Male mesh body advice

[Sora Seetan]

Okay so I am looking to purchase a mesh male body. But I have never ventured outside of the anime style before and I am not sure which one to purchase. What I need is a male mesh body, not that muscular but some is okay. Has a decent range of clothing, I am looking to create a semi urban but gothic type of look. Not a leather jacket with some jeans, like something half decent unique and interesting to look at so would like it if the body had a good range of clothing. Has a decent skins and tattoos.

What would you suggest?.

Also looking for a mesh head, not all that interested in paying stupid money for a bento head. Static would be fine. Thoughts on that also?

 

 

Edited March 9, 2019 by Sora Seetan

[Marianne Little]

12 hours ago, Sora Seetan said:

Okay so I am looking to purchase a mesh male body. But I have never ventured outside of the anime style before and I am not sure which one to purchase. What I need is a male mesh body, not that muscular but some is okay. Has a decent range of clothing, I am looking to create a semi urban but gothic type of look. Not a leather jacket with some jeans, like something half decent unique and interesting to look at so would like it if the body had a good range of clothing. Has a decent skins and tattoos.

What would you suggest?.

Also looking for a mesh head, not all that interested in paying stupid money for a bento head. Static would be fine. Thoughts on that also?

 

 

Well, @Skell Daggeris the one I use to refer to. He most certainly is not the jeans and leather jacket type. Well, he is that too, but he spend a lot of time finding special clothes that may interest you. https://www.flickr.com/photos/skelldagger/with/31888448247/

He will come with a longer reply, I am sure. But he is using Slink male body, I think he also like the thinner version of Signature (Geralt).

If you ask me, I think Belleza Jake look best. You should pick up a lot of demos. Both Geralt and Jake can be slimmed down, but they are still fit. You can't get rid of the arm muscles, even if you push the torso muscle slider towards zero.

You can use Catwas pre-Bento heads. The benefit of that is that you can use all Catwa appliers, you have the same range of products, but not animations. I think Catwa skins, beards and such is made by the vast majority of designers.You can not adjust the sliders, so you must find a head you like. You will look for the "Basic" heads. There are animation add-ons if you decide the face is too static. A head + "blink" will be 1400 L or so. It is sort of greedy to not include even blinks, but hey, that's their price.

Skins have a lot to say of course, but if the head has the "wrong" eye size for you, you can not change the eyes wider or more narrow. While a mouth depend a lot on what kind of lips the skin maker painted. Demo, demo.

The Adam Bento mesh head is so cheap. And here you can change the face with the head sliders and have animations, all for 850 L. You don't get so much support as with Catwa, sure you can use Omega skins, but they might not fit so well.

So the elephant in the room. TMP. This business makes me so irked. I can not deny that the body looks fantastic. The heads too. And I really liked the Classic head. It is still 500L just for the heads. But the support has fallen like a rock because TMP sucks majorly in development and refused to "play ball" with other designers. No Omega support. So search for TMP threads in this forum and in blogposts outside the forum, and read all the arguments against it. Billy Beaverhausen has blogged some about them.https://billybeaverhausen.com/2019/03/04/whats-eating-tmp-12/

I think it is worth reading more posts from him, I think he has every body and head. Well, not all but a lot. He is more muscular than what I associate with thin and fit, but the body demos will show how much you can take down the muscles.

Akeruka has nice heads, and for 1250 L, that's cheaper than a static Catwa blus blinking animation. And I think they have some support, more than Adam? They are also Bento.

Edited March 9, 2019 by Marianne Little
added link, some more info

[Orwar]

   Basically what Marianne said. Signature Geralt or Belleza Jake are probably the two bodies you'll want to look up. Neither are quite as well-supported as Gianni when it comes to apparel, but Gianni is much bulkier than Geralt. Jake still seems to have more creators supporting it than Geralt does; sometimes it feels a bit as if some creators never noticed Geralt coming out - which is a shame. Apart from one pesky detail with its alpha map which is just not as good as the Gianni (the chest is only split up in horizontal sections, whereas Gianni has more alpha faces as it's also split into thirds vertically on both front and back), it's a great body.

