Month: January 2020

UPDATED! Review: The Legacy Male Mesh Avatar Body by The Ultimate Meshbody

If you are looking for my review of the Meshbody Legacy female body, you can find it here.

The Mesh Project (TMP), which now seems to be calling itself The Ultimate Meshbody, recently held a contest where you could win the mesh avatar body of your choice (which usually retails for L$5,500, a price that I find rather expensive for a body that still doesn’t support Omega appliers, or have lots of designers creating clothing for it yet).

Well, the winners of the contest were just announced, and guess what?

I won! I was one of the 100 First Prize winners, who each receives the mesh avatar body of their choice, plus four gift cards or fatpacks from various Second Life designers.

After giving the matter some careful consideration, I decided on the Legacy male body as my prize, since I already have male avatars with the Belleza Jake and Signature Gianni mesh male bodies, and it would be useful to be able to compare all three. (I already have extensive previous experience with the Maitreya Lara, Belleza Freya, eBody Classic, and various free and paid-for Altamura female mesh bodies, so I didn’t really feel the need to add the Legacy female body to that mix.)

Also, I had quite liked the look of their predecessor (TMP) male mesh avatar, of which one of my alts had the freebie version, which was trim, fit, but not overly-muscled. The overall look of the Legacy male body demo appealed to me in a similar way. I will even go so far as to say that it’s probably the best-looking male mesh avatar body on the market right now (although Belleza and Signature would probably beg to differ with me!).

Here are some pictures I took of the demo version of that body, taken in The Ultimate Meshbody store. I decided to pair the body with the Akeruka Clay Bento mesh head (a relatively recent Akeruka group gift):

I tried to match the skin tones of the head and body as best I could, but there is still a detectable neck seam. However, The Ultimate Meshbody does provide a complete set of neck shaders to make this seam less noticeable. Here’s a look at the full body, and I must say that it’s quite impressive:

In particular, the detail on the hands and feet is just insane!

We have clearly come a long, long way from the hands and feet of the classic system avatars of 16 years ago!! I mean, I can see veins on the Legacy feet!

Then, I patiently waited for my prize to arrive…which it finally did today!

The Legacy male mesh body package includes:

  • An information card with a frequently-asked-question list;
  • Version 1.1 of the body (hands and feet are not separate);
  • Nine different body shapes;
  • Two versions of the EDIT HUD, which controls skintone, nailtone, alpha sections, etc. (one larger and one smaller);
  • An Advanced Material Editor to add a custom texture, bumpmap, or specular, or to adjust full-bright/glow on your Legacy body;
  • A package of fit deformers, which apparently allow you to wear clothing originally designed for other models of male mesh bodies, including the older mesh clothing using Standard Sizing (I haven’t tested these yet, so I can’t say anything about them);
  • A set of neckfades in 36 different colours, which are textures you apply to your avatar’s head in order to reduce the visible seam between the mesh head and the Legacy mesh body (a corresponding neckfade is applied to the body using the EDIT HUD);
  • A Create package, which “includes all the necessary in-world tools needed to make content for Meshbody” (including autohide scripts to drop in items of clothing);
  • A Premium Outfit: black briefs, four tight and four loose cashmere sweaters in four colours each, five pair of chino pants in different colours, and suede oxfords in four colours. It’s a basic, colour-coordinated capsule wardrobe to get you started (a thoughtful touch, especially since most starter mesh body packages just give you underwear).

The only problem I encountered when setting all this stuff up for the first time was trying to use the neckfades. According to the notecard included with the 36 neckfade textures:

◦ First, choose a neckfade that closely matches your current skin using the [EDIT] HUD.
◦ Next, choose the same skintone number in the unpacked folder ‘[LEGACY] Meshbody (m/f) Neckfades’.
◦ Once you’ve found the corresponding texture, apply this texture to your head by dropping the texture onto a custom slot your mesh head allows or by creating a supported applier your mesh head allows.

And I must confess that I have absolutely no idea whether or not my Akeruak Clay mesh head has a “custom slot” (I don’t think it does), or if I know how to create a “supported applier”. Seriously, this is the best you can do, guys? And given that Legacy currently sells no heads to go along with these bodies (and, as far as I know, no Omega appliers in the Legacy’s twelve skintones to use on other brands of mesh heads), this is a rather kludgy workaround. Basically, the store dumps the problem into your lap instead of trying to solve it themselves. Not impressed, especially for what you pay for this mesh body if you were to purchase it: approximately twice as much as any other male mesh body system out there on the grid.

