I was at another virtual fashion show a few hours ago. No, I wasn't one of the models unlike
last year.
The setting was somewhat similar. It was outside, and there was a rectangular "catwalk" with seating around it. In the background, there was a mansion from where the models came and where they went back to.
The presentation was quite different. I was wondering how long they'd take to show 134 outfits. As it turned out, they basically did the opposite of what we had done. The models were all scripted NPCs, and they all went along the catwalk in a long row, maybe 20 seconds apart or so. So the fashion show was automated. The announcement was live, but mostly limited to which theme came next.
Of course, with so many outfits, although colour variations were way more common than at our fashion show, it would have taken hours to show each outfit separately and on actual avatars. We had about half as many outfits, and we had more time to show them.
And truth be told, the way we did the fashion show almost sounds like a perfect example for how not to do it: The MC had pre-recorded his part on a music bed, thus the timing was rigid, one sortie every 70 seconds. Still, everything was presented by a bunch of manually-controlled avatars, each with a maximum of four outfits. Automation was limited to turns which were actually part of our standing animation; we had a special AO which I had converted to khAOs to reduce the server load. But we ended up doing so many trial runs in the final location that we managed to find bugs and other issues and iron them out the best we could.
Granted, we couldn't simulate the real thing. We didn't know how everything would work out with an audience, nor did we know how much of an audience we'd attract. Some said we could be lucky if more than a dozen came. Also, the last fashion show of that kind had been six years ago, and none of the models and probably precious few avatars in the audience had worn mesh yet; this was actually the first time mesh was involved. We simply couldn't test how well everything would work with about 60 avatars on the sim mostly wearing mesh with sometimes outrageously high complexities. Luckily, we didn't have serious problems, and what little problems we had, we learned to navigate around.
By the way, the first virtual fashion show I attended was different yet again. The MC-ing was live, the music bed was DJ-ed live, the models were real avatars and rather few of them, but they were automated by sitting down on poseballs backstage, a maximum of three at a time.
And the only time I ended up having more to wear as a consequence of a fashion show was when I was a model myself. It was because I had to fill in for an absent model during a test run and wear her underwear set, but still, I decided to keep it afterwards.
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