sabinky
Boutika Site Owner
Posts: 1231
(10/8/01 11:03 pm)
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Sultry Earth
One of my personal favorites and by far the most addictive sim sites on the net to download from, Sultry Earth is a website that features that extremely rare combination in any aspect of life: both quality and quantity. Run by Gela, this is a site that has a trendy and unusual style all of its own which is featured in its gorgeous skins and to-die-for heads. Updates every two days also make this site a must visit for the serious and casual simmer, as this versatile site appeals equally to both.
Since I’ve been a follower of this site since it started as “Groovy Sims”, I was thrilled when I finally got the chance to interview Gela herself, webmistress of one of the most popular sim sites in the community. A busy girl to begin with, I finally got Gela to reveal the secrets behind the making of her website, what motivates her, the inspiration behind those fab skins, and much, much more…
Rachel: What (or who) got you first interested in The Sims?
Gela: My friend bought the Sims and instantly fell in love with it and invited me to play it...and I too was hooked. Soon, my interest in the Sims began to fade because every single house in the neighborhood ended up with the same furniture, and the sims had the same outfits, and the same face. Then, I discovered The Sims Resource, which was the beginning of my adventures.
Rachel: What motivated you to create your own website?
Gela: When I bought the game, I had no idea I would be creating things for it. It seemed like making a wall was an impossible task involving thousands of lines of code and hours of work. So after about 6 months of downloading from various sites on the web, I ran into some problems in my game. Skins were making my game crash and after deleting the mailboxes and trashcans in the game made the neighbors cranky and wouldn't leave the lot. In a panic, I went to the WDS forum and everyone there was so helpful and nice and I began
stopping by there regularly. I learned a lot about the Sims community there and as I began to experiment making walls on my own. After discovering how easy it was to make a wall, I decided to venture on
and try out some objects. My first object looked horrible! But as I
made more, they began to shape up and I really wanted to show and
share them to other fellow simmers I met ...and ta-da! And that's how
Groovy Sims came to be. 
Rachel: Why the change from "Groovy Sims" to "Sultry Earth"?
Gela: I guess Groovy Sims was more of a place where I was just learning to create things for the Sims. As you can tell, not
everything at Groovy Sims is top quality, for example the lamp with the warning message next to it. After becoming Sultry Earth, the style of the skins I began making also changed dramatically from cute to sexy. I had so many new ideas that just didn't fit into Groovy Sims' cutesy theme and attitude. I didn't want to lose Groovy Sims either, so I decided to create a new site with Groovy Sims as a branch off of it.
Rachel: What do you use as inspiration for making your skins?
Gela: My first skins were straight from my wardrobe, but soon I moved on to clothes I wish I owned, and from there I began to design my very own fashions. I'm always open to "suggestions" (otherwise known as requests) and if your "suggestion" is appropriate and do-able, I
will most likely make it. 
Rachel: Any advice for the wanna-be skinners out there?
Gela: Never give up! Believe me, my first skins looked horrible! The shading was off and the whole thing just didn't pull together. They took hours to do but came out looking like something a clown would wear! As you continune making them, you begin to pick up on techniques that can't be learned by reading a tutorial. It's exactly like learning to play an instrument. Your instructor will teach you how your instrument is to be played, but it's up to you to practice
it and master it.
Rachel: What tools do you use to make skins?
Gela: Most people think that I would use something fancy to create my skins,but I actually use Adobe PhotoDelux 1.1 (Not Photoshop) which came with the purchase of my HP OfficeJet to create everything on my site. Even the graphics were created with this program. Although it lacks the more "hi-tech" options Photoshop offers, the interface is
very coherent and easy to use that it easily becomes my favorite program.
Rachel: Which do you think is harder: making skins, heads, or objects?
Gela: Definitely objects! That's why I stopped making them. All the Z-buffers and Alpha Channel was too confusing to get right, making the object edgy,and poking through walls. It's extremely frustrating to work so hard on an object, then find out that it looks flat and dull in the game. Skins would come in second because it's very time consuming to keep moving things around until it matched up on both sides since the texture doesn't quite fully wrap around the mesh.
Several times the texture would look simply fabulous, but once it's on a Sim, it just falls apart. Also, another thing that comes up with making skins is trying to create the right texture for the clothing, for example, many times when I have tried to make a denim jacket, it would look silky instead of rugged, and when I'm trying to make a silky dress, it would look quite rugged.
Rachel: Which one of the above three do you like the best? Why?
Gela: I love making skins the most because it allows you to really get creative with what you are doing without having to worry technical issues as you would come across when creating objects. Heads, well, conventionally you can only have two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, and a mouth. Not much to design there without scaring away your visitors.
There really is no limit to what you can do with a skin.
Rachel: Who are the members of your staff? If only you, do you find it hard to maintain a website with your popularity alone?
Gela: Popular? Naww... I'm currently managing Groovy Sims/Sultry Earth alone, and yes, it does sometimes become quite hectic. This is another reason for the switch to Sultry Earth. Groovy Sims updated at least 5 times a week, if not more, and also had a newsletter (which is now down). It would go out every week to let subscribers know what
was to come the next week and of all the updates. Also, there was the "Newsletter Bonus" which is a special download for the subscribers as a thank you for subscribing. This newsletter took hours to put together, and I thought that why spend this time writing a newsletter when you could be working on skins? Now, Sultry Earth updates (usually) once every two days. I have over 30 skins currently waiting
to go up. Instead of releasing them all at once as I did with Groovy Sims, I'm still sticking with my updating schedule to give me time to take breaks without always being in a rush to create new content to update. And why don't I just end Groovy Sims/Sultry Earth and just join another site? I love working on the site too much to let that go. I spend just as much time working on new downloadable content for
the site as I do maintaining it and creating graphics to spice it up, if not more.
Rachel: Do you design your website yourself? If you do, what do you useto create and update it?
Gela: Groovy Sims was based on a free interface, but as the site began to develop, I changed things around by adding frames and different graphics. However, Sultry Earth was designed by myself. I used Microsoft Frontpage to design the layout since Dreamweaver's trial period ended. All the content including the graphics that appear on the site were done by myself using PhotoDelux and Sim Pose.
Rachel: Any last words?
Gela: I would first like to thank several people for helping me make Groovy Sims/Sultry Earth possible: TSR for generously hosting Groovy Sims for free; Trenody for making a wonderful skins tutorial; Taarna for a very coherent heads tutorial; and my friends Jackie, Nat, Claudio, and Lise for being great critics and friends; and everyone who has visited my site! I appreciate your support very much! Finally, thank you, Rachel and Boutika for setting up this interview.
Regards,
Sabinka
sabinka@boutika.org
Boutika Sims
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