Mickey McAuley

I agree that mesh bodies have been rather disappointing. I have a few mesh body parts, but so far I haven't sprung for a whole body; it seems to me that the main reason to have one would be to take care of one of the biggest problems with the system body, which is the distortion that occurs in the pelvic/crotch area when the avatar bends. So far most of these bodies are a little better, but are certainly still far from perfect. I made a "bent over" pose just for the purpose of checking this with body demos. Most of the bodies I've tried get rid of the odd lines and brown stains on the inner thighs when my avatar is bent over, but there is still the issue with the weirdly flattened butt when viewed in profile. Also, the shading most people seem to put in the crotch of the skins for these bodies still make me look like my avatar might benefit from the use of adult diapers. I don't really understand why they do this; I think system lighting should be adequate to shadow these areas. Even if it isn't, I'd rather have that area weirdly light in color than to look like, well, you know. . . Couple this with the expense of both the body and new clothing with appliers, and the technology is just not quite to the point that I'm willing to make the switch. But then, I have mixed feelings about mesh in general. Awhile back I replaced a sim-wide mesh walkway/ road system for a friend with one that was made of "real" system prims. The mesh stuff was from a well known maker, and had really nice bumpmapping and so on, but the borders between the mesh prims were quite obvious because the maker had done a poor job of aligning the textures on the mesh maps. This sort of thing really bugs me, and I was very happy when she asked me to build a replacement for her, just because I knew it would look far better. But when I got into it, I discovered the biggest problem with the mesh system was the land impact: it was nearly 600 prims worth. I was able to replace the whole thing with 149 prims.The bumpmapping wasn't as nice, of course, but the seams were invisible, and it freed up a pile of prims she could use for other things. So anyway, it seems to me that people often buy mesh bodies and objects simply because it is the "modern" way things are done. There is a movie quote I think is apt, though I can't remember which movie at the moment. Anyway, the quote is "Sometimes the old ways are best."