Dressing my avatar?

[milksfull]

Hi! I'm new here and wasn't 100% sure on where to post this but I figured it fit best here. I want to create my dream avatar and change my look often. Maybe even start a blog about it! The problem is that I don't know where to find items to use on my avatar. Is it possible to get items for free? And if not, how can I earn money w/o spending? Also-- does anyone know where and how people take SL photos? I'm really new and confused so advice is appreciated n you can even PM me for my discord if that would be easier. Thanks!

[Mollymews]

the two biggest and most active inworld groups for reasonably good free (and cheap) stuff are: Fab Free and SL Free and Offers. Join these groups. They will lead you to inworld stores which give free and gifts   Free Dove inworld is also a good place to go

other places to go is Fashion Event regions where some of the vendors give away free or cheap gifts.  Another is to go on Marketplace and find on keywords FREE and GIFT

to earn L$ as a new resident then the best place to start is a inworld game called Linden Realms. You can earn some little money grinding on the game. Enough to buy the dollarbie products that some stores offer

for a mesh body then search the Marketplace also for FREE MESH BODY

[milksfull]

12 hours ago, Mollymews said:

the two biggest and most active inworld groups for reasonably good free (and cheap) stuff are: Fab Free and SL Free and Offers. Join these groups. They will lead you to inworld stores which give free and gifts   Free Dove inworld is also a good place to go

other places to go is Fashion Event regions where some of the vendors give away free or cheap gifts.  Another is to go on Marketplace and find on keywords FREE and GIFT

to earn L$ as a new resident then the best place to start is a inworld game called Linden Realms. You can earn some little money grinding on the game. Enough to buy the dollarbie products that some stores offer

for a mesh body then search the Marketplace also for FREE MESH BODY

Thank you! And sorry if this is a stupid question, but what exactly is a mesh body?

[Lindal Kidd]

35 minutes ago, milksfull said:

Thank you! And sorry if this is a stupid question, but what exactly is a mesh body?

To Molly's suggestion, I will add the group "Freedeology".  Their group chat announces many new freebies daily.  And "1 Linden 1 Hour", a group that will post various items for sale for...only 1 Linden, for only 1 hour, of course!

Mesh bodies...

For a long time, the only body we had was the one provided by LL.  This is now known as the "Classic" avatar.  It can be adjusted over a wide range, using the Appearance controls.  And it can be decorated with "system layer clothes", textures that are painted right on the avatar, and that always fit.  But it had some limitations, too.

Several years ago, LL introduced the ability for SL to support Mesh objects.  Prior to this, 3D objects were made out of "prims", geometric primitive shapes like cubes, spheres, and cylinders, using the in-world building tools.  Mesh, on the other hand, is a term that encompasses any objects made in an external 3D modeling program, like Blender or Maya.  These objects can be much more detailed and realistic than things made with prims.  Creators were quick to adopt this new capability to make houses, vehicles, hair, shoes, and clothing.

Pretty soon, clever creators started making actual avatar body parts out of Mesh.  Like hair or shoes, these are attachments for your avatar.  The Classic body is hidden by an "alpha mask" layer, making it invisible, and the mesh body (or head) is attached.  Mesh bodies can look smoother and more realistic than the classic avatar body.  The most popular brands tend to be expensive...you can spend $L2,000 to $L3,000 for a mesh body, and up to $L5,000 for a mesh head.  On the other hand, you can also find lower cost ones, and even freebies that will let you dip your toe into this aspect of avatar customization.

[MargotLumone]

In my very short SL experience I found the mesh avatars, like Maitreya en Belleza and mesh heads like Lelutka, to be an absolute nightmare in most viewers.
Not only I but also the mesh avatars around me end up with body parts floating apart and face parts partially rendered. Forcing re-texturing or re-rendering doesn't help; changing drawing distance or texture detail will not help neither. Only the old Windows aproach works sometimes: close everything and startup again, and if that doesn't help restart again.

The classic avatar has a skirt problem: it uses transparency to shorten it and all viewers cannot handle overlayed transparency, so your skirt will cut holes in the floor or in the fog or in the water. I m still looking for a mini skirt, a short skirt and a midi skirt to use as glitch with flexi-prim skirts!

[Alwin Alcott]

14 minutes ago, MargotLumone said:

 absolute nightmare in most viewers.
also the mesh avatars around me end up with body parts floating apart and face parts partially rendered.
 all viewers cannot handle overlayed transparency

perhaps post your system specs here ( the menu help in your viewer, system info/about, and post it here) because the general "all viewers suck" rant is most likely to blame at your machine or connection.

[Janet Voxel]

13 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:

perhaps post your system specs here ( the menu help in your viewer, system info/about, and post it here) because the general "all viewers suck" rant is most likely to blame at your machine or connection.

I think it’s more of the traditional “all mesh bodies suck” rant.

[Adam Spark]

On 9/15/2019 at 12:03 AM, milksfull said:

Hi! I'm new here and wasn't 100% sure on where to post this but I figured it fit best here. I want to create my dream avatar and change my look often. Maybe even start a blog about it! The problem is that I don't know where to find items to use on my avatar. Is it possible to get items for free? And if not, how can I earn money w/o spending? Also-- does anyone know where and how people take SL photos? I'm really new and confused so advice is appreciated n you can even PM me for my discord if that would be easier. Thanks!

You will likely want to spend a little from time to time in my experience, if you can at all. However, there are ways to earn linden dollars without spending. I caution you however. Some (arguably all) ways will require a lot of patience. Some ways will require a ton of effort. Some will require just dumb luck. Others pay but not well.

As a newcomer, check out the previously mentioned groups. Search freebies in the search function.

