NUX Avatar

[Rowan Amore]

34 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

 

They work with BOM universal layers.  If you have transparency on one of the channels, the nails will become transparent.

Is this something new people will understand?  Will it be explained in an included notecard?  I sure as heck have never had to deal with it myself so...yeah.  

Edited July 19, 2023 by Rowan Amore

[Rowan Amore]

3 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Are one of those male? The male has dresses? Cool!

Blake is male but to be candid, I think the female version head is very androgynous out of the box.  I didn't try the male version.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Rowan Amore

[Casidy Silvercloud]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I thought his reply meant, "It's early days", in the context of "feet".

Maybe I missed any reply that was relevant to "optimization".

High feet would be an optimization, a necessary one imo. He said it wasn't made with it or had plans to. That sounds like they don't intend to.

[Patch Linden]

3 minutes ago, Casidy Silvercloud said:

High feet would be an optimization, a necessary one imo. He said it wasn't made with it or had plans to. That sounds like they don't intend to.

No, it means we have not decided to implement it and should we I have choices to make on where I might consider doing so. 

[Katherine Heartsong]

28 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Is this something new people will understand?  Will it be explained in an included notecard?  I sure as heck have never had to deal with it myself so...yeah.  

That whole explanation went right over my head. I have no clue what a universal BoM layer is, but I only have about three years here so am still learning things.

[Casidy Silvercloud]

3 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

No, it means we have not decided to implement it and should we I have choices to make on where I might consider doing so. 

Good to know

[Rowan Amore]

11 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

That whole explanation went right over my head. I have no clue what a universal BoM layer is, but I only have about three years here so am still learning things.

Universal Wearables & Asymmetrical Designs

New channels aren’t useful unless there is some way to wear items that use those channels To meet this need, a new wearable type called Universal has been added. The Universal wearable has slots corresponding to all 11 of the new and old bake channels. In layering order, universal wearables go above the skin and tattoo wearables, and below all other types of clothing.

Asymmetrical Designs

The default Second Life UV layer uses a single area for the arm texture which is copied to both the left and right arm. Designers have requested the ability to create content for only one arm for quite some time, and the universal wearables object is designed to make this possible. 

For example, if you wish to create a tattoo design which only appears on the left arm, you can create a design using the Upper Torso UV map as the basis for your texture. Add your design to the arm area, as usual, but instead of creating a New Tattoo object in the Inventory window, create a New Universal wearable instead. You'll see multiple channels (boxes) to use for your texture. Simply add your design texture to the Left Arm Tattoo channel and your content will be applied only to the left arm of the Baked on Mesh texture when worn. 

 

Not that I know anything about channels and such but I do know the Ears on Lelutka heads use the universal layer so there's that.

[Silent Mistwalker]

45 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

That whole explanation went right over my head. I have no clue what a universal BoM layer is, but I only have about three years here so am still learning things.

I've been here since 2004 and I haven't even tried BoM yet. 😆

I prefer to keep things simple and quick. 😉

[Ayashe Ninetails]

I have zero knowledge of universal layers and how that works with nails n stuffs, but I do know I'm able to open my body HUD and click my feet off to alpha them (nails also disappear), which then allows me to wear any number of foot replacements that are BOM and work with my worn skin - Feety Peets, Hoofy Toes, Anima Travelers, Aii's demon feet, etc.

For bodies without a HUD, like Senra, I don't know how simple or difficult those things would be to make and wear, but if it's not a difficult process, I could see a separate human foot mod in various positions being made by a creator like Maze, for example, who already did the Boys' Tiptoes for Jake. Shoe creators actually grabbing a kit and making content for them is a whole other conversation, though. Foot mods don't tend to get a lot of love in the market, except maybe furry feet (but those shoes can be rather expensive).

[Orwar]

43 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Simply add your design texture to the Left Arm Tattoo channel and your content will be applied only to the left arm of the Baked on Mesh texture when worn.

   Except that'll only work if the body is set up to do so - not sure about the other bodies, but Maitreya so far hasn't (unless I've missed something big, which does appear to be quite frequent!).

   Made a layer and tried putting a random texture on there. Nothing! 

   Edit: tried with my Signature Gianni too - also nothing.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Orwar

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   Except that'll only work if the body is set up to do so - not sure about the other bodies, but Maitreya so far hasn't (unless I've missed something big, which does appear to be quite frequent!).

   Made a layer and tried putting a random texture on there. Nothing! 

   Edit: tried with my Signature Gianni too - also nothing.

