The BlakOpal Chanteuse Dress

The Chanteuse Dress from BlakOpal Designs is a spaghetti-strapped dress with a beautifully detailed waist-cincher bodice. It also has two luscious embroidered fabrics with a contrasting border. Below that is a draped apron-skirt of brocade satin with a ruffle hem. Furthermore, the apron is pulled up at the small of the back and falls in rows of fabric to just above the knee. It is a flirty, fabulous outfit! The dress features high quality model, advanced materials, and even more it has cloth physics (where available).

Advanced Materials Are Amazing

In addition to what we make for virtual worlds, BlakOpal and I make a wide variety of art in the real and digital worlds. We love working with different tools and materials. We love how light shines, illuminates, and reflects off different surfaces. We’ve both worked on projects with photo-realistic materials. In the past, that required a lot of additional work to set up, plus specialized software and a lot of time to render.

Previous generation worlds like Second Life made an effort to support advanced materials, but fell short of a truly PBR (physically based rendering) model. It was pretty good at the time, but largely revolved around tricks (like baked lighting) that content creators would pull to force an item to look like it was in a particular environment. The results looked great in certain places, but not so great everywhere else.

SineSpace and Unity do support PBR, so our advanced materials render accurately in real-time. Whether you’re outdoors or indoors, in a brightly lit room or dimly light nightclub, whether the lights are white or colored, the piece will look like it is actually in that environment.

Now Available

The BlakOpal Chanteuse dress is available now in the BlakOpal Designs shoppe in-world. Additionally, you can mix and match to create your own amazing looks. Get a sneak a peek at the dress in the SineSpace web shop. Additionally, you can visit the BlakOpal Designs shoppe in-world, or using the Shop button in the SineSpace client – and preview the dress right on your avatar! Buy for yourself or as a gift for a friend.

A Long Time Coming

This piece has been in the works for the last two years. As also with the Gilda flapper dress, after our initial success with cloth physics in 2016 we were excited to work on a number of different dress ideas and this was among the first.

Cloth physics is harder than most people think. On top of that, there are a lot of technical considerations and limitations. It took two full years of working at it (with several significant revisions), testing and getting bugs reported and fixed (thanks Adam!), and getting updates to both Unity and SineSpace that would let us get this to a point where we would be okay releasing it. We are pretty happy with the results, but are committed to improving the piece as time goes on. As with all our products, customers will automatically receive free updates as we release them.

The Magic of Physically Based Rendering

One of the amazing features of Unity and SineSpace is its support for “Physically Based Rendering” (or PBR) materials. Content creators can still create items with materials like they did in previous generation virtual worlds, but embracing PBR (or ‘advanced materials’ as we describe it in our listings) means that fabrics and cloth and metals all render more accurately.

As a result, clothing will look great and render accurately in almost any environment. As you might guess, we are big fans of the color black. Take a look at the picture above to see what the BlakOpal Chanteuse dress (with Marla Boots, Amaline necklace and beaded hoop earrings) looks like outdoors in the middle of the day. Below, see the same outfit in a dimly lit nightclub like Gothika.

Shadows. Textures. The glint of light as it reflects on metal. None of these effects are tricks that are ‘baked on’ or built into the item. We made them to be physically accurate, and subsequently they are rendered that way in real-time (and looks AMAZING as you dance).

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