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Help with my Avatar???


CaraMayfield
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Hello!

I just wanted to give context before I start. I was on Second Life before and I was able to navigate it pretty well but never got past the part to really dress up my avatar. It was right around the time that mesh became a thing and that only a few people had it and were getting around to playing with it. And now fast fowarding to now.

I joined Second Life again to make new friends and I completely forgot everything that I learned on Second Life. But thats not the issue. The issue is, as a born-again noob, I dont understand any of this mesh body and applicator and other stuff. I tried to look at the forums but it even made me more confused. I just need help in designing my avatar to look nice and away from the basic look that you start with.

 

Can someone explain me all this avatar designing stuff in really simple terms? Im trying hard to understand but Im just getting fustrated. 

 

I attempted to figure it out but it didnt do so well. I tried to get a mesh body from Belleza but they said i didnt have enough credit but I have about $3000L to buy a $2499L item. I wanted the Belleza Freya body because its the one that appeals the most to me. I went to the store, clicked on Full Freya and pressed the credit and then it told me I had 0 credit. Wow. I tried multiple times and it said the same thing. I dont know but can someone explain to me what I will have to do to obtain the freya and other stuff to buy with it???

 

Anyone please???? 

 

Thank you,

Cara Mayfield

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Did your viewer at the time show you had $0L when you went to buy the body?  Sometimes viewers don't show the correct amount.  The amount showing on your dashboard is correct.  Usually a relog or having a friend pay you $1L will correct the problem.

As for putting your avatar together, now that you have chosen a body and were hopefully able to buy it, you have several choices.

You can use the shape that comes with the body, your own or you can buy a shape for it.  You can also use the skin that came with the body or buy a skin that is labeled for use with Belleza bodies.  Hair and eyes can be purchased anywhere you wish and will most always work.

Regular system clothes will not work with a  mesh body because they go under the mesh on the original avatar body which is invisible.

You can wear mesh clothes with it.  Clothes labeled fit mesh for Belleza will automatically conform to the shape of your body.  However you may be able to wear standard sizes too.  Be sure to try on a demo of any mesh clothes you consider purchasing to make sure they fit well.  A HUD came with your body that gives you the ability to alpha any parts of the body under the clothes to make that part invisible, so they don't stick through the mesh.  Use it instead of the alpha that comes with the clothes.  When you try the demo make sure that you can alpha out any body parts that need it and that the alpha or invisible part doesn't stick further out of the clothes than it needs to.

As for appliers, they are another option for wearing clothes with a mesh body.  Applier clothes are like system clothes.  An applier will 'paint' the clothes over your mesh body.  You can wear them exclusively or in combination with mesh clothes.  For instance you may want to wear an applier lace top under a mesh jacket. They are really handy to have for this because unless a mesh top is designed to wear under a specific mesh jacket you may have the top sticking through the jacket.  Of course sometimes you can wear mesh tops and jackets from different designers together, just be sure to demo them together to make sure.

If you buy appliers make sure that they are labeled for Belleza bodies or are Omega compatible.  Omega is a universal system for appliers many designers use.  Read the instructions that came with your body to see if it already works with Omega appliers. Some bodies come already set up for it, others don't.  Some bodies weren't Omega compatible but then later versions were made so.  I have a different body than Bellaza so am not sure if the current Belleza body is already Omega compatible now.  If the body is not Omega compatible already, you can buy a kit to make it work on the MP here.

Whether you use Belleza appliers or Omega, directions for how to use them should be included in the instructions that come with the body or with the Omega kit if you have to get that.

The biggest thing is to ALWAYS demo any mesh clothes, or skins you consider buying BEFORE you pay for them.  If the designer doesn't offer a demo, pass it by.  Applier clothing may or may not have a demo available.  However if the applier clothing is labeled for use with Belleza or Omega it will work.

Hopefully this helps to alleviate your confusion about all the new options for your avatar.  If you have any further questions, feel free to post them here.

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CaraMayfield wrote:

Can someone explain me all this avatar designing stuff in really simple terms? Im trying hard to understand but Im just getting fustrated. 

 

In the beginning, we had the original system body.  This is still the base for everything we wear.  There are 4 things which make up the base and they can never be removed; only replaced.  Shape, skin, eyes and hair base. 

