Coby Foden

Flexi hair. This was very long but I shortened every flexi prim so it's about shoulder length. No problems clipping through the body now. How the flexi hair moves depends a lot how the flexi prim parameters have been set. Admittedly some flexi hairs indeed do have far too wild movement. About alpha sorting: It is rather obvious in light hairs. In dark hairs it does not show so easily, if at all. (Hmm... now I noticed that one sculpted prim is showing a bit, must move it a bit so it stays hidden when dancing.) Mesh hair. Excellently textured, but no natural hair movement. (All hair strands are sticking to each other, like glued together and glued to the body too.) (eXxEsS and Stealthic are among top best ones who make excellent realistic hair textures for their mesh hairs.) Personally I like both, well made flexi hairs and well made mesh hairs. What to wear depends on the mood and occasion.

When the avatar is moving then the most natural looking and natural real hair like movement is still available only for flexi hairs. Not all are complexity monsters. I still keep and occasionally wear some nice flexi hairs which have amazingly low complexity. Which is great. Flexi hair rocks when dancing. The best mesh hairs on the market look beautiful and very realistic. Great for snapshots for example. The problem naturally is that they don't move like real hair does. There some bento mesh hairs which ad some movement, but effect is not natural at all. Fexible mesh might be a solution, if at all possible to implement.

Having a look what is in my "To be sorted" folder... Hmm... flag of Mexico with waiving animation and Mexican cowboy hat. I might need them some day. Saved in proper folder. Done. Next... erm... OMG! 755 items! Maybe some other day. (It will take ages this way...)

In some places the dances in the dance pads are quite new. So are the single dances, and there are places with excellent new couple dances. Really nice ones. So there is not always need to use the dances in one's own dance HUD. Anyway, there are also places where the venue provided dances are very ancient ones and thus not good looking. The problem with dance pads is indeed that most of the avatars are floating in the air. Only the very tallest avatars will have their feet on the floor, or close to it.

Does this dress make my hips look wide? Yes, it does. Does this dress make my butt look big (protruding, bulbous)? No, it doesn't. It's pretty nice dress actually. And for free. From here: SL frees & offers group gift by ALTER @ Sense Event July 2018 "Kate" Ethnic dress /Boho Moon

Exploring a place. Then in the cafeteria I found this treat. Mmm...

Nobody needs those. As I said, in that dancing place they looked really weird and bad. It seems too that not everybody has a dancing HUD. There are lots of places where there are venue provided single dances, couple dances and even dancing pads. And they are used too. So, it's very bad idea if the venue owners start filling those with full bento dances.

I would be interested to see where I have said that. Please do show me. What I have actually said is that it would be great if Linden Lab upgraded the system avatar's mesh. Nowhere I have said that everybody must use it, or any other single imported mesh avatar. Even if the system avatar was excellent, people could still wear imported mesh avatars if they wanted to. But as I said earlier, there would be less demand for them. And could Linden Lab implement excellent system avatar if they wanted to? Of course they could. Just hire an excellent designer to make excellent mesh for the system avatar. It's totally possible, what would prevent it?

Please go back and read again what I said. I do not want single mesh body, not at all. What I was saying was " One more reason for Linden Lab to upgrade the system avatar's mesh." Do you know what is the difference between mesh body and system avatar's mesh?

/me points up to my post... (Read carefully.)

Before mesh we didn't look like clones of each other. We had very wide range of different looks. Maybe you didn't notice it? If the system avatar was excellent then there would less need for mesh bodies and mesh heads. And using excellent system avatar would make things much easier, especially so for new people. Surely, designers could still make mesh bodies and mesh heads, but I'm pretty sure gradually there would be less and less real demand for them.

When visiting one of my favourite dancing place I noticed that the owner had replaced the dances on all dancing pads to full bento dances (the ones which animate not only the body but also the bento head). Oh no! All bento heads already have their bento facial animations. People most likely want to use those. Because all bento head brands are rigged very differently the heads need animations specifically made for them to look good. Using other brand's animations will often give weird unexpected results. In that venue I was watching the faces of the avatars. It was not a pleasant sight at all. All kinds of weird expressions on the faces. No good at all. This is again one more disadvantage of the incompatibility between mesh heads. Full bento dances just don't work as expected. One more reason for Linden Lab to upgrade the system avatar's mesh, to kill this crazy mesh avatar trend were we are heading. The more mesh bodies and heads there are, the more complicated things will get.

Some rigged mesh hairs start to look pretty good and realistic. (If they moved like a real hair that would be awesome.) This one is "Alena" hair from Stealthic. No hair base needed, what you on the forehead is also part of the mesh hair.

Day after day, very warm in RL, +30 °C [+86 °F]. That's quite rare in the northern Europe. Maybe I should go to the winter regions to cool off. (',°.°,')

......

I had similar mini dress. It had originally been knee length, the texture designer has had a "brilliant" idea to shorten the dress by using alpha texture. Being no mod it was totally unusable. I trashed it; nothing lost actually though as it was store group gift. It seems that not all those texture designers who make things from mesh templates are aware of this problem. This is one more thing to keep in mind when demoing clothes before buying. See how it looks against texture which has alpha channel in it.

I was looking for non-distracting background for snapshot. Went underwater. Perfect!

Went to a beach at noon... .. later, the sunset came.

Exploring Moonlight Isle and from inventory I found just the right hair to go with that place! "A&A - Cleo Hair Moonlight, created by Alice Klinger, in 2013"

I have noticed that the lighting and animation going on have a big impact on how the face looks. Hairs will also also change a lot the general looks of the whole head. And even though they don't change the face, they have certain impact on how the face looks.

Went surfing today. This is one of the fun activities in SL. Place: Palma de Majorca (just search that in the world map). Great waves there and not laggy.

Wow. There are really nice natural looking animations. I like especially the many smooth relaxed standing animations without any silly movements. ♥

I payed visit to http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/El Tajin/103/170/21 (known as "Solana Nude Beach"). It's totally changed since my last visit. I really liked how it looked in the early days with many visitors present. Now it's full of rentals. And I saw only few people there. Anyway, I found nice swing there to relax and listen to the music.

In the morning... In the afternoon...

Trying on curly flexi hair. From EMO-tions "Joiny" hair. Amazingly it's not even render heavy. (The local light in that prop was so strong that it almost totally bleached out all the details from my white top.)