   Heads... Well, that's very much up to preference. I did buy a GA.EG head a while back because I 'wanted an option', wore it for a few days whilst trying to tinker with it, but never really got into it. Back to my Catwa head and never gave it another go.

[Maitimo]

My avatar is basically an elf, and I started with Gianni but I switched to Geralt as soon as it came out. It is possible to slim them both down, even Gianni, and with the right skin (low muscle definition) you can avoid the pumped-up jock look. Clothing for Geralt is limited but growing steadily, but I do regularly switch back to Gianni for certain outfits.

I got Jake for one of my alts but I regret it and wish I'd gone for Geralt again; it's nearly as muscular in the arms as Gianni, and there's no AO for the hands so they will be permanently splayed unless you also buy a separate AO for them. On the plus side, Jake fits "standard sizes" better than either of the Signature bodies, which are offset considerably further forward than the classic shape. 

Catwa still has a couple of old non-bento heads for L$900 each (not including the animations packs which are sold separately). I use one of them, Justin (which appears to be based on Ian Somerhalder), the other is Paul. The advantage of these over non-Catwa heads is the much greater availability of skins, beards and other add-ons.

Edited March 10, 2019 by Matty Luminos

[Ryder Palfrey]

I have the Ex Machina Davide body which is much more slender than the others mentioned so far. There isn't much (or any?) specially made clothing for it, but I have no problems using standard size clothes with it.  Though as Matty mentioned with the Jake body, you have to buy a separate hand AO.

They've also dropped the price; body and head together is under 2k now, and as well as the built-in skins (which are very nice) there are a couple of free skins in the store too.

The shorts pictured here are included with the body, along with a tank top and colour-change huds.

[Sora Seetan]

Sorry for the delay in response. Thank you for all of your responses, i went with the jake body in the end!. Much appreciated :)

[Athayus Quan]

Jake body is a bit hard to use not sure how well supported it is although I do my best to support it being a mens mesh clothing designer in here, my personal favs for bodies and ease of use is the Signature Gianni Body, Cata Head, Birth for Skins, Doux for Face addons ears etc. Valt makes some great men's hair and stealthic

[Skell Dagger]

1 hour ago, Athayus Quan said:

Jake body is a bit hard to use not sure how well supported it is

The Jake body is very well supported. It's now the second most popular body to rig for at menswear events, after the ubiquitous Gianni.

By the time I got to this thread the OP had already made their choice, but for any other guy querying which body to buy, my advice is always to consider what kind of build you want your body to have vs how easy you want things when using the body and its HUD (and also finding clothing). While a muscular body such as Gianni can be slimmed down if you're not fond of the bulky shoulders, it takes a lot of slider work to do so, and you need to use sliders you might not instinctively think to use in order to change the deltoids (focus on the shoulders, neck, and pectorals, and also lengthen the legs a little bit - Gianni is very top-heavy with shorter legs than torso). Other bodies - such as Jake - need care with skins, as they have muscle tone (and arm veins) built into the mesh itself, and the body has a very pronounced inguinal crease that - if you choose a skin that has a strong IC built into it - can make you look as if you spend hours in the gym every day.

