WHat do you do FOR SL outside of SL?

The GIMP for clothing.
Microsoft Word and my e-mail so I have an up to date list of places to go - but I'm not sure thats quite what you meant.
I also use the forums for when I can't get into SL and for good tips on doing things in SL
Flickr for photos


I Want The Stars!!!

* 3D Studio Max ( --I model for sculpties, as well as recreate scenes for the theft of shadow passes and self-shadowing which I import into SL.

* PS (CS) --for everything under the digital sol.

* Digital Camera --used to snapshot textures/images in the raw--either as decals or setup by myself for tiling.

* Avimator --I setup poses for my products.

* Audacity --I use this to record sounds (gesture sounds, object sounds, vocal phrases).

* Internet --I research images, get texture references, run tutorials, upload and download. I also use the internet to advertise my SL presence (here and other locations).

* MS Office --keep track of business, numbers, sales, clients, etc.


Hmmm...I think that's about all I use in relation to SL.

Photoshop CS3 for textures
Soundforge 8 for audio
Poser 6 for animations*
Blender 2.44 for sculpties**
One Note 2007 for... notes.

* The only software I actually bought just FOR SL was Poser. The rest I used on a daily or weekly basis for one or more other projects. Poser can be a bit of a steep learning curve for a day or two but once you get a handle on it is is a very fast and reliable animation package whose features grow as your need for them does. I tried a lot of the free ones first and... they just don't compare. Similar to how blender does not compare to Maya though poser was within my budget and maya is not!

** Blender is great for a free program, but I would much MUCH rather have Maya. Blender can be very difficult to work with at times (using more than one object or trying to use nurbs and get a UV Map out) and is full of quirky bugs at every turn. Building the UV Map is also a by-hand operation so you are more or less stuck creating from pre-made basic shapes for practical purposes. The Maya exporter can auto create UVMaps for a group of nurbs objects at once which is great for making multiple sculpty forms like AV heads. There is even an importer for SL that will rereate the entire object and position all the sculties to perfectly match your original creation in Maya. However paying for Maya JUST for SL use is a bit insane (IMHO) so Blender it is. As far as the other free tools to compare it to, I stared out with Winds 3D which is a simple program that works well for vertex editing, but 90% of the time I am using the sculpt tool in Blender, which, once you learn /it's/ quirks, is very quick and easy to use for making AV parts, rocks and other organic shapes in just a few seconds.

No. What do you USE? Not what you are........

*smiles*

Mainly I just wish that the artistic talent all the rest of my family have had even lightly glanced in my direction instead of laughing at me.

SO ... I use the tools I have ... lovely, lovely words ...

Wish i had time for that. But i'm too busy keeping my computer running stable with all that junk on it....

Its amazing how much time I spend out of world doing stuff for in-world...lol

Poses/Animations:
Poser7
Qavimator

Textures:
Adobe CS3...I tend to switch back and forth with Illustrator and Photoshop...just depends on what i am doing.

Sculpties:
Blender
Wings3d

& my digital SLR for taking high res photos for my store.


^^
Vanya

Software:
Poser 7 for animation & poses, plus the odd bit of artwork
Photoshop CS2 - countless texturing jobs, signage etc
Bryce & Vue d'Esprit - occaisionally for rendering stuff, artwork
Carrera Pro- more modelling, rendering stuff (I used to do a lot of 3d artwork before finding SL)
Maya - well, I have it, still not actually used it for making a sculpty, lol
Blender - see above, but on a cheaper scale
Genetica 2- texture creation
Excel - to keep my sales stats, I am a graph-junkie!
Painter - texture creation, especially the fuzzy brush! love it!

Hardware;
Main pc and laptop - the laptop is my baby though
Canon EOS 400D DSLR camera - my main texture camera *pets her camera*
Kodak V803 - small but 8mp and very versatile, great for pictures when travelling
Nokia N80 - my phone has a 3mp camera and has served for SL textures too - and I SO want a N95 with the 5mp camera, *drooooool*
Very old Canon scanner - I will scan anything that stands still long enough, lol
Two external harddrives - to back up all my textures, and I have bloody loads now, heh
2g USB stick - with flowers on it! - how did we manage before these little babies were invented?


In conclusion - I am a sad geek who is far to excited by powerful software and cool gadgets