Month: October 2019

Second Life Bakes on Mesh: Halloween Carmen Miranda!

You know, I should just rename this blog the Second Life Bakes on Mesh blog (talk about a sub-niche of a blogging niche!). I am just having so much fun experimenting with Bakes on Mesh, and I wanted to share my latest creation with you!

Carmen Miranda was a Portuguese-born Brazilian samba singer, dancer, Broadway actress, and film star who was popular from the 1930s to the 1950s. She was known for her signature fruit-hat outfits in her movies:

Today I wanted to show you my Halloween goth version of Carmen Miranda!

This entire outfit, including the hat, bracelet, necklace, and earrings, were hunt prizes from a long-ago hunt by a store called Comme Il Faut (which sadly no longer exists). This is a system-layer-and-prims outfit, worn on a combination of an Akeruka Cleo mesh head and an Altamura Juliet mesh body. (Both were free group gifts earlier this year.)

If you have a recent Akeruka Bento mesh head like Cleo, you can hit the redelivery terminal in the lobby of the Akeruka store to get an updated version, which includes a separate Bakes on Mesh head in the package.

Altamura has released a relay for use with Bakes on Mesh (it’s available to Altamura group members for free at this exact SLURL; the Altamura Design/Mesh Avatars group costs L$50 to join). You do have to buy and install the Omega system kit on the Juliet body before you can use the Bakes on Mesh relay (it’s for sale for L$99 at this exact SLURL).

The skin I am using on this avatar is by Atmoic Bambi, and is called Noori Noir. Unfortunately, the store is also no longer on the grid. This is an older system skin, so the area around the fingernails doesn’t quite match the Altamura mesh nails. I found that my earlier solution, the free finger and foot fixes available from League which I mentioned in this earlier blogpost, didn’t work for grey skin. To fix the area around the fingernails to match this deathly grey pallor exactly, I used nail covers by SmitCoStudios, which you can edit and tint any colour you wish (they are available for L$25 on the SL Marketplace).

The eyes are part of the Cleo mesh head package (you will need to add the included eye alpha to use them with the Bakes on Mesh body). And yes, they come in red to match my outfit!

But the best part of this whole outfit? It comes with skull maracas and an animation to use them!

So I plan to wear this wonderful outfit when I venture out to various Halloween events this year!

Strawberry Linden Explains Bakes on Mesh in Second Life

Strawberry Linden (a.k.a. Strawberry Singh)

Strawberry Linden (formerly known as the popular SL blogger Strawberry Singh), has released a new Bakes on Mesh tutorial video on YouTube:

Given her years of experience making tutorial videos, this is essential viewing if you want to understand all that Bakes on Mesh has to offer! Seriously, Linden Lab was so smart to put her on the payroll. She has an innate ability to explain complicated things in an approachable, easy-to-understand way.

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Halloween Hunts!

October is a busy time in Second Life, with many Halloween-themed hunts and events. It’s a great time to pick up some free and inexpensive items for your wardrobe!

Let’s start with a casual outfit with a couple of Halloween hunt freebies:

The T-shirt (which comes in a wide variety of sizes to fit both male and female avatars) is one of two free gifts hidden away in the truly maddening Halloween maze at Haunted Frolic, stop number 48 on SL’s Top Haunted Places Tour and Hunt.

And the sneakers are a free hunt gift too! The web chuck sneakers are a gift hidden at the Petite Mort/Oubliette booth at the Trick or Treat Lane event, running from now until Nov. 1st:

There’s also a Halloween Hunt going on at Brii Underground Wear, with ten easy-to-find pumpkins, each containing a different Halloween outfit. Here’s one of those ten prizes:

The Mary Salem outfit includes this elegant black strapless gown and the matching wrap, as well as some gothic cameo jewelry and a top hat, both of which I did not include in this picture. As you can see, this beautiful formal black gown can be used for more than just Halloween parties! Find pumpkin #2 at Brii and it’s yours for just L$6!

The last freebie isn’t a Halloween hunt gift, but it is free. This lovely strapless satin cocktail dress comes in black and pink, with an optional black or pink ribbon at the neck, and it is a free gift from C!L Boutique to mark October as Pink Ribbon Month for breast cancer awareness. You don’t need to join any group to pick it up; just teleport to this SLURL and click on the panel on the wall:

Happy hunting and shopping!

