Pussycat Catnap

Considering how Jake is starting to not be supported by mesh heads (Lelutka as of now, might happen to more soon) - this seems foolish. NOT because Lelutka chose to stop Belleza Support - but because Belleza hasn't had an update in so long supporting it would just introduce problems into the current head and they wanted to focus their rigging on the new standard all other bodies have moved to... And Legacy male... I was shocked when I looked into it lag-wise. That body should be banned from the grid... AR'able as an abuse of region resources. Sadly, a fate Belleza Female might also need to share... (and it's still my favorite look, but wow on the lag). I need to do that for Legacy female also, look into how much lag it generates that is. ps: On the note about Belleza and Lelutka heads not fitting it - this is what caused me to start this thread. I bought my male alt a Lelutka head, and then noticed the neck didn't fit, and started reading people asking about it in the Lelutka group. And as painful as it was I agreed with their response: we support a current standard so we can keep things resource light with all this new rigging we just added, we can't help that Belleza is so slow to update. So I figured I'd ask in here about what to get to replace Jake. 🙂

Mayreal: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/166919?search[category_id]=371&search[maturity][]=General&search[maturity][]=Moderate&search[maturity][]=Adult&search[page]=1&search[per_page]=12&search[sort]=created_at_desc&search[store_id]=166919 BOM and only $1792 L

Triangle Counts: Gianni Body + Hands and Feet (demo): 161,370 Belleza Jake 2.0: 179,961 Adam v2: 84,216 Legacy Male (demo): 401,906 !!! Adam is the best optimized - not even sure if the brand is still in business because I got him that so long ago. Legacy Male is WTF land... The other two are similar and if Gianni is good I will put that on my 'to buy' list. Belleza Female btw is 521,287 triangles - that's your queen of lag right there. Much as I love the body, she's got so many onion layers on her it makes me cry... Hope we get an update that removes ALL of that and makes each 'breast shape' a different body rather than forcing 3 onions for the sake of 2 options only one merchant I know of supports... BUT that's not this topic - I just put her numbers in to show contrast with Legacy Male in the lag department. Maitreya is 176,297 triangles so for people who want that for a male I guess it would work but I never mix male and female bodies and would find the curves visually jarring on a male. I want bishonen - which is not a gender-bend just not a Schwarzenegger build. 😉 More like a normal RL male body. Where I'd like him to have muscle tone, would be more like Bruce Lee - handsomely slim and wired. EDIT: Checking to see if I had the current signature, discovered they have 2 male bodies, and the other one, geralt - is exactly what I was seeking. So that goes into the budget instead. Also. Adam is still around and got a BOM update - but my alt's current skin is a poor fit for it and they don't sell to that body. It's not the body form I wanted - but I guess that is another 'brand out there still' for the list. And a low lag one at that.

Actually that solves my concerns pretty well. I think I'll re-demo gianni on my alt and do a lot more shape dial tweaking than I had been doing. 🙂

Going through my male alt recently and tried the lelutka head on him. Lelutka's new 2.5 update uses this supposed 'new standard' for neck connections. The one that Maitreya calls 'Type 1'. Supposed to be some universal thing I guess all the head and body folks met and hashed out or whatever (I don't know why it's a standard for them if it's also completely new). My male alt had Belleza Jake - which is not party to this standard. He also had Adam which - I don't even know if that exists anymore. This has me thinking - what are the current mesh body brands for male avatars? I've noticed Belleza, Legacy/TMP, Gianni, and Slink. Is that the field? Missing something? I demo'd Legacy male and found it has an insanely high number of triangles - even worse than Belleza Female if I remember right. Haven't looked at Gianni closely yet - I glanced and it looked a bit too muscle-freak but maybe that's fixable? I'd prefer him to have a slim 'bishonen' look. Slink has the built in micro-male bits... (and I say bits, it's too small to be a byte...) - which is just off putting to me. What else should I be looking at? Or can a non-muscle-freak look be had on gianni?

