Feeling brand new again! Help!!

[Aerioria]

I've been away for over 7 years around about.  I love Urban roleplay, but my avatar seems dated I guess you could say.  I do have mesh avatar its Maitreya Lara (I'm sure they've changed over the years, this would of been about the first one that came out) I've also got a compatible head, not completely sure off top of my head which head it is.  I just have no clue where to start, nothing is around that was when I was last on.  So where would one start now updating their mesh avatar.  I keep hearing about BOM and lost there too.  I put a lot of Lindens on her back in the day (I danced also and needed a higher quality avatar).  I've done a little research and see people talk about Legacy and different types but I'm still at a loss, even seen Lara mentioned but would that be newer version then mine?.  Also where do you suggest to get hair?  I bought some yesterday and like it but it shot my avatar complexity up over 100,000 with just the hair.  Is complexity something I should concern myself with today?  It wasn't cheap hair either.  Which brings me to physics.  Whats the best physics to use for life like movement?  I have Tuty's or something like that lol.  I really am feeling completely lost on SL today.  

Not even going to talk about my alt.  She's still sporting Slink lol  which seems to be completely gone today.

[ValKalAstra]

Alright, that's a lot of questions! Let's start with the mesh body.

Good news for your wallet: Maitreya Lara is still around and it still is an absolute juggernaut on the market. They've done continous updates throughout the years and you should in theory be able to get a redelivery at their mainstore. This will give you two things: Lara and LaraX. The latter being a somewhat recent update that broke compatibility with previous versions. One way or another, in terms of mesh body, you're good to go.

There are other meshbodies and each of them have kind of got their own niche, I would say. There's the aforementioned Legacy. It's overall a bit more soft, does shoulders better than Maitreya (in my opinion) but is supposedly heavier on performance and the HUD is a headache. Another popular one is eBody Reborn, which leans towards curvy bodytypes but from what I gather, it's surprisingly flexible. There are other bodies too but these are the big three at the moment and you'll have no troubles finding clothes for them.

BOM then is a different way of doing textures. Old but refurbished. Instead of applying textures to a surface, you simply add or detach the textures from your inventory. Meaning, you can more easily layer various makeups, tattoos and other stuff like freckles on top of each other. It does take some initial setup that's a bit tricky however. Upside, you can re-use your old system stuff again!

Heads then, that's probably the part with the biggest changes since you've left. Catwa is... kind of still around. Genus is... kind of... maybe... still around and the big player on the block these days is Lelutka. Whether you opt for a head from Lelutka or not, chances are you will run into something called "EvoX". That's their newer standard for head textures which to my knowledge is shared by various other head makers too.

Physics: Didn't change to my knowledge, don't sweat it. Unless you mean animations since you mention tuty? Are you talking about the jiggle when you walk or the way you walk? In case it's the latter, BodyLanguage or Vista offer somewhat expensive if decent starting points for an Animation Override or you can make your own - or even use the built-in AO from Firestorm and skip the animation huds altogether. Chances are that your old Tuty is perfectly fine though. Bento is not THAT new.

Complexity: I generally aim to stay below 100k. 120k if I am really pushing it with a roleplay outfit - I expect to get yelled at right around there . Most of my outfits hover around 60-90k, depending on how much details I add and whether I use Lara or Legacy as the basis with the latter taking up more complexity.

Hair: That does sound like you grabbed a flexi hair. Not a lot of people are using flexi anymore. I don't use flexis so I wouldn't know good modern vendors for it. My personal favorite stores for hair are: Stealthic, Yomi, Kuni, Rama Salon, Magika and Doux. There are maaaany others just as good though (shoutout to Dura for Unisex Tomboy styles).

Sooo, if you want my guess as to what directions you could go to update your look:

Step 1: Grab a Maitreya Redelivery. If you use Lara, you can keep using your wardrobe. If the newer LaraX, you might need to shop new clothes (weekend sales coming up though, good starting point!). If nothing else, this puts you back right on top of the mesh game.

optional Step 2: Consider switching to BOM as that seems to be the way things are going. While you do, if you can afford it, consider switching to a new head as well, one that supports the EvoX standard. Personal preference: Lelutka is the current juggernaut for a reason there.