Sansar Avatar Clothing: Are We Going to See a Repeat of What Happened in Second Life, With Designers Having to Create Separate Versions for Multiple Brands of Mesh Avatar Bodies?

This red ballgown by Nicky Ree Designs is all system layer clothing with a flexiprim skirt, worn on a classic, system avatar with a Catwa Bento mesh head and Slink hands. Bakes on Mesh now allows you to wear this outfit on a fully mesh avatar like Maitreya Lara.

In the early, pre-mesh days of Second Life (before 2011), avatar clothing designers had it pretty easy. All clothing for the classic, system avatars was applied on overlapping layers, with extra prims for features like sleeves and collars and flexiprims to simulate flowing clothing like skirts and cloaks. It was simple, everybody knew how to use it, and best of all, it worked with any combination of avatar body sliders: fat, thin, muscular, short, tall…

When mesh clothing started to make an appearance, around 2011, it was still mostly designed for classic, system avatars. With the addition of an alpha which removed the parts of your body covered by the outfit, it still worked well. Clothing creators pretty much adhered to the agreed-upon five “standard sizes” for classic avatars, which meant that if your avatar was one of these five sizes (i.e. adjusted to fit a specific predefined set of body slider numbers), your clothing pretty much fit you perfectly. A more complicated system, but still fairly easy to understand and use.

However, with the advent of mesh avatar bodies, avatar fashion designers faced a much more daunting task. Clothing makers now had to learn how to rig their outfits for an ever-growing, seemingly endless number of mesh bodies. Even worse, clothing rigged for a specific mesh body might not work with a different mesh body!

Strawberry Singh used to run an annual mesh body parts survey, and the results of the 2018 survey showed the most popular options at that time:

Women’s Mesh Bodies

  • Maitreya Lara
  • Belleza Freya, Isis, and Venus
  • Slink Physique and Hourglass
  • Abar eBody Classic and Curvy
  • Tonic Fine and Curvy
  • Altamura
  • Kemono
  • V-Tech for Maitreya
  • Ocacin Standard and Voluptuous

Men’s Mesh Bodies

  • Belleza Jake
  • Singature Gianni and Geralt
  • Slink Physique
  • EXMACHINA Davide
  • Altamura

That’s a whopping 15 options for women and 6 for men! Most avatar fashion designers decided to deal with this situation by restricting the mesh bodies that they would design for.

In most cases, for women’s clothing, this has meant rigging for only six of the most popular mesh bodies:

  • Maitreya Lara
  • Belleza Freya
  • Belleza Isis
  • Belleza Venus
  • Slink Physique
  • Slink Hourglass

(An increasing number of designers are now also creating clothing to fit the new Legacy avatar by The Mesh Project, in come cases dropping one of the “top Six” mesh bodies listed above to incorporate it.)

Obviously, this situation in Second Life is far from ideal, either for creators or consumers. Newer mesh body creators like Altamura must feel like they’re bashing their head against a brick wall trying to get designers to create clothing specifically for their bodies.

Linden Lab wants to avoid this nightmare in Sansar, by eventually releasing a completely adjustable human(oid) avatar on which all Marvelous-Designer-created clothing will fit. However, at a recent in-world Product Meetup, it was revealed that Marvelous Designer clothing is limited in how much it can be adjusted. For example, while it can be easily scaled (resized), it will not be possible to make just the sleeves of shirts or just the legs of pants longer, for example.

At the moment, we are all in an uncomfortable interim situation with human avatars in Sansar, waiting for the full body deformation capabilities that Linden Lab tells us is coming within the next 4-6 months.

In the meantime, we are already beginning to see some Sansar avatar fashion designers start to make multiple versions of clothing for different popular custom avatars (which are non-adjustable/static), like this Harley Quinn outfit from Daisy Winthorpe:

In addition to a version for the new Avatar 2.0 female body, Daisy has released versions for Fabeeo Breen’s Daphne custom avatar and Cora’s line of Alina custom avatars:

Frankly, until Linden Lab releases the final version of its human avatars with full body deformation features, I am reluctant to buy any clothing from the Sansar Store. There is also going to be a trial-and-error period where we figure out what works and what doesn’t with these upcoming avatars. Hopefully, incorporating Marvelous Designer clothing will still prove to be a satisfactory solution for most people.

Linden Lab is working hard to try and save avatar clothing designers from the problems that have occurred in Second Life with multiple competing brands of mesh bodies. However, it might still happen that we will see the same problems happen all over again in Sansar. Only time will tell. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.