In theory, it works?  Maybe on the new body?  Who knows?

[Blush Bravin]

57 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

That whole explanation went right over my head. I have no clue what a universal BoM layer is, but I only have about three years here so am still learning things.

If you use a Lelutka head, then you most likely have been using a universal layer to add the skin texture to your ears. 

Those are all universal layers. You can create these yourself and add a transparent texture in the texture slot to make the toenails disappear as Patch mentioned above.

[Marianne Little]

It is very logical, LL will not kill business for all the mesh body and head sellers.

They need the income from the mesh body and head market. People buy L, Tilia get fees, creators uploads, stores have land...

So of course LL will not make mesh bodies so great and fantastic that people say: "No need to buy something, this is perfect and have all I need".

It is only a start, an intro to get newcomers used to the concept of hiding the default avatar with some body and head replacement. And then, they start to be unhappy with the freebie body because bodies people pay for is better and have more bells and whistles.

It can not be easy to find the balance so people will use it, but will be unsatisfied after using it for a while. Senra must be just good enough, but not an iota more.

The lack of high feet can be one of those decisions, so new users will spend money on more functional bodies.

[Hunny Bunny]

27 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   Except that'll only work if the body is set up to do so - not sure about the other bodies, but Maitreya so far hasn't (unless I've missed something big, which does appear to be quite frequent!).

   Made a layer and tried putting a random texture on there. Nothing! 

   Edit: tried with my Signature Gianni too - also nothing.

Try selecting the left arm and changing the texture from baked_upper to baked_leftarm

Edited July 19, 2023 by Hunny Bunny
added image

[Orwar]

Just now, Rowan Amore said:

In theory, it works?  Maybe on the new body?  Who knows?

   I won't pretend to understand the theory behind it - but I think it should!

4 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

Those are all universal layers. You can create these yourself and add a transparent texture in the texture slot to make the toenails disappear as Patch mentioned above.

   All I end up with is my ear being grey though (removed my skin to make sure there wasn't anything to have any conflicts with). 

   That's using the base transparent texture in the viewer, don't feel like burning L$10 on uploading an empty PNG to try it with. If Patch says it'll work for the nails, I'll trust that over my probably-user-error-ridden tests, but .. Meh. Seems a bit unintuitive. Why not just add all channels to the existing layer types (i.e. alpha masks, skins, and tattoos), rather than making a layer that no one seems to wholly understand anyway. 

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Orwar said:

   I won't pretend to understand the theory behind it - but I think it should!

   All I end up with is my ear being grey though (removed my skin to make sure there wasn't anything to have any conflicts with). 

   That's using the base transparent texture in the viewer, don't feel like burning L$10 on uploading an empty PNG to try it with. If Patch says it'll work for the nails, I'll trust that over my probably-user-error-ridden tests, but .. Meh. Seems a bit unintuitive. Why not just add all channels to the existing layer types (i.e. alpha masks, skins, and tattoos), rather than making a layer that no one seems to wholly understand anyway. 

But...is this something mentors are going to explain to new people who choose the NUX avatar?  Will the dang thing come with ANY instructions?

Another thing I found odd was in the female Hair folder, a lot of the object denoted as Hair were actually what I would consider hairbases.  This might get confusing when most hairbases are tattoo layers.  This is a Hair in the female folder, too.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Rowan Amore said:

But...is this something mentors are going to explain to new people who choose the NUX avatar?  Will the dang thing come with ANY instructions?

Another thing I found odd was in the female Hair folder, a lot of the object denoted as Hair were actually what I would consider hairbases.  This might get confusing when most hairbases are tattoo layers.  This is a Hair in the female folder, too.

Tell new users, it is short when you first put it on, you have to wait for it to grow before you can style it. In the meantime, go buy a "wig hair" that matches.

[Rowan Amore]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Tell new users, it is short when you first put it on, you have to wait for it to grow before you can style it. In the meantime, go buy a "wig hair" that matches.

I'd actually wear that hair in the picture.  Unorthodox has something similar called Scalpz which I love.  It's a skull cap you set to the Lelutka head you're wearing and then apply different hairbases that are made specifically for it.   I just don't think calling it Hair on the NUX avatar is ideal.  It's confusing.  It's a hairbase if anything.  Women are going to put that on and say, "WTF?"

[Marianne Little]

I think I have read that to make the universal layer work with a tattoo, the skin under has to be made using left and right arm first.

I do not remember the technical reason why it is so.

I can't legally hack the skin and remake it. And I have no idea if any skin creators use two arms.

