Gabriele Graves

Vanity, thy name is Gabriele...

*waves* to @Macphisto Angelus Hey Mac! Nice to see you around again

This is very long but it roughly chronicles my journey from a staunch "not-going-to-go-to-fully-mesh-ever" person to being 100% mesh today: I bought mesh hands and feet when they became available just like many others because the system ones were so bad. I was very happy with them, they were a big improvement. That was the start but for the longest time I kept my system body and head which was perfectly fine when I was wearing system/flexi-prim clothing. Soon enough mesh clothing started to appear. Mesh clothing was enticing because it just looked so much better and before long I was mainly buying mesh clothing. It didn't take long though to become really frustrated with alpha cuts. Often the ones supplied were very inadequate, missing and in many cases you could still see the cuts with the clothing on. I found myself trying to get alpha's from demos of similar clothing to see I could improve things. I am not good at making alphas and after giving it a go, I realised that this wasn't going to work long term. This was also at the time before fitmesh and none of the clothing responded to shape sliders. I had tried a couple of mesh bodies but at that time the ones available didn't respond to shape sliders either and it seemed complicated make existing mesh clothing work with them. Most mesh clothing was standard sizing at this point - none targeted specific mesh bodies except the ones from the mesh body creators and they had only a small selection available. One thing they did have though was the ability to *easily* customize the alpha cuts with the HUD. I really liked that, a lot. I really felt that LL could have made system alphas that easy with a bit of effort, but I digress. The alpha improvement wasn't enough. Part of my reticence was because I wasn't ready to give up my investment in the many, many system outfits I had bought. That wasn't really the fault of mesh though. Due to this and the limitations, I wasn't convinced that scripted third-party mesh bodies were ever going to be the answer. I stayed with my system body for a very long time after this point and hoped that LL would update it. Time passed and I got by with mesh but wasn't really happy with the results. Fitmesh came along, things were a little better and I had a good selection of outfits that worked well. They were far better than any of my system clothing. More time passed and I was persuaded to give the mesh bodies another go. At this time at least two of the mesh bodies I had previously tried had been updated to work with shape sliders. Also outfits from third-parties had started to appear for at least two of them. I took the plunge, bought one and everything was much better, I could buy clothes that fit much better than they had before and were made specifically for the body I had. Most fitmesh could be made to work because of the easy alpha cuts and even some of the non-fitmesh could be made to work as well. The feeling that I really wasn't enjoying SL as much started to lift and I enjoyed clothing again. This phase lasted quite a while and I really didn't think I would want a mesh head. At this point mesh heads were static only and the chances of finding "my look" was slim. The system head was simply a better option to me. The only thing I was unhappy about at this point was my visible neck join which I couldn't seem to shake under all lighting conditions despite have the several correct sets of skin appliers. I could live with it - I wore chokers, etc. Then Project Bento happened, waited to see how things would play out for a while and then got the Bento demos and took a look. Even with the demos, I could test the appliers. The neck join had disappeared. Some heads were very responsive to the shapes sliders and some not so much. I spent a few hours trying to make the demos look "like me" and ended up with results I was happy with. I bought a bento head and immediately it felt like the missing piece of the puzzle fell into place. My avatar looked whole again and the anims and options were great. Undoubtedly there was a learning curve at each point but that passed reasonably quickly with patience. After all, I was in no hurry - it wasn't like I had had to eat the whole enchilada at once. Because I moved to the mesh body first, I had time to adjust to how it worked, get used to appliers before tackling the how the head worked. I realised at this point that I would never go back to any visibly system body parts. I was ready. I deleted over 30,000 items of system clothing, alpha layers, etc. and have never regretted any of it. Wearing clothing is now far far better than it was before, the difference is quite profound. I certainly don't miss trying to get flexi-skirts and prim/sculpty attachments to size and position properly. I am not saying that any of this would be the same for anyone else but I was more surprised than anyone to find myself changing views so radically even though it took a lot of time. My recommendation to anyone is to keep an open mind, use the demos to keep playing with it all, become familiar with it and maybe one day it will seem like the better option. I believe that the eventual results are worth the time spent persevering with it.

I am fashionably late to almost every party...Hello to everyone

Come to Second Citizen Mk II, you can name and shame there: http://secondcitizen.net