Quick rundown if you do: Grab demos for head and body texture from the SAME store. This removes the need for a neckfade entirely. If they look like old system or tattoo stuff in your inventory, they're BOM. If they're a HUD you attach and need to apply, they're appliers. Appliers are falling out of favor though and seem to mostly be around for compatibility I feel. I personally enjoy GlamAffair or Deetalez for skins and then add additional skin details with stuff from Izzie's, which can give it that little bit of extra.

Then one way or another, find a sandbox or private place, replace whatever you wish to switch out for the new. If your Avatar turns red, it has BOM activated in the HUD. If you want to be on BOM, you need to remove the body alpha. If you want to stay on appliers, you need to turn off BOM. If your head looks like a Wookie accident, go check the HUD for the new head and switch between Evo or EvoX (or whatever it might be called in non Lelutka heads).

If things break or you run into walls, feel free to ask with specific questions. Hope that helped.

/edit: Since a lot of content has diversified in recent years, people can offer the best help and recommendations if you mention what kind of look you're going for.

Also I've probably forgotten something, it's a wide topic

Edited July 25 by ValKalAstra

[Aerioria]

Wow you have been so much help!  Thank you so much.  

[Persephone Emerald]

I agree with everything @ValKalAstra said, except I think it's easier to go cometely BOM except for eyes and makeup.

1. Update your Maitreya Lara to Lara v5.3 and LaraX v1.1. Keep each of these bodies in their own folder.  You can use the same skin, head, eyes, hair, most shoes, any BOM layers and probably the same shape with both. 

2. Try demos for Lelutka EvoX heads. Akeruka, LOGO & some other mesh head makers also make good EvoX compatible heads, but Lelutka's let you switch easily between Evo (SLUV map) and EvoX UV map skins, so you can still wear your old skins if you want.

3. Join Akeruka's group to get $1 group gift EvoX compatible heads in December and June. I think LOGO has free and discounted group gift heads too. Most importantly, get the free Lelutka head and all the free gift skins and hair from the 12 Days of Christmas event in December. In the meantime, join SL Frees and Offers and Fabulously Free to keep aware of other gifts and sales.

4. Once you've bought the mesh head you like best. Make a copy of the shape that came with it and rename it. Write down the slider numbers for the body shape you like with Maitreya (on paper or a Notecard) and copy those to your renaimed copy of the shape that came with your mesh head. (Mesh heads need to use shapes that are made for that brand of head, or else the shape of the head can look really weird.)

5. Take your time adjusting the shape sliders for your head a little bit at a time until your happy with your look. 

6. Get hair wherever you like. I like No.Match for their huge group gift section. I like Mina and Nova for group gifts too. Most people don't use flexi, but sometimes parts of the hair can be flexi.

7. The updated Maitreya Lara and LaraX bodies come with Velour skins both as appliers in their HUDs and as BOM body-only skins. Many head-only skins are made to match these Velour tones, so you may want to use them. Most skin makers sell the head and body skins separately, but 7 Deadly S[k]ins and I think Wow Skins still sell skins that have the head and body all on one skin layer. Make sure any skins you buy are for the mesh head (brand and possibly EvoX) that you're using.

8. Check your favorite stores and sale events for clothes you like. You can probably still wear all the system layer items (except skirts) and the Maitreya mesh clothes you already have with the Lara v5.3 body. Note on your folder titles or in a notecard you add to your clothing folders which new outfits fit LaraX. If you like that body, you'll want to easily find clothes that fit it in your inventory.

9. Don't delete your old skins, system layers or Maitreya mesh clothes unless you're sure you don't like them anymore. Much of this stuff is still usable and won't be updated to EvoX or LaraX. Physics works the same on the new Maitreya bodies too, except that LaraX now has butt physics & more responsive boobs.

10. Feel free to ask for more advice and update us with pictures. 🙂

Edited July 25 by Persephone Emerald
typo

[Nalates Urriah]

@Aerioria You have some good info from the previous posts. Having missed some of the development steps today's current promotional material is going to be confusing. Especially as it is a mix of old and new stuff.

BOM... Bakes On Mesh... So what is it that bakes onto mesh? And why is this an avatar thing? Without knowing these answers things can get really confusing.

