Non-mesh vs. Mesh

[animats]

On the left, classic avatar. On the right, mesh avatar.

I've been trying to duplicate my non-mesh look, which I rather like, in mesh. Here's what I have so far.

The avatar on the right is built from the open-source Roth, the "BOM 2000" version. You can buy this on Marketplace for L$10. Roth is the male counterpart of Ruth. Ruth is used often; Roth not so much.

(The version on Marketplace is not ready to use. Out of the box, there's a see-through section at the neck and the head and body don't match, even with with the same skin. After fixing the see-through section (one face is 30% transparent for no good reason) and setting the alpha mode consistently (body was "alpha masking", head was "alpha blending") for body and head, it looks OK.)

Biggest problem with Roth is skinny lower legs. I have to turn up "leg muscles" to get a big enough leg size down at the boots. Roth's thigh to ankle ratio is more female than male. (There's no separate adjustment for lower leg size, is there?)  I should bulk up the arms a bit, which is an option. Other than that, not too bad.

Alphas are a problem. The supplied "alpha HUD" only lets you blank out areas at the level of "lower leg", "upper leg", etc. No fine adjustments. No good reason for that; the HUD for Open Simulator has more control. You also don't get any of the fancy stuff like nail color adjustment.

I have a non-rigged leather jacket that fits, but it takes some fussing because the alpha layer it comes with doesn't hide some shoulder areas just below the neck.

 

Edited October 4, 2020 by animats

[Maitimo]

The Roth body is horrible, truly horrible. I tried it, and if I was using a male body on a budget I would honestly rather skip it and stay non-mesh.

I don't normally recommend Legacy/TMP products, but you'd be better off switching to the free Legacy body for men (if it's still available?). 

[Jordyn McGregor]

4 hours ago, animats said:

Biggest problem with Roth is skinny lower legs.

The upper arms too!  

[Mercedes Avon]

I have to agree with the others. From those pictures, I like the non-mesh body better. I also second Maitimo's thought. The free Legacy body might be the best balance for you. It's been updated to BOM and used the newer HUD which is much more user friendly. I would give it a try. You do not have anything to lose.

[Claireschen Hesten]

As much as i dislike the free TMP classic it's not a terrible male option as there's still a decent amount of TMP supported stuff around. If you want to avoid the group join fee Alantori has it's male "David" body at L$50 for this weekends Manly Weekend sent it to my M-alt as the Midnight Mania has never previously reached it's target. The body is BoM with just an alpha Hud and comes in two parts top and bottom it's said to be compatible with stuff rigged for the Adin body, my M-alt uses the system head still and there is an obvious seam between head and body which is probably the only non clothing related issue with the body

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Finally, a man with some thighs.

 

8 hours ago, animats said:

Alphas are a problem. The supplied "alpha HUD" only lets you blank out areas at the level of "lower leg", "upper leg", etc. No fine adjustments. No good reason for that; the HUD for Open Simulator has more control. You also don't get any of the fancy stuff like nail color adjustment.

Didn't you say your previous avatar was the system body? Why aren't you using BOM (and alpha layers)?

Edited October 4, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Josephine Carissa]

Greetings Animats,

i read your post and thought that maybe Skells blog about low to no cost might help.

http://www.virtualbloke.com/archives/3931

Kind Regards,

Josephine

 

[animats]

Yes, I get that there are alternatives. I wanted to try the open source body.

Open source Ruth isn't bad. Open source Roth looks like someone took Ruth and tried to turn it into a male body, badly. Hence the skinny ankles.

One can do worse. A Slink demo. Default settings. The jutting chin is easily fixed, but I have no idea where the stripey pattern on the arms is coming from.

[Maitimo]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Yes, I get that there are alternatives. I wanted to try the open source body.

Open source Ruth isn't bad. Open source Roth looks like someone took Ruth and tried to turn it into a male body, badly. Hence the skinny ankles.

One can do worse. A Slink demo. Default settings. The jutting chin is easily fixed, but I have no idea where the stripey pattern on the arms is coming from.

On the plus side, you could probably make a great Gollum avatar with it...

[animats]

3 hours ago, Maitimo said:

On the plus side, you could probably make a great Gollum avatar with it...

Yes, and that's about what you get with the appearance sliders in the default positions.

[Marianne Little]

It was a shape with the Anderson head too? Always use the suggested shape that comes with the head. It is faster to start with something resembling a human face and alter it until you have a face you like.

Changing body measurements is faster that rearranging every slider in the face.

Stripes on the arms, because it is a demo?

[Marianne Little]

I found a head that look very promising. And it has a free demo, so I believe it is legit. Scammers do not offer a demo before you buy. 199 L!

