Female mesh body with good backward compatibility?

[Noel Loordes]

I am searching for a human mesh body that provides good backward compatibility, i.e. mesh clothing made for the standard avatar should work for the mesh body too. 

Ideally it would also support old alpha textures, but considering their limitations (such as not allowing hiding arms separately) this is a minor point. 

I have seen some mesh avatars, but being bound to the clothing available from a single vendor is just not an option for me. 

The ideal solution would be a mesh replacing the standard avatar mesh while retaining (partial) configurability through the appearance dialogue and compatibility with clothing layers, but as far as I know this is not possible. 

[Poenald Palen]

I think there is a way to attache something adjustable to the mesh, bone weight. But it looks odd and weight painting on the mesh counts. If you could get the textures of the lcothing you could use the SL avatar mesh (free with license from LL, sorry I can't remember the link of the top of my head) than you might be able to modify it, keep the same UV mapping and then attache the modified shape and apply the clothing textures (not already made into clothing item via SL's clothing creation asset thingy) to this mesh avatar shape. Bone weight adjustments adding to adjustment. But, havine said that you are NOT getting the SL avatars clothing shapes added. So, for each looser fitting, bell bottomed or otherwise slider changed clothing you are losing that shape. You will look skin tight all time, unless you make mesh with those features.

You can export an avatar and load it into blender, I think Domino Marama has stuff to do this, Machinimatrix's Gaia Clary works with Domino's stuff and has Avastar which imports exported SL avatars.

So, between avastar, exporting your SL avatar and buying clothing textures, or stuff with perms that allows you to click and coy the texture because they have mods rights, then you can use those images directly onto the SL avatar mesh you modified (but left the UV map) and..well, it may work enough.

[Madeline Blackbart]

Unfortunatly there are no mesh avatars that support the alpha layer. And all of them  (excluding those built from the defualt avie which IMO is pointless unles made HUGE) will not use those textures as theywill have there own UV. That said there are some that have there own alpha system. A good and fairly cheap one is Utilitizer's Avie 2.0 it takes a lot of the standred avatar mesh clothing and has it's own alpha system that's pretty detailed. it won't take ALL standred avatar mesh clothing but most.