Honestly this is why I near stopped buying from major brands about two years back (I get maybe 1 or 2 items a year to fill in something like "need that boot style") and started buying full perms kits only. Full perm kits are priced - often cheaper than "fatpacks"... and Gimp is free. For my furry look on the other hand, I do buy from furry merchants because that stuff is mod. And again... Gimp is free.

I'm not a fan of Legacy but the 'shared those files' thing is very much an honorable deed worth remembering. I will note that the fit I am currently seeing between Lelutka Evo 2.5 and Maitreya 5.3 in 'Type 1, button 0' is the best neck fit I've had on a mesh body / head connect. They seem made to go together.

Turns out these three are head only skins, and the body skin they're sold for is a closed shop under -remodel-. So when it comes back - it might lack comparability with third party folks like this brand.

SL User: Help, my bits are broken in XYZ fashion and I can't get them to look right! Human Body CSR 7 of 9 the brand is paying for dealing with some no-mod part: Ok, read that notecard, on line 273 where it says to click the 75 different things in the HUD in this order, and enter these values, then... wear this other HUD, then this applier, then... detach it and move it to this attachment point, then... contact me again tomorrow for the next steps. Furry Body CSR the brand doesn't pay a dime to because who the heck needs a CSR: Sod-off and edit yourself noob, the thing is mod. - they keep saying they need no-mod to reduce support calls, then I join their group and see nearly a dozen CSRs in chat all... day... long... I think the furry makers, rude though they may be, have it down right. L2P noob and fix it yourself. 😛

To add to this note. I mean by that to use the actual 'default transparency' texture found in the library. NOT setting transparent to 100 in edit or with a HUD. Make an applier and actually apply that library texture. Why that one? Because it's basically a super small texture that is EVERYWHERE in SL. If you log in you've already cached that sucker... so use the heck out of it. That's my thinking and I put it all over the place on my land and when I edit things on my avatar that I have control over and want to hide a part of.

Sheer and absolute stupidity on the part of content creators. They think it helps with security - it doesn't. They think it helps with support requests - it doesn't. If anything it increases them as people struggle to fix an issue. I have a LOT of rigged moddable items - it's a blessing when I have them. I can fix textures, recolor to my EXACT desire, link things in to reduce the use of attachment points. UNLINK things to get rid of that one piece I didn't want... and more... And... I still cannot 'download the mesh' just because it's mod.

Agree actually and was just searching for the right way to state this. I got around it a lot by going into the 'Head' tab of the shape and dialing it to be 'more round' on the dial named 'Head Shape'. You can't get all the way there with this, but you can get about 80% of the way.

I tend to look at triangle count because the official complexity formula has built in cheating, and many brands reduce complexity scores with that rather than actually reducing the impact the item has on your GPU. I really don't know how to tell if someone is using a cheat or not. Triangle count however, just is. It is a solid metric that you cannot hide and every triangle is a tiny hit to your GPU. It just cannot be cheated over. Likewise with script metrics - I look at script time. Memory and script counts are not reliable and can be hacked around or even (especially memory) show numbers much higher than what is actually being used. Script time however - is an actual metric of how much time it's using up from the region's CPU - not cheatable or even not 'wrong on accident' like memory. Textures would be the third metric - the one I think we are both on the same page over. Every use of a 1024x1024 texture instead of a 512x512 is 4x more GPU memory being used... - At least this one however, I can avoid by just shoving a transparency into that HD layer...

This is an interesting aside. Catwa 4.5 - with all it's layers, was lower triangles than Lelutka 2.0: That's all deformed because I don't know how to 'undeform' myself in the Black Dragon viewer... Native BOM influenced my decision to switch brands - but the ability to have a head that was made for the ethnicity I wanted to look like was also big - and the HDPro switch for Catwa meant they were making a big push towards 'high lag'. he 2.0 to 2.5 switch Lelutka made is a push towards more lag, but a smaller one.