Don't hate me if I remember it wrong, it has been a while since I heard that universal layers have two arms.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Marianne Little

[Casidy Silvercloud]

This whole discussion has me confused lol. I guess I just never put much effort into learning more than the basics needed to get my system av the way I wanted her back before mesh was a thing. Avs are so confusing, so are bodies and heads and everything else. I'm not even new, just dumb occasionally and probably spent too much time away. I imagine some new users are going to struggle like this. I feel for them, it's rough out here, we need significant amounts of help!

I'm going to put a little more effort today into trying to make one of the free mesh bodies I have work. I have a lovely head, so that's a start. I have high hopes, but if I don't return someone send snacks and substantial substances I might need to survive. I have little faith in my capabilities. 

[Qie Niangao]

3 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

But...is this something mentors are going to explain to new people who choose the NUX avatar?  Will the dang thing come with ANY instructions?

It's a modifiable body so whoever makes feet (or auxiliary arms or legs or whatever) can make the world's best HUD and install a script in the body itself ("follow these instructions") to make it reasonably painless for the new user. There's a bit of orchestration in what needs to be worn along with the HUD and the attachments, though, and I'm not seeing anything to make that easier.

And that's maybe my biggest concern with what we've seen so far: this is the ideal opportunity to release a body management user interface fully integrated with the viewer, so these avatars could be controlled from a single UI. That could rein-in the proliferating complexity of incompatible controls from each new creator, instead establishing an easy to adopt standard better than any of the hideous kludges existing interfaces to those products. I hope this once-ever opportunity wasn't missed. I thought I heard hints that it was among the project's objectives but now I wonder if that was all just wishful thinking.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

I think, personally, that there are three clear aims for the Senra bodies.

1) Give noobs something that doesn't look too obviously "noobish" or awful out of the box, so that they can start exploring and finding things to do with some confidence that they aren't going to stand out like a sore thumb. Part of that is ensuring that they don't all need to look exactly the same (i.e., not part of a small army of lady with dog in bag) as other noobs.

2) Provide noobs with a body and clothing that are, functionally and mechanically speaking, close enough to current avatar customization practices that it is providing an early tutorial on how to use mesh bodies and heads, BOM, HUDs, etc.

3) Give them something serviceable enough that they can improve their looks through purchases (freebie or otherwise) in a gradual fashion, building on what the Senra bodies already provide. Instead of having to drop obscene amounts all at once just to get started on going mesh, they should be able to build a better looking avatar gradually, piece-by-piece: a few new clothes, then new hair, then skins, then maybe a new mesh head . . . etc.

 

From what I've seen having tried it out, the Senra body moves in the right direction on all of these, but with only partial success.

1) Looking good and enabling customization out of the box: I'd give the Senra avis a grade of "B" on this. They look . . . ok. In fact, I've seen people with expensive LeLu EvoX heads that managed to make them look worse than the default shape for the Jaime. The fact that they have some styling choices immediately should ensure, in theory, that they needn't look like every other noob popping into a club (assuming they can find a club that will allow them in).

2) Provide a kind of a tutorial on mesh in SL: at most, I'd award them a "C" on this. As others have noted, there are some pretty non-standard elements to these avatars, and the single "HUD" provided is woefully inadequate as a sample and teaching guide. I had to struggle a bit working out how to use the hair and hair bases -- and I ain't a noob. This could be relatively easily improved, and they really need to add simple, well-written, and easily accessed instructional material on customizing and using these. I'd actually favour something built into the view, but at least an illustrated manual that could be attached unobtrusively to, say, the right side of the screen.

3) Provide a base upon which to gradually build future customization using commercial products. I think that this is a solid "A." The Jaime body, the feet issue notwithstanding, is really not terrible (it's the skins that are the biggest issue), and it will support commercial skins available now. A great deal will depend, obviously, on the provision of new clothing for these avis, but older, standard-sizing stuff will certainly work, as will skins mapped according to the old standards and hair. I can easily imagine slowly building a pretty nice looking avi using the foundation that this provides.

For me, the big issue, then, is B) -- making these easily usable and understandable in a way that will serve noobs well when they start delving into commercially-available clothing, skins, heads, AOs, etc.

And well-put together documentation and instruction is absolutely essential, or these will actually make things worse for noobs, because they'll be faced with an incredibly opaque and complicated customization system straight from the get-go.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Blush Bravin]

1 hour ago, Orwar said:

   I won't pretend to understand the theory behind it - but I think it should!