Edited March 13, 2019 by Skell Dagger

[Kweopi]

because you are new to mesh bodies, you can start with the free ones , just to test them and learn the basics:

Altamura have few limited inworld, in different places, also is a free one at Ex Machina , or the almost free one from meta ( linked down),  plus the free full perm roth (linked down) . after you get used to them, get demos from all mesh creators and choose according to your taste (yeah, i know, i always give advices to get the free ones instead of those expensive, is a bad trait of mine.i learned my lesson in the hard way, after i recommended to a friend something expensive, i loved the item very much, she don't and she blamed my for bad expenses and never talked to me again )

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Donald-A-Roth-mesh-avatar-Duck-Girl-edit/15560391

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/META-Male-Mesh-Body-Base-BASIC-Fitted-Bento-Hands-GIFT/16432257

Edited March 13, 2019 by Kweopi

[EveniosReturns38]

"Neither are quite as well-supported as {Signature Gianni} when it comes to apparel,"

ok not sure where that came from but this is the false conclusion that the Signature body is the "best" body for male meshes. and thats not true.  I was visiting the store and saw how the body alone costs 3,500L (which is 500L MORE then the average mesh body in sl and 500L more then Jake) and i saw a very good looking male avatar there hanging out and he told me that Jake is far better by a long shot... I saw this thread trying to figure out what mesh body to get for my male upgrade and it looks like Jake is the best bet to go to.  it cost less and with the right skins it can look amazing.   Id pass on signature for now and i think that quote above is also a bit incorrect.

[Marianne Little]

12 hours ago, EveniosReturns38 said:

"Neither are quite as well-supported as {Signature Gianni} when it comes to apparel,"

ok not sure where that came from but this is the false conclusion that the Signature body is the "best" body for male meshes. and thats not true.  I was visiting the store and saw how the body alone costs 3,500L (which is 500L MORE then the average mesh body in sl and 500L more then Jake) and i saw a very good looking male avatar there hanging out and he told me that Jake is far better by a long shot... I saw this thread trying to figure out what mesh body to get for my male upgrade and it looks like Jake is the best bet to go to.  it cost less and with the right skins it can look amazing.   Id pass on signature for now and i think that quote above is also a bit incorrect.

The thread is 2 months old, and that is old in terms of SL. Please remember that designers add on more sizes when it's demand for it. As more and more people use it and ask for products, it surges forward.

You also ignored @Skell Daggerwho posted it was very well supported. In March.

[Skell Dagger]

13 hours ago, EveniosReturns38 said:

"Neither are quite as well-supported as {Signature Gianni} when it comes to apparel,"

ok not sure where that came from but this is the false conclusion that the Signature body is the "best" body for male meshes. and thats not true.  I was visiting the store and saw how the body alone costs 3,500L (which is 500L MORE then the average mesh body in sl and 500L more then Jake) and i saw a very good looking male avatar there hanging out and he told me that Jake is far better by a long shot... I saw this thread trying to figure out what mesh body to get for my male upgrade and it looks like Jake is the best bet to go to.  it cost less and with the right skins it can look amazing.   Id pass on signature for now and i think that quote above is also a bit incorrect.

Neither Orwar nor I suggested that Gianni was the best body. We said it was the one with the most clothing support. At the time we wrote our posts, Gianni was indeed the male mesh body that by far had the most clothing made for it by designers, but I mentioned that Jake was rapidly coming up as a close second. And now if you go to menswear events you'll see that Jake has caught up even more and there's a fairly even split between the two.

Both Gianni and Jake have their pros and cons, and your choice should not be dictated by whether some random good-looking bloke tells you it's "the best body" - because "best" is entirely subjective. If I were to tell you that the Slink Physique Male body is "the best" for me because it's the one that gives me the shape I prefer to have, because it has a few more "power user options" that I really like, and so on, then your "very good looking male avatar" acquaintance would scoff at me. Slink Physique Male is my personal preference for those reasons, even though not many people are creating for it these days and I've been forced by the market to switch mostly to Gianni. Oh, and it's also cheaper than both Gianni and Jake.

Jake had a baptism of fire. It launched with some neck issues (which weren't fixed for a long, long time; well over a year as I recall), and it still suffers from splayed-finger problems if you're not using a Bento AO with high enough priority hand animations. For those reasons - even though I own it, alongside several other male mesh bodies and god knows how many mesh heads - it's still the one I use least out of the "big four".

