Ren Toxx

MartiNEdeN Fall wrote: [...] i am looking for more realistic ones rather than little arnold ones [...] In that case I withdraw Tellaq and Bad@azz from my recommendations, and suggest that you begin with Aeros Avatars and Egoisme.

lord4571 wrote: What if their profile don't give you a common ground? They may still have them, just didn't bother writing so; God knows few people keep an eminently up-to-date profile; and with those you'd have no other recourse than pushing for conversation, with either success or failure. My suggestion was just to focus on (or begin with, if you will) those who already seem promising in that sense; despite what may sometimes seem, there's more than enough people in SL that you can afford being selective.

MartiNEdeN Fall wrote: [...] I've already checked Unique, Laq, Prodigal... I'll add Sophistishapes (exclusively a shapes store, but the best I know, and once you buy the shape, the included style notecard will guide you to the featured skin, hair, eyes, etc); and as for proper skin stores (most of which do include a shape for it, though I wouldn't say they're as good), check Redgrave, Tellaq, Nivaro, Ispachi, Birth, Belleza, Bad@zz, Aeros Avatars and Egoisme. To a point, these recommendations cover styles of skins all over the place, from realistic to idealized, from slender to overmuscular; but still there are hundreds more skin stores, some within that range, some going to both extremes; the three stores you mentioned don't quite imply a certain preference of yours, but if you can be more specific about what you look for, further recommendations will be easier.

ArtieMacnar wrote: [...] What do I need to do in order to not make myself a burden on the community? If you go too far with that kind of thinking, know that the only sure way to avoid being such a burden is to leave the community altogether. Because someone, somewhere, will always have a problem with something about who you are, what you do and/or what you say. In other words: understand that there will always be complainers, drama queens and prissy people, and there's no way you'll be able to please them all. Therefore, don't feel too bound by others' expectations and, as a previous answer said, be yourself. If nothing else, you'll feel more free this way.

Try looking at people's profiles, looking for common grounds & interests they're far more likely willing to converse about with anyone, including you :smileywink:

Pussycat Catnap wrote: There's also a hard cap on the number of alpha maps you can wear. I forget what it is. Maybe 6? Five.

Glad to know, Marcus :smileywink:

Change your camera's angle of view (Ctrl + 0 narrows it, Ctrl + 8 widens it, and Ctrl + 9 resets it) in conjunction with actually moving it closer or farther from your face, until you manage the desired closeup without the associated perspective distortion you describe. Most likely in your case you'll need to narrow the angle about two or three steps - therefore two or three presses of Ctrl + 0

Elinah Iredell wrote: [...] Do people still use beta grid to test their textures before uploading it to the real SL? Yes but, as the previous answer states, you have zero-cost options in the main grid; I didn't know that temporary textures as such were still available, but local ones (essentially the same, and in a few aspects even more convenient) surely are. The thing with older, less powerful computers is that many people get discouraged when SL viewers by default run poorly on them; even though most try detecting the hardware capabilites and adjust accordingly, it's far from a smart adjustment, often lowering some settings too much and others too little -understandably enough, since a truly smart adjustment would have to include each user's personal preferences, which the program can't possibly know. So I always recommend trying anyway, beginning with any given overall setting (the performance-quality global slider) that will let you in fact log in and do things, then start slowly and carefully changing specific settings, not only in the advanced graphic preferences section but even going deep into the Debug Settings if necessary, all the while observing the effects in framerate and rendering quality, until you strike the best possible balance. I found that many users who believed their equipment too old for any significant SL activity, changed their minds after seeing what some fiddling with settings can achieve :smileywink:

Elinah Iredell wrote: [...] Isn't it true some computers can't see or use tattoos at all? I doubt so. Since SSA was enabled, all the baking process (regardless of the number and type of layers) is done on external servers which then return the final result of your appearance; all your computer has to do is tell those servers what are you wearing. Therefore, as long as your viewer knows how to tell them (in other words: is SSA-compatible), it needs relatively little processing power; in fact, that aspect can easily be handled even by average smartphones running specific viewers for those devices, such as Lumiya.... or, yes, text viewers for low-end computers. The only viewers uncapable of it would be old ones predating the introduction of multi-layers in SL; and since that was well before SSA, any viewer not having multi-layers would lack SSA as well... and would therefore be incompatible with current SL at all, with the result that the whole avatar would look grey regardless of what layers it was wearing.

And now we know why.

I just edited my first answer asking for a clarification, hoping we might be able to suggest you a viewer suitable for your computer and multi-layer compatible. As for your new question: that depends on your Photoshop skills. There are templates to ease the job, and with some tricks (such as using the local texture function, if your viewer supports it, and if you have the latest Photoshop, even using its new Generator automation), you may find it reasonably easy to superimpose eyebrows to that skin darkener.