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/BOM-Alan-Male-Bento-Head/18795834

And the store itself look like a real store, not something a copybotter put up.

And it is BOM too. I will demo this head on my alt who has the previous free head from Catwa. I was never totally happy with it.

Your mesh avatar budget is then: 199 L for the head + 1 L for the free Classic Meshbody. Total cost = 200 L.

That, my dear gents, is almost too good to be true. But as said... the demo is free!

Edit to add: If you will turn on BOM on the Classic 1 L body, you find out how in Skell Daggers tutorial. It is the best hidden BOM function of all mesh bodies I have. http://www.virtualbloke.com/archives/3634

Edited October 5, 2020 by Marianne Little

[animats]

I got Roth to look better by using the shape from the classic avatar with the mesh skin. That bulks up the arms and legs a bit. But then the positions for clothing are a bit off, and skin keeps peeking through above the wrist and behind the neck, despite the clothing alphas.

Any idea why rebaking the mesh for a BOM avatar takes two minutes? It's compositing a few 2D images. That takes a small fraction of a second. If they're going to take that long, something should be running a mesh analysis of what's inside what and adjusting the meshes so clothes layer properly without alphas. Like Sansar did.

[Marianne Little]

35 minutes ago, animats said:

I got Roth to look better by using the shape from the classic avatar with the mesh skin. That bulks up the arms and legs a bit. But then the positions for clothing are a bit off, and skin keeps peeking through above the wrist and behind the neck, despite the clothing alphas.

Any idea why rebaking the mesh for a BOM avatar takes two minutes? It's compositing a few 2D images. That takes a small fraction of a second. If they're going to take that long, something should be running a mesh analysis of what's inside what and adjusting the meshes so clothes layer properly without alphas. Like Sansar did.

I do not know, because it does not take 2 minutes for me. It is grey a short time. Sometimes I use Ctrl + Alt + R to rebake, but not every time.

I

[Theresa Tennyson]

15 hours ago, animats said:

One can do worse. A Slink demo. Default settings. The jutting chin is easily fixed, but I have no idea where the stripey pattern on the arms is coming from.

Because you're using the Slink skin which is crap because Slink isn't a skin maker and the whole reasoning behind BOM is you don't have to use what the body maker decides to provide/support.

 

2 hours ago, animats said:

Any idea why rebaking the mesh for a BOM avatar takes two minutes? It's compositing a few 2D images. That takes a small fraction of a second. If they're going to take that long, something should be running a mesh analysis of what's inside what and adjusting the meshes so clothes layer properly without alphas. Like Sansar did.

There is no difference between the time it takes to texture a mesh body with a bake than it takes to texture a system body with a bake. "Mesh analysis" won't do a blessed thing. The main difference is that the system body wears the old bake until the new one is ready to display whereas the mesh body will turn gray until the new bake arrives.

[Marianne Little]

About the Alan male bento head: I bought it for my alt. The Catwa Freya head he had, did not give him a profile that was masculine enough.

It is a simple head, not all kind of bells and whistles. Some may wish it was eyelashes on it. Others will like that it's no lashes.

I (my alt) sent the creator a few suggestions. The demo shape is not modify, so I could not test the sliders. All other mesh head sellers include modify shapes to test it. I was lucky that I could change the most important sliders. Parts like eye corners was not responding well, and I could not see it with a no mod shape. I could take my time to wear another shape, but that would deform the whole head and make me spend more time. But I liked the eye corners as they were.

For some reason, the ears are no modify... but the BoM head is modify? Strange, I hope it is just a mistake and that they are supposed to be mod. They are too small in default size.

The best is that hairbase and beard is add-ons. It reduces the ARC with 20 000 when they are not worn. Better to use BoM layers.

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 10/4/2020 at 2:01 AM, Maitimo said:

The Roth body is horrible, truly horrible. I tried it, and if I was using a male body on a budget I would honestly rather skip it and stay non-mesh.

Yeah I wondered why he had a weird crotch area - the 'gap' seemed to high or something.

That noted, a lot of the "mainstream brands" are basically bodybuilders with a combo pack of script bloat and polygon excess...

 

'Why is everybody a lesbian in SL, even the gay guys and straight women?'

'Have you seen the male bodies this platform has?'

 

Edited October 5, 2020 by Pussycat Catnap

[animats]

45 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

'Have you seen the male bodies this platform has?'

I knew they were bad, but not how bad. I got into this mess by doing the Ruth tutorial. Ruth worked fine. Since Roth is the male version of Ruth, I expected it would work fine out of the box. No.

 

Roth, with skin and shape from Boris, the classic avatar from above. Now the arms and shoulders are bigger, more in proportion to the rest of the body.