Here is another concept that is easy to grasp but is also fundimental to every 3D world, not just SL.  Every object is made up of triangles.  Lots of triangles, usually.  A box is easy to see, just split each face diagonally and there you have it.  Triangles.  A curved surface is actually a lot of smaller triangles.  With small edges and shading tricks and it looks perfectly smooth.   Why triangles?  It has 3 points (verticies) and each has 3 coordinates (X,Y,Z).  Without going further, MATH is the answer to why triangles.  ... Moving on -- and I swear it is not nearily as complicated as that little side trip.

The first clothes are the system clothes.  These get applied to the system body and placed over the skin.  So you wear a shirt and it covers your skin with a shirt. 

Next there are prims.  These are little blocks that can be manipulated and put together to form an object.  A prim skirt is made up of several cylinders arranged in a circle.  Each cylinder is hollow like a can and split so that only one curved side is shown.  To make it look like a skirt, a texture is applied to the prim. 

Moving on up the evolutionary scale there are sculpted prims.  Also called sculpties.  These are made from the sphere type prim.  It has an extra color map you don't see that tells the viewer how far to move each triangle point form its starting position.  Once it is shaped, the texture you can see is applied to the surface of the sculpted prim.  Sculpties is like the first step toward mesh but they have a fixed number of triangles that can be used.

With each step, one common theme is that a texture is applied to the surface of the object.  Even if you are just making a picture frame you do this.  Res a cube, flatten it, apply a texture to the face. The same holds true with mesh.

OK.  Mesh.  If you toggle wireframe view you will see what mesh really is.  It's everything.  It's a boat load of triangles.  However what we think of when we say mesh clothes or mesh bodies is a single object made up of a set of triangles.  Whole and complete using as many triangles as necessary.  The first "mesh" in SL is the system body. In that regard it is nothing new.  It is what computers have been using to render 3D objects for a very long time.

OK, so now we have mesh we can create directly without having to use primes or sculpties.  Mesh bodies take the place of system bodies.  BUT!  Remember from the very start I said there are 4 things which can never be removed.  Those 4 things make up the system body.  So ... we cover those 4 things with a mask to make them invisible.  Then wear out mesh body and eyes.

Wearing a mesh body is exactly like wearing a prim.  It moves with the body and needs to be textured.  We apply textures to the mesh just like applying textures to a prim.  Simple so far.  But it gets more complicated for creators when we want to mimic how the system body works.  The system has a skin layer, tattoo, underwear, clothes, alpha, jacket and skirts, too.  Meanwhile a mesh body is still basically a prim.  It has the one level of texture you can apply to its faces and that's it.

To get around the one level problem ... your mesh body is actually several bodies each just a few pixels larger than the one underneath.  Like matryoshka dolls. 

Now it should be obvious that it would be a royal pain in the [body part goes here] if you wanted to dress a mesh body by manually applying textures to the stacked layers that have a minuscule amount of space between them.  So we use a tool to do this for us.  The Appliers.  They basically say put this texture on this layer.  Depending on how the texture is mapped to the mesh some bodies will need special appliers.  Matching brand names is the easiest way to make sure your applliers are compatible with the body but there is also a system out that tries to help solve the need for multiple appliers that all do the same thing for different bodies.  This is called Omega system.  It takes a texture for a clothes designer and ten maps it to the body you are wearing.  It knows how to do this if you are wearing the Relay HUD for that body. 

OK, so that is a little confusing.  Omega, appliers, HUD!? 

This is has been getting smoothed out as more mesh body part designers are including the relay script in their mesh parts.  This make the mesh Omega compatible so you can use Omega appliers without needing anything else. I should probably spend time talking about appliers and Omega but this is already way beyond TL;DR and I have yet to mentioned rigging.

Rigged.  In a very simplistic way it just means the triangles that make up the mesh have been associated to points on the system body.  Your rigged mesh shoes will always be around your system feet.  If your feet move, so do the shoes.  It also means it does not matter which attachment point you use.  You can attach shoes to your nose and they will appear around your feet because that is where the mesh is rigged.

 

THE DOWN SIDE OF MESH BODIES.