   All I end up with is my ear being grey though (removed my skin to make sure there wasn't anything to have any conflicts with). 

   That's using the base transparent texture in the viewer, don't feel like burning L$10 on uploading an empty PNG to try it with. If Patch says it'll work for the nails, I'll trust that over my probably-user-error-ridden tests, but .. Meh. Seems a bit unintuitive. Why not just add all channels to the existing layer types (i.e. alpha masks, skins, and tattoos), rather than making a layer that no one seems to wholly understand anyway. 

I didn't mean to suggest you use the universals from Lelutka with the ears on the NUX avatars, but simply illustrating what a universal was and that she had already been using one without realizing what it was.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

14 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

And that's maybe my biggest concern with what we've seen so far: this is the ideal opportunity to release a body management user interface fully integrated with the viewer, so these avatars could be controlled from a single UI. 

 

6 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And well-put together documentation and instruction is absolutely essential, or these will actually make things worse for noobs, because they'll be faced with an incredibly opaque and complicated customization system straight from the get-go.

😩😂 Body management system. Documentation. Instructions. Layers. It's still not clear to me why the most nooblet of nooblet activities (setting an appearance the instant you first login somewhere) has become such a difficult process. I have done this in hundreds of other places outside of SL and it's never needed anything more than 2 minutes if you aren't the type of person to live in character creation (up to 2 hours if you are...just sayin'...). I guess I'm not understanding why things function so differently here.

I *should* be used to this. I build both simple and complex avatars every couple days it feels like. Over the last few months, though, I've caught myself several times wondering why the heck I was manually putting on skins buried in an obscure folder within my inventory, tinting my actual body from a color selector and jumping into my head HUD to copy the RGB values over, hiding my ears to manually position new ones over the gaping holes in my head, and other random shenanigans you find yourself doing when you build a look piece by literal piece (we won't talk about dyeing my avatar's spine after actually giving her one and how weird that felt).

Do I love this level of freedom in customization in the third-party market? Yes, of course, but...I'm tired. I've done this a million times. I do indeed spend up to 3 hours, sometimes days or weeks even, customizing a look (if you include all the shopping and fiddling), and I'm someone with many years of experience doing this. A newbie must feel so overwhelmed and exhausted after an hour. I mean, some do. I've seen them quit in frustration after 30 mins of still being stuck naked with a handful of people trying to walk them through the process of buying a new skin and getting dressed (and failing).

We need NUX/Senra to be simple. Pleeeeease be simple. *begs* There's a huge opportunity here for an easy-to-use avatar that requires no experience or prior knowledge to get it up and running. Work your magic. ❤️

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

We need NUX/Senra to be simple. Pleeeeease be simple. *begs* There's a huge opportunity here for an easy-to-use avatar that requires no experience or prior knowledge to get it up and running. Work your magic. ❤️

I agree in general with everything you say, and feel your pain, although of course the main issue is that avatar customization (and most innovations in that regard, the singular exception that I can think of being BOM) has been driven not by the platform (and LL) itself, but by individual creators, all creating their own standards and approaches. From what I understand, LL didn't even intend, initially, that mesh should be applied to avatar bodies and (eventually) heads, and were caught a little by surprise when that started to happen.

There are two slightly conflicting goals here: the first is, as you say, to make customization as easy as possible for noobs within their first hour in SL. For that something like the centralized, well-organized, and intuitive "character creation screen" that you see at the beginning of so many games is obviously the route to go. I don't know how difficult that would be to add to the viewer code, but I'd imagine it wouldn't be easy. BUT you could produce a sort of cheat version using well-designed HUDs, I think. Think of the inventory and wardrobe organization system that's quite popular -- I've forgotten what it's called. Something like that, except simpler to use.

The system would never become universal, because a well-designed HUD that allows you to change your appearance comprehensively likely wouldn't be adopted by creators who are making only one element in that appearance. LeLutka is not going to design a system that allows you to easily and intuitively change your hair, for instance. And the idea of creators here standardizing is frankly pretty laughable: they're too busy trying to one-up each other with sparkly new innovations.

But the second goal, teaching noobs how to use the systems and mechanisms that are in practice already "standard" in SL requires an instructional approach that doesn't provide a single, simple, and intuitive system because, as you note, that's not how customization actually works in SL. A simple customization system at the beginning does nothing to prepare them for the grim realities of actually using commercially-available parts and elements.

Maybe something like a two-level approach might work? Provide them with the option of using a simple system straight off, or of learning how customization works "in the wild" through a more complicated, but hopefully well-explained, approach?