For Japanese Kimono Fans... Against texture theft from RL website!

Dear Japanese Kimono Fans in SL...
There is a sadly news. Largest Kimono shop in SL "JAPAN NONKO romankan" steals textures from RL kimono company's catalog. And RL company appeared thet they will take legal action to this shop.
If you have bought products in this shop, you should ask refund to shopowner.

JAPAN NONKO romankan location is as follows:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Epsilon/95/104/22
http://slurl.com/secondlife/LALA%20Moon/118/109/27
http://slurl.com/secondlife/aduchi%20momoyama/100/61/22

And please look these pictures...
These pictures compare this shop's Kimonos and RL catalog.

Theft Kimono: http://img01.slmame.com/usr/nonko/kiss.JPG
RL Catalog: http://www.yukatayasan.com/new_yukata/popup/10002.html

"Yukata Seclet Love" (left) and RL catalog (Right) comparison.
http://www3.uploader.jp/user/sluploader/images/sluploader_uljp00003.jpg

how do you know this? where is the article discussing it?

/me agrees with poster below... this is just a ploy to get free advertising and new cutomers.

people photosource all the time

Good maybe people will have to start photographing their own textures
or learning how to make them gain appreciation how it hard to make good
quality ornate silk fabrics by hand.

I don't even think it is photosourced but rather that the designer used a rl image as inspiration for a design...I guess the 'fabric' might be photosourced. I am curious about this, waiting for someone who knows more than me to come along and post.

I do agree that it is a good idea to try to create your own 'fabric' textures, but a lot of people don't. It also bothers me that someone's competitor could climb on an alt and make a post like this pointing fingers.

For what it's worth, as far as the kimono itself, the SL designer's is much prettier than the RL picture

Looking at both images it could be inspired but the designer in SL didn't
make exactly the image.
Lot of designers use certain fashions that are inspired by other designs in SL and RL too.
I don't know curious to see what happens. I doubt they could prove that it was outright theft.
Looks hand done or with tubes now that I looked at the outfit.
There is lot of copy and reproductions too of public domain/ old masters and common fabric patterns that are reproduced often by numerous textile and art.
Some of the flowers remind me of common pattern that I have stumble upon in few times when looking for texture lessons and tube sites, in fact it sort of reminds of some of the flower patterns in Photoshop.
Anyway I thought names weren't suppose to be mentioned?
Lot of people sale stuff they googled but this designer did pretty good work
it hard to do outfits similar i know I have tried to do similar patterns myself on
personal Kimono style robes that I use only for myself.

Yep, same fabric but that's it. SL design much prettier than RL catalog. And even so, what are they afraid of? Are japanese women all of a sudden start buying their kimonos in SL?

It isn't that easy to just reproduce the design exactly and make it look as
good as the SL designer did here.
If no one believes me try to reproduce it yourself.
Even a good design in SL may only make very little money here.
Not even enough to be a threat to the company in RL.

The textures shown in the links are nice, bold and crisp textures, it would be easy to reproduce them.

I would do it to prove my point, but I prefer to do all my texturing by hand. I did start out with photo sourcing and it is an excellent way to learn how to utilize more options in photoshop... but, as I said, my preference is not to make all mine from scratch

much more fulfilling

it looks to me like they did use the actual photo of the texture
I have no comments to make on the quality of either the Real or SL version of the article of clothing, as it is not something I am knowledgeable in

Now, the shop owners of "JAPAN NONKO romankan" have officially announced in their blog that they had been reconciled with RL shop and made apologize to their customers. And also, they will accept to refund if customers want.
If you have bought their Kimono and don't like it, please send IM to shop owner.

