New Version posted June 30, 2005*
Seasonal Variations Below
I have to admit, the Muse that inspires my Sim skins has been going in odd directions of late. I had fully expected Yavanna to be the next of the completed skins for my Sim Valinor since I was much farther along on her than I was on her spouse, Aulë the Smith. In point of fact, I had scarcely begun work on Aulë. Then a chain-reaction went off. I was playing the game and was thinking about the writing I'd been doing for my current novel-in-progress, and for some reason decided I should make Olórin a new outfit. Don't ask me why, that's just what popped into my head, so I did (that will show up on his page one of these days). When I finished working on it, it occurred to me that with some modifications, I could make the meshes I'd used for that outfit work to assemble a character a friend of mine has been trying to cobble together almost since she started playing the Sims. (The character belongs to an original fantasy novel she and I have been working on for what seems like ages.) That fellow was medium-skinned and clean-shaven, but while I was making the skin for his head, I realized that if I made the skin tone even darker and added a beard, I'd have a perfect Aulë, at least the way I happen to envision him. When I was in the process of writing I Entulesse and came to the scene in which all of the Valar appear, I went hunting for descriptions of them in Tolkien's work, but did not find it for all. Since Aulë is The Smith, and is described as working hard at the forge, I felt it would not be inappropriate for him to have darker skin, since that is a common side-effect of working in the high heat of a smithy. When I wrote a scene in Twice Blessed in which Aulë did more than simply appear "on camera," the vision of him as a dark-skinned man came firmly into my head. Since the Ainur helped sing the world into being, and each had in them some portion of Eru's thought, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that when they manifested in their self-incarnate forms, one might see something of all the races in the Ainu population. This felt so right for Aulë, I decided to keep with that vision in creating his Sim.
*The new version was designed to make a single unit of the mesh, rather than use many pieces, which can get to be a real mess in your skins folder. I also improved the texture mapping to allow for a more complex design on the skin, and made a clearer version of the face, which is numbered to work with the stayput version of the head mesh.
