Total Art Soul - for artists

I have NOT had a chance to play with my new beads.  One of my friends "accosted" me earlier today, because she wanted to give me "meshing lessons" in a couple of new programs I'm not used to working in.  She and I are Sims players, and we used to enjoy doing some "tandem creating" for Sims 2 -- mostly recoloring meshes--since we neither one were very gifted at meshing.  She worked in Milkshape 3D, and I worked in Blender3D.  I could make some decent object meshes, get them uvmapped, but Blender was incompatible with the program SimPE-- SimPE was the program we used to get the meshes exported our of the game and imported into a program, such as Blender and then Photoshop to be edited, and then exported back into the game, so my meshes never showed up right in the game. ("wonky" being the correct term :D )

Now that Sims3 is out, there is a new program for working with the meshes, known as the TSRWorkShop.  TSR being The Sims Resource, our favorite Sims Custom Content site.  So she spent nearly all day walking me through the process of opening a package file, and cloning it to import into Milkshape, so we could turn it into a totally new 3D object for the game. I'm not nearly as familiar with how to work in Milkshape as I am in Blender, so we had some fun moments when I screwed up! But she's a patient teacher, and I learned a lot more about navigating around in Milkshape than I ever knew before. We got to the point where she was going to show me how to do the uvmapping in Milkshape, but I had to go cook dinner, and after dinner I just wanted to chill out and not get back into something "worky".  :D  So tomorrow--I am going to accost her first--and tell her I'm ready for lesson, part 2! She made it seem pretty easy so far--well, since I already knew enough about working in 3D she didnt have to teach me that from the ground up, that made it smoother going, anyway.  So--I may not get to my beads tomorrow either! Thats ok, they'll be there when I'm ready for them.  :)

I also was going to get into a story writing contest for a virtual pet site/forum I enjoy. They are asking for little short 100 word adventure stories describing the exploring of the different areas of the "world" with your pets. I have one story finished--and havent done any more--yet ^^ I have till about March 7, I think, to write whatever I'm going to on that.  I'm hoping I'll manage to at least write another story or two before deadline    :)