatars, I separated them in two groups of two poses. One group would have the girl in the middle, and the girl pulling, and the other group would have again the girl in the middle, and the guy pulling. Then I started sitting avatars on the pose balls. I did with my main, to begin the sequence:

Then I logged one of my alts, already prepared in a Doll avatar, making her sit:

and then, all I had to do, was removing her legs and feet:

Time to log next alt, also prepared in a Doll avatar:

and then I removed all the upper body parts (head, eyes, hair, chest, arms, hands):

Then I changed to a bright windlight to better see where they were positioned with respect to the water, then raised them:

then added my male alt to the mix:

and after that, I did just minor position adjustments, found a windlight I liked, moved the Sun, and snapped. Once the picture was up, my mind shut its voice off, and I continued working.

I hope this gives you ideas for your own pics. We can do a lot nowadays in SL, fooling the eye.

Have a great day :-)