Your system body does not need appliers to say which level the clothes are applied.  Also system clothes are a special type of object that contains a texture but is not a texture itself.  You can't use a system shirt to texture a prim.  And mesh is another type of prim. So all the system clothes you own will not work with a mesh body. Something to think about before you go mesh.

Mesh clothes, on the other hand, are pre-textured mesh items that attach over your avatar.  They will work with mesh bodies and the system body.

 

OK, that's enough for now.  Nobody reads past the 4th line anyway,

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  • 6 months later...

Sighs, all I want to do is wear the tattoo I have had since my first day in SL.... I guess I am just too .. dense, unintelligent, unknowing, ... I don't know... something, to figure it out.  Beginning to think I should not have gotten a mesh body. Should  have just stayed the same as I was and been done with it....

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Sunnie, if you're looking for help, you'll have to tell us more about what you're trying to do. I'll presume that your tattoo is a classic system layer thing. The maker of your mesh body may have an applier that will morph that tattoo for use on it. Tell us more and we can tell you more. It's also possible that what you want to do is impossible. SL ain't easy.

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On 01/02/2017 at 7:30 AM, CaraMayfield said:

Hello!

(...)

Can someone explain me all this avatar designing stuff in really simple terms? Im trying hard to understand but Im just getting fustrated. 

(...)

That's a a very wide question and if you read blogs and found no answers there -while most blogs are usually very detailed and explicative-, I don't really see how we can help?

 

1. A meshbody is worn as a replacement of your default body. Therefore you need to wear an alpha to hide your default avie under it.

2. Most things you used to wear are now on your meshbody : the layers are now layers on your meshbody. The system layers are now applier layers on your meshbody (you're limited to 1 texture per layer, instead of 10 per layer on the system avie).

3. Mesh clothing is very much inspired from RL. In RL you wear the cloth, you don't texture it on your body and mesh clothings is just this.

4. Because this is 3d environment there can be some clipping issues between a mesh cloth and a meshbody, which can be fixed with the Alpha (show/hide this or that part of your meshbody) on your meshbody HUD.

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8 hours ago, SunnieBuccaneer said:

Sighs, all I want to do is wear the tattoo I have had since my first day in SL.... I guess I am just too .. dense, unintelligent, unknowing, ... I don't know... something, to figure it out.  Beginning to think I should not have gotten a mesh body. Should  have just stayed the same as I was and been done with it....

You should have made your own thread on the forums, instead of digging up something from February, that a) distracts everyone from your own problem and b) might have no relation to whatever it is you are trying to do.

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1 hour ago, Kristof Maven said:

 I am glad that I am not the only one in this situation.

your first post about getting advice is only 14 hours old and you now already feel like whole SL is against you and turned bad in the time you not been online.... tháts what i call a victim role.

And yours isn't the same as mentioned here: she was new and initially only had a payment issue and some lack of understaning Mesh.

You got all links, advice and suggestions, help in your original post. Do something with it.

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8 hours ago, SunnieBuccaneer said:

Sighs, all I want to do is wear the tattoo I have had since my first day in SL.... I guess I am just too .. dense, unintelligent, unknowing, ... I don't know... something, to figure it out.  Beginning to think I should not have gotten a mesh body. Should  have just stayed the same as I was and been done with it....

Have you checked the creator's store to see if they now sell tattoo appliers? If they're still inworld and still have a store (and they create appliers now), it might be worth contacting them to ask if they'd be willing to make an applier of the tattoo that you bought from them a while ago.

If not, then - without the full image of the original design, which belongs both in physical and intellectual property format to the original designer - you will not be able to turn your system tattoo into an applier for your mesh body.

Lastly, as Syo has already mentioned, creating a new post that's titled something like "Help with creating a tattoo applier for my mesh body" and listing your questions (mentioning the body that you wear) in the post will get you far more help that's specific to your question than dragging up some old post about creating a new mesh-style avatar.

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1 hour ago, Alwin Alcott said:

your first post about getting advice is only 14 hours old and you now already feel like whole SL is against you and turned bad in the time you not been online.... tháts what i call a victim role.

And yours isn't the same as mentioned here: she was new and initially only had a payment issue and some lack of understaning Mesh.

You got all links, advice and suggestions, help in your original post. Do something with it.

OK I am wrong. I totaly misunderstood that topic. I am not in the same situation. sorry for my wrong message  but I cannot delete it.

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