Saturday, April 18, 2009

Fat Pack my arse

I might upset a few designers with this post, and indeed I may be factually incorrect about the whole design process and what it involves, but it's just my casual observations and surmisings as a non-designer. Please correct me if I am wrong. I am happy to be put right.

The subject I want to address is fat packs. And I guess within that, hair fat packs particularly.

Take one hair style you buy for, for example, 150L. Suppose there's a fat pack on offer with ten colours. Ten hairs of exactly the same style but just different colours. And this costs, not 1,500L, but 800L. A bargain, right? Wrong!

Or at least, given my understanding of it, it's wrong. Again, correct me if I'm mistaken.

In RL this would be a true bargain. Because in RL each piece in a multi-pack has to be individually manufactured and there is usually a saving, due to economies of scale and stuff, but not almost 50% like the above example.

But in SL, surely all the work is in manufacturing the first piece. The original style and then tinting it. SL manufacture differs from RL in this area.

Surely after the initial creation, making the other colours is a simple job of just changing the colour. The hard work, the design work, is done isn't it? Is not just changing the colour the easy bit? A few clicks of the mouse?

As such, I can understand charging a bit more for fat packs, just to reflect those few clicks of the mouse for each new colour. But not that much more.

Am I wrong?

4 comments:

  1. :P I haven't played around too MUCH with this but I would assume Each hair isn't just tinted but was colored and shaded individually :)

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  2. Oh and I wanted to add LOL *Textures are not easy to make ! :)

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  3. From the little I know of hair creation, the base structure of the hair is only completed once, but each color change involves a texture change. I've seen some of the texture files used for hairs, and they are as varied as there are avatars in SL. Some are more realistic than others, but it seems most hair creators use the same "family" of textures.

    Hair textures are also available at various sources on the net, so it's not always a matter of a designer creating the texture.

    The real art is in the structure of the hair, imho. I can't imagine texturizing it would be as time consuming.

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  4. If, Lialynn, each hair is coloured and shaded individually, then I stand corrected, and I understand why the relative price for a fat pack. As I said, I am open to correction. So to speak.

    My thought process was along the same lines as yours, Lysi, the real art is in the structure of the hair.

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