Agreed, though I am going to go with the brand for now because others choices are even worse. Here is a representation of what you're speaking of: 2.5: 104,178 triangle mesh 2.0: 85,662 triangle mesh - that's a noticeable increase in lag generation. @Siobhin Shippe@Aradia Dielli: Please ensure that in the next update, HD-layers are an optional wearable and not always on - just as Maitreya did with it's layers in 5.x

Ignore that this is actually for a commercial for alcohol, the song itself is one I want to see if I can find the full length version of, if such exists.

Here is my head on Ryn 2.5: Nearly identical to the Ryn 2.0. The only change was that in making sure there was no change... I found out my eyes needed to lower the 'eye bug' setting a bit because in some extreme animations there was pop-through. That was true with the 2.0 as well - I just hadn't noticed it before the update made me test for it... 😉 (I'm trying to make my eyes look 'slightly inhuman', so I'm hitting up against things most people won't hit.)

Here is an alt with Nova on 2.0: And an attempt to make a similar look on 2.5: Notice some changes in the bridge of the nose and I made the eyes less 'wide open' because it didn't look as good when open anymore. I find the upper eyelid crease has to be controlled by editing not your shape, but your 2003 era 'system hair''s brow tab.

If the head you use was released after Fluer (if it's Fluer or Ryn) the 2.5 update doesn't change the rigging at all - so they claim no shape adjustments needed there. If it was one of the others the shape changes radically and... you cannot 100% replicate many old looks. But you can get close. As for HD this and that - I'm opposed to such things on principle. They increase gridwide lag. But at least it's mild and not all over the place like the Catwa update - and the head is still native BOM and lower lag than other major competitors. This is me on Ryn 2.0. I will get a 2.5 ready soon in the same outfit:

This is why when I made my new AO, I made it to work with chat commands and NOT buttons on a HUD. It can be placed in a HUD off-screen, or added into your left ear, or wherever else you want to throw all your animations and the script. And... That's kind of how I do all my scripts to control things - I put them up with a listen and a choice of channel. THAT NOTED... Too many people keep HUDs on when they don't need them on. If you're not in the middle of configuring something, the configuration HUD should be taken off. Other HUD UIs... yes, many of them could use re-designs to me more about ease of use and less about 'look at all the colors and art effects I can put into this'. And... make them MOD, so people can resize them. It's safe to make the prim mod, if you keep the script no-mod...

Hiru actually looks like one of my younger RL Korean friends back when he was in college a few years ago. That's an amazing skin but he's so similar it'd feel weird to see him in SL. This just seems to drive home my feeling that somehow, diversity is better addressed for male avatars than female avatars, despite the fact that otherwise 99.99% of everything in SL is for female avatars.

Yesterday I looked at updating an old male alt. I found that Asian skins were easy to find from 'Stray Dog' which also has a decent number of African skins. In a general quickie search, this seems like one area where the men have better options. I see a lot of male African skin choices out there, and more Asian ones than I expected to given how few I've found for women. There's also an entire flickr group dedicated to just the topic of male skins for people of color (I don't know why it's using this one image as the preview for the link, but that's one example that I think I even demo'd last night). Stray Dog has a whole pile of skins of this level of quality: I think this is the first time in SL I've ever wished I spent more time on my male alt avatar...

I can so relate to that... A month ago I culled about 500 images... and now I'm seriously shy of posting to it again... I suspect back when spoiler worked here, they might have been using a different forum software. We've been on this system for years - but there's enough of us around here that were around under older systems for us to remember things from 'the old days'. It would be a nice feature to have.

For a rare moment I agree with you. This thread is a VERY BAD IDEA... Things are likely to get toxic around here for a few weeks no matter which way this goes... and at level of toxic it will be super hard to have good discussion. Even someone like me who, as a political scientist, lives and breaths this stuff all day long and is pretty much the only topic I enjoy... can see right now is just not the time to engage... I will probably fail to avoid engaging... but... yeah...