Meme Instructions: Share your avatar’s digits and/or answer the following questions about mesh bodies. If you decide to share your digits, feel free to add your image to the Digits Flickr Group.
You do not have to share your numbers if you don’t feel comfortable. You can just answer the following questions:
- Do you currently own a mesh body? If so, do you wear it all the time or just once in a while? If not, skip to the fourth question. – Nope. I’ve tried a few demos, and admire all the possibilities that the mesh bodies offer in terms of taking art shots, but it is just way too much trouble to fuss with them. I’m happy with the SL avatar.
- What is your preferred mesh body available on the market right now? – N/A
- Have you changed your shape since you started wearing the body? – N/A
- How do you feel about mesh bodies in general? – I think they are really a work of art. Folks that are not into art or fashion in SL can pretty much take a pass. While I’m very interested in art, I’m not willing to get into a technology that isn’t supporting most of my SL day to day experience. It is also a tech that changes on a regular basis. Some mesh bodies are already dead based on the wonky and abusive DMCA system we live with. LL has to act immediately upon takedowns with minimal evidence that the complaint is legit.
- What is one thing you would request from designers when it comes to mesh bodies? – I think the designers missed the boat when they commercialized various mesh bodies as thing you PUT ON. I like the variety and the change in emphasis in the various bodies I’ve seen. Some are plush. Some are thin. Some seem to be much more real and some are more fantastic. However, I think for myself, that the whole question of mesh bodies should have been taken back a step to the baseline avatar. Barn door is open now, but maybe this will apply to SL2? I’ll comment more below.
From my perspective, the mesh body designers took the easy and natural path, they went around LL and did the hard work and innovation that Users had been asking LL to do for years. They re-invented the humanoid avatar.
But the SL avatar is mesh. ((Word of caution here, the whole commentary is fantasy, LL is never going to implement a new avatar in the SL we have.))
To me, the mesh body you want should be a set of selections, all with slider “fitted options” and tied back to some sort of baseline humanoid that is artistically sweet and average. That’s what LL and designers should have worked on.
Instead, SL avatars are tech from prior to 2002. Is there anything on your computer that is from 2002? I didn’t think so.
I supposed that SL2 will address this in some fashion. (Perhaps badly given LL resources spends in the past as a yardstick.)
So we have a 2002 mesh body with sliders. The body is wrongly proportioned. The sliders are ergonomically wrong.
What if instead, as with gender, we could select bodies by ‘genre’ avatar library? We could be quadropedal, androids, or aliens, or titans, or orcs, or werewolves, and the rigged bones and sliders for all of these would have some clean math acting on the base av. What if SL2 had an open set of design parameters (as with viewers) and if your avatar design qualified and passed quality checks, you could add a new avatar to the base math of the sliders and suddenly be a sleek new being?
Sure, you might find that most avatars added to the library were good ol’ Plush, or Curvy, or Zombie, or even Child, or Fashion Waif—-but you’d be working within a system. Your sliders would have ‘fitted mesh’ influence on the ‘genre av’ you had selected.
It’s only a dream folks. The diversity and complications for fashion designers could go straight to unmanageable. However, I love the idea. Cruise the marketplace and you’ll find some Pretty Popular AVs that are doing this, and providing all the skins, clothes, weapons, and fancies that fit Only Their Genre AV.
![Port Caledon skies [HAM 073]](https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3812/10521415864_6b86b969d3_z.jpg)
Caledon: possessed of character 