In SL we have primitive objects/items (aka prims) and avatars. Viewers run prims and avatars through different render processes. The big difference is how textures on a surface are handled. On prims there is only one texture per surface or face, depending on how detailed one wants to get. With the avatar the surface/face is called skin. We can add several textures to skin. They stack or we can say are "layered". So, we have a Jacket layer on top of a Shirt layer on top of a Tattoo layer on top of Skin.

Once up on a time... the viewers took all the textures from all the layers and built (aka baked) a composite texture which the viewer used to render the avatar. Every viewer that could see an avatar had to download all the textures for it and bake them to render the avatar. This was a lot of work for the viewer and the servers were downloading a ton of textures. The Lab developed Server Side Baking (SSB) to improve SL's performance. The servers collected all the textures, baked a composite, and sent to resulting single composite to everyone. This is a big improvement but it did not change how the viewer renders prims and avatars. Still two distinct processes. Only how the textures for avatars were put together changed.

Then about 2012-13 we got mesh. What we call mesh is just another type of prim. It is rendered in the prim pipeline. So, it gets ONE texture per face. (I am simplifying and skipping explanation of Materials. To be more accurate I could say one material per face.) Because of this limit and the need for layers on a mesh used for an avatar body... residents figured out a solution. The onion-skin avatar bodies made in the style of Russian Dolls were a solution. Since the bodies were layers within layers it was practically impossible to manually select a layer and add a texture. The solution was Appliers. For mesh bodies via scripting (HUDs aka Appliers) we put on skin, underwear, tats, etc.

Now once again every viewer that could see an avatar had to download all the textures, put them on the layers, and render the avatar's mesh body. To improve performance the Lab extended the use of SSB to mesh prims. They called it Bakes On Mesh. The idea is the SSB used for avatars can be used to bake a texture for mesh and put it on the mesh prim.

This removed the need for layered bodies and the bother of downloading lots of textures. We got our performance back.

Slink was the first to drop layers from their bodies and I think Slink was the only one to completely do that. (And Slink closed - gone) But designers and users found there were benefits to having a mix of pre-BOM and post-BOM bodies and heads tech.I like the single layer bodies but prefer the multi-layer heads. So we have this mix of tech from different eras and people have to figure it out. It is confusing. There just isn't much to be done about it. To keep things simple, stick with BOM.

Now with PBR we are getting another level of complication in materials for prims. This includes mesh bodies. We have always had the problem of materials (the color, bump, shinny) with avatars. The render pipeline for avatars does not handle "materials". So when we do BOM we split off materials. The simple story is we put color on the system avatar and let BOM put whatever we put on that body on our mesh body. Then we use an Applier (normally built into the body''s HUD) to add material properties to the mesh body. 😵

If one learned this over the years it was a bit at a time. To get it all in one dump... sheesh.... it is a lot. Hope this helps.

[Cougar Sangria]

On 7/25/2024 at 10:54 AM, ValKalAstra said:

 

Good news for your wallet: Maitreya Lara is still around and it still is an absolute juggernaut on the market. They've done continous updates throughout the years and you should in theory be able to get a redelivery at their mainstore. This will give you two things: Lara and LaraX. The latter being a somewhat recent update that broke compatibility with previous versions. One way or another, in terms of mesh body, you're good to go.

There are other meshbodies and each of them have kind of got their own niche, I would say. There's the aforementioned Legacy. It's overall a bit more soft, does shoulders better than Maitreya (in my opinion) but is supposedly heavier on performance and the HUD is a headache. Another popular one is eBody Reborn, which leans towards curvy bodytypes but from what I gather, it's surprisingly flexible. There are other bodies too but these are the big three at the moment and you'll have no troubles finding clothes for them.

I will jump in here and clear up a misconception about LaraX.  It is NOT AN UPDATE.  It is a NEW BODY; you get it FREE with a redelivery.  Both 5.3 and Lara X are in the redelivery package you will receive.  Look in the extras HUD, and you will find 5.3.  LaraX responds to the shape sliders much better, and yes, you can make it curvy.  You can also use the same shape for LaraX1.1 and the current Lara5.3.  LaraX will need its own clothing, but switching between the two bodies is easy.  You can use the same skins, tattoos, and anything BOM(BakesOnMesh/SystemLayers) between them both.  I suggest you join the Maitreya Lara Friends Group; the CSRs are very helpful. Good Luck, and don't be afraid to ask questions.

Edited July 31 by Cougar Sangria
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