Elinah Iredell wrote: [...] Is there any other way to add new eyebrows than with a tattoo? No; tattoos are the only layer type that covers the face. Elinah Iredell wrote: [...] My computer can't see two tattoo layers at the same time [...] Are you positive about this? A viewer that supports SSA (made mandatory some time ago in order to be able to see any layer at all, instead of just grey), but not multi-layers, wouldn't be quite common.

LollipopSweetness wrote: [...] I wonder why people don't always see the same things [...] Different viewers use different textures to signal the mesh loading failure; mine (Firestorm) uses ducks as well.

The image identifies its author as Rayne Morgan, and a Google search of this name quickly returns her blog, in which the relevant entry can be just as quickly found; it doesn't detail where the lashes are from, but the blog is open to comments, so you can ask her directly.

MizzFuzzyMoran wrote: if it is a diffrent veiwer it will do diffrent things wont it if it didnt do diffrent things what woud be the point of a diffrent veiwer Rendering is only one of many things a viewer do, and though there are indeed some differences in how each of them do it, in my experience most of the times big apparent differences are just due to different viewers having different default settings: make them the same across all of them, and most of those differences will disappear. This is so not only because of the “shared experience” thing I mentioned, but also because all of them are inevitably linked to Linden Labs' original rendering code, always needing to use it as base for their own, and most TPV programmers just don't have the resources or the inclination to make deep, radical changes to it on a consistent basis. To more explicitly answer your question, most viewers differ mainly in areas such as interface and extended functionality (most of which, nevertheless, consists of little more than interfaced panels for settings that other viewers have as well, but hidden in places like the Debug Settings).

MizzKittenzz wrote: I'm guessing this is all happening on the official SL viewer? Maybe you could try another viewer like Firestorm, see if that helps. Quite certainly not; all viewers (that I know of, including Firestorm) use the same basic avatar and render it essentially the same; in fact they rather have to, due go a certain “shared experience” thing that Linden Labs require of all TPVs. At most, the OP might try checking his viewer's avatar LOD setting, just in case it's being rendered at an unnecessarily low quality that would exacerbate the problem. Other than that, the only known solution is to use rigged mesh body replacements, one of whose main advantages is precisely that: they have higher / better thought out polygon counts.

SawTooth Criss wrote: [...] And would he still be able to do it to me if I sit down? Nope, he wouldn't.

This HUD has been having such problems since long, long ago; their servers may have been down recently, but they actually never worked very well; when I bought it, I thought it was a cool idea to use external webpages for a more visual & flexible setup of dances. Huge mistake. The idea in itself may have merit as long as the servers employed are reliable and the webpage well programmed... but this was definitely not the case with Henmations: the webpage wouldn't even load at all in two of the three popular browsers I use (Firefox, Chrome and IE), and even in the one that did work, it was extremely slow and unreliable, throwing error after error... and one had to pray that all the dances loaded on the HUD actually appeared on the list. I did contact Henmations' customer support, apparently back in the day when they still bothered with it at all; their response was vague, to say the least, and the only whiff of a practical solution they offered is a future fix that, of course, never ever materialized; quite the contrary, looking at all the complaints. So I switched to another, notecard-based dance HUD; cumbersome it may be, and requiring slightly better technical SL skills, but at least it does work.

A Marketplace search does return several relevant results.

I, too, cherish the great variety of jobs SL offers... besides those you mentioned, there’s also creators, artists, builders, public relationship, events hosting, photographers, cinematographers, live musicians, actors, teachers, orientators, scripters, writers, designers, models, journalists, fashion / appearance consultants, decorators, land barons, business / staff managers, security services, professional roleplayers... and so many more. It’s of course a pity that many RL professions and their related skills can’t be easily translated, if at all, to SL... but the technology just isn’t there yet to offer a virtual equivalent of... say, perfumists or chefs. But still, the ones that can already be performed here... it’s amazing.

Could you show us an example of what you describe as 'blurred' ? Photoshop's resampling algorithms aren't particularly awful... in fact there's several of them for you to choose, in case you don't like the standard 'bicubic' one; nevertheless, all of them just do what they have to do (what in fact you ask them to do), which is to represent the original image with less pixels, and thus loose detail... that could be construed as 'blurring' the image, but there's no helping that; you just can't avoid losing detail when downsampling (unless the original image was, in turn, oversampled... but that's another story). Still, if it feels like you've lost detail and none of the resampling algorithms completely satisfy you, what you can do is to apply some Smart Sharpen after downsizing... do it with a very, very small radius and strength, that might improve the perceived sharpness of the downsized image.

I've often read user comments to YouTube videos about Second Life and, though they're certainly swarming with the kind of comments you quoted, there always are many others defending SL. Did you, by any chance, forgot to quote those?* * In case you didn't notice, that was a rethorical question; I know the answer as well as you do, if not better.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Second-Life-goes-mobile/td-p/2529705

Gadget Portal wrote: [...] How is it possible people sitll buy these things? [...] No one said prima donnas have to be savvy.