New Avatar – Interesting Mesh Density

OK everyone is posting about these.  If you haven’t already heard, you have to be hiding. They are far better than the Ruth and Roth avatars from earlier times.

They are interesting and noobies will look much better. However, noobies will still act like noobies . They won’t be all that hard to recognize.

However, Saturday when I was trying to play with the new avatars the SL system was acting up. The Choose an Avatar panel did not want to load. I kept getting an empty panel. I left the panel open and relogged, that got it working, or it may be just the relog did it. Or my region may have been having difficulties.

Once the panel was loaded then some avatars would not load. I would get what looked like an LOD4 version 0f the avatar only, very bizarre looking up close but ok from a distance. Switch to another one and later retry the one with loading problems, seemed to work.

When you wear one of these avatars a folder is created in the Clothing folder of your inventory. The ‘Lucy’ avatar is of course in the Lucy folder.

These avatars completely replace, well are worn over, your system avatar and a full body alpha mask hides the system avatar. They are complete mesh bodies and clothes. I am not sure why they made them No-Mod. 

At first look the mesh layout looks similar enough to use existing skin and clothing items made for the system avatar. A quick comparison suggests they are near duplicates. I’ll have to see if I can do some more testing and find out how similar they are.

It is just a matter of time until someone copybots one of these and starts to play with it. Then we’ll know if I am right.

I need to find the license these are released under. It may be legal to copy and modify them for use in derivative works. Probably not. But as LL is releasing them and since they have all rights to them, it will be LL’s TOS ONLY that covers how they are used… unless LL signed a specific agreement with the creators of these avatars, which I really doubt. But, that is a possibility.

Standing beside my body…

A problem with these avatars is all the mesh items are worn on the Avatar Center attachment point. Or may it isn’t a problem, but a good thing… you’ll have to decide. It does mean if you attempt to wear any item individually you have to remember to use ADD rather than wear. But, I am finding using ‘add’ is something I do much more often now.

I do think it a problem that I cannot edit the shape of Lucy or any of the avatars I checked. I tried my SL Viewer and Firestorm 4.6.5/64-bit. So, I can’t adjust my facial features or body size. Bummer.  Alicia is 1.93m/6’-3”+ tall. Bummer. I can’t use my wardrobe of non-mesh clothes. Bummer. My mesh clothes, the few that I actually like and will wear, don’t fit. BUMMER!

So, I’ll be keeping my avatar.

In the Future

These avatars do demonstrate what can be done with fitted mesh. We have seen a process start with Slink and slink-like body parts; breasts, butts, hands, feet, heads… now we will likely see whole bodies. I know some people are working on full mesh bodies that have no head. You could use your system avatar head or possibly a Slink head. With the system head you would still have the current facial animations. With a Slink or mesh replacement head you could change facial expression only via HUD.

This leaves the question as to whether these avatars were made by LL or a third party. If the Lab made them, will we see more? We might… but I doubt the Lab is going to go into the content making business.

Fit with the new avatar body is excellent – using my custom shape

This might be an effort something like Linden Realms where the idea was to get staff experience in building problems. Some segment of the staff is still said to be working in the Advanced Experience Tools for gamifying SL. These may also be a move to quite those complaining about Fitted Mesh. Sort of a: see, it can work – type thing. No real telling on that one.

Another problem… each time I put on one of these avatars using Choose an Avatar a folder was created in my Clothing folder. That could turn into a mess. I’m not sure how well these avatars have been thought out considering they are for new people. I see problems and changes ahead.

I think the clothes are making use of Materials. They look pretty good detail-wise.

As to fitting… since we can’t change shape it may seem we couldn’t find out. But, you can add a new shape and adjust it, sort of what I did in the image above. Then you find out you cannot adjust the face of these avatars. Almost everything else, but not the face. Some of these female avatars have some ugly faces, sorry ladies. So, I’m not seeing these avatars as serious competition for what the creative types in SL are doing.

However, the clothes and body work very well together. (See image above.) As the shape sliders change, both the body and clothes follow along in tight unison. Not something we see with Fitted Mesh clothes and the system avatar, which has been a significant point of dissatisfaction with Fitted Mesh.