Blue World Style: How Danielle Eber Became a Blue Mars Fashion Leader

Danielle Eber is the avatar behind one of the largest brands in Blue Mars, Tirion Designs, as well as owning and operating two separate cities, Tharsis Estates and Sandbox City, renting out shop space there to fellow designers. Unsurprisingly, two items from Tirion Designs, her black patent stilettos and backless pink satin bra, are among Blue Mars’ current top ten bestsellers.

A longtime virtual world user, Danielle became a pioneering content creator in Blue Mars after reading about the world on Massively. She signed up for the early beta and was among the first to try the new platform.

Danielle started Tirion Designs with a focus on clothing to fill a perceived gap in the market, but since then, she's been expanding into cities, hair, houses, and even furniture, experimenting and testing new techniques to see what works best where. "With Blue Mars being still under development," she tells me, "We designers have barely scratched the surface in what we can make and what people want."

Her tools for creating Blue Mars content are 3ds Max 2010 and Photoshop CS4. “They seemed the most compatible with Blue Mars, since there are specific plugins for them, can do everything I need, so I don't have to learn multiple programs,” she tells me. She also likes that they’re industry standard tools, since she’s hoping to turn her Blue Mars skills into a real world career. She does acknowledge that doing this will require dedication. "Although you don't have to be a professional to build here,” as she puts it, “the game engine and developer toolkit are very much pro level, being derived from what a commercial game developer uses to make their own games. So if I want to do the best work possible, I need to learn and practice."

Formerly a content creator in Second Life, Danielle says she may return to creating in SL once it introduces COLLADA mesh, already standard in Blue Mars: “With the introduction of mesh to SL it seems to be moving forward again, so I may build in both worlds in the future."

Find Danielle's creations in Tharsis Estates, and browse her shop online via her Picasa gallery. She often spends time in the Welcome Area during evenings -- you may get to meet her then too!