Need Mesh Head and Body

[Cole Silvershade]

Hi, I just returned to SL after being gone for almost 9 years.  Obviously mesh stuff is the new norm these days.  I see a lot of posts for free or low cost items for women, but nothing listed for us guys.  Does anyone know of any stores or Marketplace listings for men?  Thanks in advance for your replies.

[Laika Ravikumar]

Hi you should take a look at Skell Daggers profile he has a blog with everything you would want to know about and where to find everything. Good luck,

[Cole Silvershade]

Awesome, thank you so much Laika.

[Skell Dagger]

Hi Cole

If you're looking for truly free or dirt cheap mesh heads and bodies for men (understandable in this day and age, when finances are tight for so many of us) then pickings are slim. The vast majority of mesh clothing is made for the popular male mesh bodies (Signature Gianni, Belleza Jake, Meshbody Legacy, etc) and the vast majority of skins are made for a combination of one of those bodies, plus either Lelutka or Catwa heads.

However, you have one big thing in your favour as a returnee after all this time: Bakes on Mesh (BoM). Bakes on Mesh is a relatively new avatar customisation method introduced by Linden Lab that allows system layers (the skins and clothing you'll remember from the last time you were inworld) to be 'baked' onto the much higher quality mesh heads and bodies that are around now. So in that sense, the skins and their compatibility with different brands of head and body are less of a worry. In addition, you'll often find that a great deal of mesh clothing can fit on other brands of mesh body (especially things that are not close-fitting, such as jackets and pants) so - with the use of the body's alpha HUD, or included alpha layers - you can mask out any parts of your body that poke through the clothing.

I don't usually like to promote my blog in the forum (weird, I know, but I feel that blog recommendations are best left to readers who have genuinely found them useful) but in this case I do have some posts that might be helpful with regard to the specifics of putting together a male avatar as cheaply as possible. I've been running a series on my blog called Bloke on a Budget, where I explain (sometimes in hand-holding detail) how to navigate the minefield of putting together a male avatar in SL when you don't have more than a few Linden pennies to rub together.

To get you started, try this post where I show four different looks for between L$1 and L$2 in total (including the mesh head and body). Granted, the freebie heads and bodies can often not be of quite the same highly-customisable super-high quality than the full priced ones, but if you spend the time to work at it then you can achieve some good results. The outfit really does help a lot. Here's a composite image of the four looks (apologies that it has text on it; I just grabbed it from the featured image) -

In that post I used one of the free head/body combinations from Altamura for the formal look (note that the skin on that particular one cannot be changed) and the free Bento Male Avatar by Onupup for the remaining three casual looks. I also explain how to set up the Onupup body to make use of Bakes on Mesh, so that you can use system skins.

In this older Bloke on a Budget post I'm using the unisex 'Freya' gift head by Catwa (which is no longer available) and the L$1 'Classic' body by Meshbody (which is still available). While the Catwa gift can no longer be obtained, that post might be worth sitting down to read anyway, because in it I take you through how to use various 'BoM fixes' to sort out problems that can be caused by using old system skins on any mesh head and body. (Unfortunately, most of these BoM fixes do cost a bit of cash.)

I'll be continuing this series shortly, once I get time to do the photoshoots for another post. Hopefully that will help you at least get started.

Edited August 26, 2020 by Skell Dagger

[Cole Silvershade]

Hey Skell,  wow, what a great and informative post.  It's people like you that make SL such a great place to get away from RL stress and make people like me want to come back.  I can't wait to dig into your blog and see what awaits my noob like mind :-).

Thank you for everything you do for SL.  It's greatly appreciated, at least by me.

Cole

[Laika Ravikumar]

He is the best