So, in short: no, the quote was not incorrect. You read it incorrectly, and assumed that Orwar stated that Gianni is "the best" body, instead of "the most well-supported [at the time of writing] body". And, if you're sniffing at the price, you're probably not aware that Signature often holds half price sales, which means that the body you deem incredibly expensive actually becomes the cheapest on the market.

And now for the advice part of my post: If you're looking to buy a male mesh body, first of all pick up demos of each one. Try them on. Check out the availability of skin appliers for them (and whether options are also available for your choice of mesh head, or - if you're sticking with a system head - for matching system skins). Experiment with the shape sliders to see which body can be figured into the type of physique that you prefer. Then teleport around each of the six main menswear events in SL (links to all, plus galleries of what's available there can be found on the Mens tab of the Seraphim website) and look at the logos on the ads to figure out clothing support for the body that you like the most.

Make your mesh body a personal choice, not a decision made via recommendation from some random good-looking bloke.

Edited May 25, 2019 by Skell Dagger

[Fox Wijaya]

13 hours ago, EveniosReturns38 said:

 this is the false conclusion that the Signature body is the "best" body for male meshes. and thats not true. 

for some Gianni is best, for other Jake, for some Niramyth and for another group Exmachina, SLink... and so on..

Personally i also go for jake, and would rather be on a Linden standard avi than ever put on a Niramyth, but also have gianni, gerald, exmachina and slink, and depening on mood and clothes... quite happy with all.

[Skell Dagger]

16 hours ago, EveniosReturns38 said:

I was visiting the [Signature] store [...] a very good looking male avatar there [...] told me that Jake is far better by a long shot

I'm also intrigued by the above, because this happens a surprising number of times in SL. Evangelists for a specific brand will go and hang out in another brand's store (usually wearing their favoured brand's group tag) and tell anyone who will listen (or will announce loudly in open chat to their evangelist companions) that their preferred brand is better than the brand whose store they're currently in. Or they will trash-talk the brand whose store they're in. I saw the latter happen in a specific mesh head store just last month, literally minutes after a new head had been released, so the store was very busy and full of people:

[Avatar A arrives on my radar with Avatar B, then appears in the store a few seconds later]
Avatar A: [just one minute after that, having clearly looked around the entire store in that time] these have got to be the ugliest heads ever i have not seen one thats nice
Avatar B: [immediately afterwards] I Am struggling to find one i like also
[both teleport out 30 seconds later]

And also, very unsubtly trying to entice potential customers to their preferred Other Head Brand, in a mesh head's support group chat:

Avatar A: 'Other Head Brand' is having a HUGE sale. Is your head brand having one?

Edited May 25, 2019 by Skell Dagger

[EveniosReturns38]

so turns out maybe i am wrong? that Jake has some issues with starfish hands and mesh heads blend better with the signature body and that jake hasnt been updated in a while??

 

hmmmm...

[Fox Wijaya]

12 minutes ago, EveniosReturns38 said:

Jake has some issues with starfish hands

mesh heads blend better with the signature body 

jake hasnt been updated in a while??

no to all

[EveniosReturns38]

"slowly getting to understanding........."

ok.......so Jake HAS been updated to fix the mesh head issues (finally)

BUT is still some issues with starfish hands without certain bento aos?

good to know? lol

[Fox Wijaya]

2 minutes ago, EveniosReturns38 said:

"slowly getting to understanding........."

my suggestion is you read the posts above again, and more in detail. In special Skell's post.

[EveniosReturns38]

Ok......i finally did a demo test by getting both bodies demo the same skin demo and the same shape for both and the same demo boxers.

and i find that gianni seems to be a bit more detailed and.......on jake the autoalpha doesnt fully work..the butt has parts that peak through.....

on gianni the boxers fit perfectly without any alpha adjusting.

🙂

 

[Gobilly]

I've been playing a bit with Exmachina Davide 6.0 version: https://billybeaverhausen.com/2019/06/02/exmachina-davide-6-0/