1850: Night at the Opera (in collaboration with The Royal Thornolia Chronicles)

After my months-long Celtic spree, the time has come to briefly return to my old era of interest...

May I present to you a small 1850s set, made together with amazing Ali, the author of @theroyalthornoliachronicles! We're both so excited to finally share it with you all 💗 Make sure to check Ali's post for her half of the collaboration - practically necessary if you want your mid-Victorian gentlemen to be properly dressed for the evening!

While Ali dealt with the men, I focused - surprise surprise - on the ladies. And made two evening dresses, both inspired by the same fashion plate from ca. 1850:

If you follow Ali's story, you probably remember that a certain mademoiselle Eleanor Valery wore the dress on the right to an opera event. The dress on the left also made a short appearance, as it (or rather: its beta version) was worn by my simself Cecile, who was kindly invited to participate in the evening as well (no, that's not my real name. I just asked my husband to give me a random female French name, and that was the first thing he came up with ;)). And so both dresses are named after those characters: Eleanor and Cecile.

Both come in 29 swatches and I swear all of those colour combos come straight from mid-Victorian fashion plates - even if Ali claimed some of them remind her of 1980s Barbies ;)

• polycount: ca. 17K for Eleanor (that's HIGH my friends, you have been warned. Believe me or not, it's mostly the fault of all those tiny deco flowers) and 7,5 for Cecile
• Base Game compatible
• HQ mod compatible (pictures taken with the mod). Both dresses come also in non-HQ versions, if that's what you'd prefer. Pick only one each!
• Cecile uses glass shader for lace transparency = won’t work properly in laptop mode
• all LODs
• custom thumbnails, bump and specular maps, lots of satin shine
• tagged as everyday and formal
• found under long dress subcategory
• colour tagged
• disallowed for random
• PDNs included if anyone wants to make recolours. You don’t need them for the mesh to work.

You might notice that they vary slightly in style, and that's because I put an insane amount of work into texturing Cecile, as somehow I couldn't get it to look any satisfactory with my usual methods. I love the result, but the whole process was so convoluted that I'm not even sure if I could still retrace all the steps, let alone redo Eleanor in the same style. So we're left with this small discrepancy between both dresses. Hope you don't mind!

And now, once again, jump over to The Royal Thornolia Chronicles for the other half of the goodies :)