Procedurally generated textures (using shader 2.0) are a good way to go.
Textures can be created and rendered quickly, are highly compressed , can be made into seamless patterns easily, and can be scaled up without any pixelating.
And then you import that into sl with all the jpg fragmentation.
http://www.werkkzeug.com/examples/texture_gallery
http://www.werkkzeug.com/

Silliness- I for one shoot the MAJORITY of m own textures - freely admit to photosourcing anything other than lace- for some reason I do really nice lace but solid fabrics defeat me. So I walk around in RL shooting stuff and getting strange looks. Have I gotten some off the web? Sure, but by the time it has been used for a color source or angled, shaded and cut in pc- it is a far cry from the original. As for inspiration - hell yeah - same as RL designer do all the time- you think it's sheer coincidence the fashion houses of RL dresses us all so similarly every year?

What I do see here is a blatant torpedoing of a rival by another- no innocent, unconcerned consumer would have gone thru the trouble to register and post inflammatory accusations. Too bad their attempt back fired Now more have seen the work of this Designer and can decide on the merits of the work as a whole- not jealous chest-thumping from a competitor.

wouldn't it be hilarious if the OP was the designer's alt and this was all a ploy to advertise on RA lol

Gorgeous kimono -- both of them.

But I don't see anything wrong with being inspired by RL designs and even using elements from RL images. Sure, it would be nice to contact the original fabric maker and obtain permission, but honestly, few do that.

I would buy the SL kimono, even knowing it was inspired by a RL one.

Was this an advertising ploy by the SL creator to achieve more business? Possibly. since... really... MOST Japanese people do not speak English (all correspondence would have had to be carried out in Japanese). MOST Japanese would genuinely not care about such an "infraction" -- especially in an imitation heavy society. It's not the RL kimono seller whose work is being "infringed" upon -- it's the kimono cloth creator.

Meh... silly buggery at its finest.

I would think that the real life company needs to hire the SL designer to roll out next years product line, its pretty clear that the SL representation is far superior to the RL source of inspiration.
As far as being the same print, yes it most definately is the same pattern. mostlikely the pattern was bought from a fabric manufacturer in China, and didnt come with exclusive rights as the fabric manufacturer has probably sold rolls of this fabric to many clothesmakers. Proving the picture was gleened from the website is easy enough for the website owner, but to what advantage? The only plus here for the Real Life Kimono maker here is that many people have found thier website from this posting. Instead of legal action the RL company should be more intrested in the talented avatar that made this SL Kimono for thier own improvements to thier product line

how do you know this? where is the article discussing it?

/me agrees with poster above... this is just a ploy to get free advertising and new cutomers.

At the very least if it is a Rival, it's a violaqtion of the "Naming Names" rule the forum occasionally has.

I have spending literally hours for long period trying to get details in fabrics that
I hand drew to turn out as good.
It isn't easy for everyone or everyone would be doing it.
In fact very few SL designers I have seen have ever done many elaborate fabric patterns
it's more common to see solid textures or details done with prims, photos then actual hand drawn details.
I can count maybe very few who do actually hand drawn, no photo sourced, elaborate details
with their textures, even fewer do their own original textures.

Conceptually it probably isn't too difficult to create your own Japanese print fabric in photoshop, since they're mostly composed of stencilled images which are readily available and repeat at regular intervals. A skilled photoshop artist with a set of stencil masks could knock one out in 20 or 30 minutes - it took me an hour with some stencils and only an average skill to knock out the following, and I know I can do much better if I work on it for a while (this was my first attempt).

http://www.visi.com/~haverber/japanese%20roses.jpg

There does seem to be something about all of this on the creator's website. I can't understand much of it though, as it is all in Japanese.

http://cool.weblike.jp/secondlife/

I went and looked it up last night when this thread first appeared, and ran it through a translator with very limited success.

Maybe someone that speaks Japanese can shed some further light on what is going on.

What a cute site, I really love the designs. This one I had mixed feelings about, I'm anti-fur (not anti-furry, I am one, you know what I mean) but this just brought out a giggle in me. Would love to see it animated like it was still alive, like blinking and such LOL

couldnt care less.