My first suggestion is to enjoy exploring the grid. See what others are doing. Learn from them. Don't expect your dream avatar or anything else tomorrow. Take your time. I learned a lot in my early days, but I do wish I took more time to savor and soak things in.

Learn skills and see what might interest you. You'll probably want to know some basics - prim building and taking photos come to mind. You already mentioned the photos, which is encouraging. Take lots of them, if only for the memories! You'll quickly discover that you can apply your skills to ways to earn money! Photography is a business here. You can sell creations. Visit clubs and events to see how you might get hired to host, or to perform as a singer or a DJ should you have the skills and desire.

You seem eager to learn and I wish you the best. My partner and I are available to help. You are always welcome to message me in-world to learn more. Welcome to Second Life.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 9/14/2019 at 7:33 PM, milksfull said:

Hi! I'm new here and wasn't 100% sure on where to post this but I figured it fit best here. I want to create my dream avatar and change my look often. Maybe even start a blog about it! The problem is that I don't know where to find items to use on my avatar. Is it possible to get items for free? And if not, how can I earn money w/o spending? Also-- does anyone know where and how people take SL photos? I'm really new and confused so advice is appreciated n you can even PM me for my discord if that would be easier. Thanks!

You have gotten some good answers. I'll point out there are some threads here about mesh bodies and free mesh bodies. So, dig around and do some searches.

An old and famous free stuff place is Free Dove. I got my first hair and clothes there.

If you want to understand more about mesh vs classic read Second Life: Mesh vs Classic Bodies. Hopefully it will explain the SL jargon well enough for you to make sense of what we are saying. Also, important to know, mesh bodies are changing. We are in the transition right now (9/2019). So, you may want to wait a month or two to see how the change to Bento & BoM bodies shakes out before spending big L$.

Second Life has a huge blogosphere. So, check out these sources:

• Ryan Schultz - Mostly Sansar but he does steals & deals for SL.
• FabFree – Fabulously Free - A blog about finding free stuff.
• iheartSL | Second Life Fashion & Community Feed - This is a fashion aggregator. There are 100 to 500 new items per day. If you start a fashion blog you will want to add your information and posts to this stream. You can find hundreds of fashion bloggers using this tool.
• Seraphim - This is a promotional site for SL fashion designers. They post 2 to 10 events per day telling who has what at which event. Often free gifts and always deals.

Also, look for How does your Avatar look today? This is a 'vanity' thread where people post images of their avatars. Some are just AWESOME. The regulars in the thread are helpful. There is info on where things came from and how to do things as well as the images.

And Flickr is a good source for finding SL merchants as many place their promotional material there. There is a group: Show Your SL Ads aoung a variety of other SL related groups.

[MargotLumone]

Partly solved the mesh avatars not rezzing properly by whitelisting programs and cache folders in virus and trojan scanners, but still not completely bug free, there seem to be some services that have to be whitelisted as well but no answer from support yet which ones and how to whitelist services in W10?

[MoiraKathleen]

2 hours ago, MargotLumone said:

Partly solved the mesh avatars not rezzing properly by whitelisting programs and cache folders in virus and trojan scanners, but still not completely bug free, there seem to be some services that have to be whitelisted as well but no answer from support yet which ones and how to whitelist services in W10?

I'm not sure which viewer you are using, and which anti-virus program you are using, but you might want to take a look at the page linked below from Firestorm's troubleshooting wiki.  If you are using a different viewer, the .exe files might be in a different location than described, but you should be able to locate them by searching for them by name - except for the actual viewer .exe, the others should be the same name no matter which viewer.

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

I haven't really heard much about where more services than those listed in the linked article need to be whitelisted.  If you are still having problems after following the suggestions on that article, then you probably should provide some more information here, such as which viewer you use, the specific issues you're experiencing with mesh avatars not rezzing properly, and the system info from your viewer's Help -> About window (you can copy the contents of that window and then paste that here).

It is not uncommon when landing in a new location, especially a location with a lot of avatars, for mesh parts and clothes to take a tiny bit of time to settle into place and display correctly.

[river813]

I picked up the RuthToo freebie mesh body a few days ago and was very impressed.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/RuthTooRC3-Bakes-On-Mesh-Female-Body/18174055

Its Bakes-on-Mesh-ready out of the box so it's extremely easy to use and you can just wear any classic skin (including the Linden Lab starter skins from the Library which look really good on it). No hud for alpha cuts but it does respond to system alpha layers so you can wear standard sizes with it, and some standard fitmesh works without alphas at all. I've also had some success with tops (but not bottoms) made for Slink Hourglass and Belleza Venus. 

There's also a separate Extras box which contains Medium and High feet plus some extra skins and system-layer clothing. The High feet are compatible with Maitreya shoes - but not with Maitreya boots because they don't fit around the legs, so for boots you'll need to detach the feet altogether and use Standard/Classic size boots with included alpha layer. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/RuthTooRC3-Bakes-On-Mesh-Extras/18174085 I haven't tried the Medium feet because I don't own any Medium shoes at all.

Head and hands are bento but no animations are included. There's a static pose hud for the hands. I haven't yet tried it with any animated AOs. The head is really nice though, and is separate so you can wear it with other bodies.

I honestly almost like it better than Maitreya: Ruth is curvier and responds better to shape sliders, (very small or very large breasts, and larger hips for example, without distorting), and she doesn't have that weird armpit shape that Maitreya has. The big downside is if you wear too much alpha, it thinks you've alpha-ed out the entire thing so then the Bakes on Mesh stops working and the system body shows through instead. There is also a tiny (one-pixel-wide) gap between the head and body at the neck, only visible if you cam in really close. If you wear the Ruth head with Maitreya body, there is no gap.

Here it is with one of the Linden starter skins & hair. Shape is from the RuthToo set with some tweaking to make the face look more Asian.