I signed on for a bit this morning (RL is keeping me pretty busy these days) and was IMed by Bart Seymour. He'd been talking with Reine, and had some of his mesh avatars on display. We chatted for a bit, and it turned out he was making one model that he thought I'd like. I did indeed, and I bought it on the spot.
He helped me, clumsy as I am, with setting it up. I will have to seek out a pale skin (of the sort I prefer) in texture form; the avatar is set up so that such textures (which, if I understand, are packaged together to comprise an SL skin) can be applied to it--for testing purposes, I used a tan skin. (Let's pretend that I spent some time on one of those nude beaches in SL. :))
I had to tweak my shape to work with it--somewhat broader-shouldered, a little shorter (*sob*). (I made my torso a bit longer, which in SL shortens your thighs. I'll experiment to figure out the best settings, and see what's really necessary to work best with the avatar.) I took some pictures, but having just downloaded the Firestorm FUI beta (more on that later), I hadn't twisted the graphics knobs. Bart was already set in that respect, so here are the photos that he took, behind a break as there are some NSFW mannequins in view:
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Alas, I don't think either these or the photos I took show enough detail at a good POV to show off the white thong to advantage. The stock avatar crotch is notoriously bad, and even if you don't care about breast size, improved quality there might be important to you.
In any case, I am very impressed. While the cleavage doesn't extend as near to my sternum as I'd think it should (maybe that's a skin issue...), it's still lovely.
I can't use it full-time right now; clothing is an issue for now. (NOTE: one shouldn't infer from that qualification that I know anything about what clothiers might be doing in that respect. I don't.) Even if I could, I'm not sure I would; I am still very attached to Foxbean Laboratories' breasts. Also, I am on the fringe in multiple respects--am I willing to trade off some leg length, height, and slenderness for the advantages of this avatar (to be sure, some would say that I should)? I don't think I've gone overboard on shoulder width, but I will want to look at the shape I used more closely at my leisure.
5 comments:
I love the sense of heaviness to that avi's breasts - but what's the advantage to a mesh avi?
Some of the advantages will only appear with the mesh deformer.
1. With it, body physics will work on the mesh, and hence on the breasts. Jiggle! (That said, I haven't kept up with the current breast attachment jiggle technology.)
2. I am hoping that the mesh will work and play well with the breast sliders, too, but we'll have to see about that.
Others have to do with the state of the stock avatar--as the article mentions, the stock avatar crotch is infamous for its low quality. short shorts or underwear for the stock avatar just don't look right.
Clothing for prim breasts with the current state of the art is problematic. The fit of the clothing layer texture with the top proper only really looks good with one particular size, position, and orientation. The breasts in a mesh avatar are by their nature joined to the rest of the avatar, so clothing for them only has the problem that clothing for the stock avatar has, i.e. those caused by textures simply being stretched to fit rather than, e.g. in the case of fabric patterns, replicated.
That's not to say mesh avatars are the goldeneh medina. There needs to be a way to deform mesh clothing so that it needn't be designed for one specific avatar, and to make everyone's accumulated inventory of clothing work on mesh avatars. Mesh avatar breasts are not currently capable of continuous realtime growth as many breast attachments are, and they may not be growable to the amazing sizes many breast attachments support.
Maggie Bluxome put together an excellent article on issues with mesh avatars and what they mean for the busty community. I don't have a link at hand, but I recommend it for you and everyone else.
Here is my article.
http://maggiebluxome.com/mesh-and-prim-breasts
The article was written before mesh deformer was announced.
Something else I wanted to add.
http://maggiebluxome.com/flexi-mesh
It has been stated that there will not be flexi mesh. That means mesh will not jiggle.
http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Mesh-Cant-Flexy/td-p/1363375
Any "jiggle" feature in mesh will be just how they are in sculpted breasts.
I hit send too soon. :)
There *may* be a possibility of "jiggle" when the mesh deformer comes out. The code transfer avatar physics to the rigged mesh.
We won't know until it appears.
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