This is not too bad. I like this body. But it has clothing problems.

 

But not quite. Although the classic Boris can wear that jacket with that alpha, Roth is just enough different for it not to fit. Those shoulders are too high above the collarbone.

OK, so patching up Roth mesh with the Boris shape is not going to work, short of going into Photoshop and creating custom alpha layers.

I tried some rigged mesh. Doesn't help the troubles in the wrist area.

SL clothing has to be designed to fit some specific skin envelope, and this isn't it. Is there a reference male mesh skin for classic avatars, used for sizing? Ruth maps more or less to the classic female avatar, but Roth is a bit off, as you can see.

I've looked at various male bodies, but I want something that isn't locked in to some very limited (and probably overpriced) clothing line.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

38 minutes ago, animats said:

SL clothing has to be designed to fit some specific skin envelope, and this isn't it. Is there a reference male mesh skin for classic avatars, used for sizing? Ruth maps more or less to the classic female avatar, but Roth is a bit off, as you can see.

There is only one official UV map, and it's as unisex as the base avatar. To make a male skin, you would use the same UV template as the female skins.

The problem with going with that route is that deformation is hard. You can't exactly model a male chest and then morph a smooth bust out of it. You're (almost) forced to make the model with the female topology, and squish things down from there.

[animats]

-

Edited October 5, 2020 by animats
Delete

[animats]

 

Blender files for Roth  (left) from GitHub. SL reference avatar (right), from the wiki.

Resized for equal height. Clothing for "classic" SL avatars is made to fit the model on the right.

There's why the clothing doesn't fit. The classic avatar form has a hollow between the shoulders, and Roth doesn't. Which is why skin peeks through the jacket just below the collar on both sides. Roth's arms are much longer, which is why there's trouble at the wrist. Roth also has a smaller head. As someone said, Roth is a good base for Gollum.

Ruth seems to be able to wear SL classic mesh clothing, but Roth can't. That's why.

I suspect someone made Roth from the Ruth model, not from the SL male reference model.

Is there a mesh body that's just the SL male reference model?

 

[Maitimo]

10 hours ago, animats said:

Is there a mesh body that's just the SL male reference model?

No, as far as I'm aware, there is not. That's why every mesh body only works with clothing that's specifically rigged for it.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

My personal conclusion: even for rarely used alts, it's way less of a hassle to just buy a proper head and body from a major brand.

All the hassle with the almost-free and cheap and "just needs a little modifying" options plus finding proper clothing and skins and such is just too annoyingly time consuming for me, with the results barely coming close to my preferred look.

Last weekend, during the Male Shopping round, I got a L$ 50 full avatar offer and a head and body for L$ 100 in total. The combo has neck issues of dooming hell, which I might get fixed with enough patience, and the full avatar... well. Let's just say we named him "Junkie Crackhead" and some of the first mesh starter avatars had more realistic appearances.

[Maitimo]

30 minutes ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

My personal conclusion: even for rarely used alts, it's way less of a hassle to just buy a proper head and body from a major brand.

All the hassle with the almost-free and cheap and "just needs a little modifying" options plus finding proper clothing and skins and such is just too annoyingly time consuming for me, with the results barely coming close to my preferred look.

Last weekend, during the Male Shopping round, I got a L$ 50 full avatar offer and a head and body for L$ 100 in total. The combo has neck issues of dooming hell, which I might get fixed with enough patience, and the full avatar... well. Let's just say we named him "Junkie Crackhead" and some of the first mesh starter avatars had more realistic appearances.

For a head it's not so bad, as long as it's BOM (or can be converted to BOM). There aren't really any compatibility issues with even cheap or free heads. Neck-fitting issues can be resolved using a free "furry" neck-fixer - they are intended for using a furry head on a standard human body but they work equally well for gaps and ill-fitting human necks too. The one from Apricot Paws is the best of the freebies https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Apricot-Paws-SLUV-Neck-ExtenderFix-Freebie/14958878.

For male bodies, it's still a big problem; there are occasional one-off offers at events but aside from Roth (and variants of it) and the Legacy freebie, there isn't really any other choice.

 

[Skell Dagger]

I found the free Onupup Male Fitmesh Avatar to be interesting to work with. I don't know if it's based on Roth (I doubt that it is in all aspects, but the comparison images in the ad - below - look reasonably close) but it's fully modifiable and can easily be set up for BoM.

The only caveats I found with it were that it needs a special included animation to be active all the time in order for the mouth to stay shut (which I found to be a bit odd, but a Bento AO with face movements might work equally well) and that the head comes attached to the upper body. If you want to keep your system face shape, you may want to experiment with shaping the head, but since it's free it might be worth a try.

Edited October 6, 2020 by Skell Dagger