I may just decide to live with the slight neckseam—or invest in some turtleneck sweaters! At least, more and more designers are now creating clothing specifically for the Legacy bodies, both male and female. And I also received some giftcards and fatpacks as part of my prize to get me started!

Anyway, other than that, the quality of this mesh body is truly excellent, absolutely top notch. Here is my avatar, wearing the default starter shape with no adjustments, ready to hit the beach, after I tried for an hour to find the very best match between the 6 included skintones on the Akeruka Clay Bento mesh head, and the 12 skintones that come with the Legacy mesh body:

I am quite pleased with the way he looks! Here’s how my little stud muffin looks with some clothes on:

I suppose one thing I could do is investigate to see if there are any skin appliers out there which support both Akeruka mesh heads and Legacy mesh bodies. I could also decide to open up my wallet and spring for a Catwa head, since there are very clear instructions provided in the Legacy package on how to install the neckfades on a Catwa brand mesh head. But I just don’t feel like spending another L$5,000 at the moment, not when I have a whole set of Akeruka mesh heads in my inventory that I have picked up as free group gifts over the past two years. (It offends the freebie fashionista in me!)

So, would I recommend this body?

Yes—provided the company works out a better solution to deal with the inevitable neckseam problem you will have. Yes—provided you can live with a smaller number of designers creating clothing and shoes for this body than the competition (Belleza Jake and Signature Gianni and Geralt). Yes—provided you don’t need or want to use Omega appliers (which have become sort of a universal standard in Second Life).

If you can live with all those current limitations, and if you have the cash burning a hole in your pocket, then I say yes, go for it. But there are certainly cheaper male mesh bodies out there, with better designer support and Omega applier support, which you might want to carefully consider first:

  • The Jake Belleza mesh body will set you back L$2,999 without head.
  • The Signature Gianni and Geralt mesh bodies cost L$3,500 each, without head.

Frankly, I don’t see a lot of extra oomph for the Legacy body sticker price of L$5,500 (although I admit the capsule wardrobe is nice). You could take your savings and put it towards a nice Bento mesh head, from Catwa or Akeruka or any other vendor. Or put it towards a very highly realistic-looking skin applier from Birth or Stray Dog. I still don’t think that The Ultimate Meshbody is the best value for your money (although I certainly can love it as a contest prize which I won for free!).

So, if you’re still interested, here is the SLURL to take you directly to The Ultimate Meshbody store, called The Shops (and yes, they have improved their previously horrible shopping experience somewhat). And, in a note to those who are haters based on their past experiences with The Mesh Project, they say:

Why should I support your content?
▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄

Well, first, we just hope you like it! We spend a lot of time, care, & love on trying to make things both beautiful, and functional but still high quality. Doing this, is truly is what we love to do, and we’re so passionate about making beautiful things for you. It is genuinely hard work, especially when we try to be perfectionists. We hope that you’ll consider supporting our work so that we can continue to spend as much time as we do on our products and keep delivering you the best. We are so sorry it took such a long time to deliver this series of bodies but with it we learned a lot and we feel more comfortably confident that we can deliver great products to you in a much shorter time period now that we’ve learned from experience. Thank you so much for those of you who have supported us since the beginning, we won’t ever forget it and we’re so thankful for your continued support & patience.

Pictures taken at Secret Beach. Speedo by Legal Insanity.

UPDATE Jan. 13, 2020: Somebody suggested to me something which I had completely forgotten about, which is that the Legacy body and Akeruka head both support Bakes on Mesh, so I suppose I could go that route if I really want to get rid of that pesky neck seam. There are more and more high-quality BoM skins out there! Here is information on the Bakes on Mesh capability of Legacy mesh bodies from their website.

UPDATED! Cryptovoxels and Decentraland: More Money Is Being Exchanged for Blockchain-Based Assets Than You Might Suspect

You’d be surprised by the amount of cryptocurrency changing hands for blockchain-based digital assets like virtual land and avatar wearables
(image by WorldSpectrum from Pixabay)

I have been observing the goings-on of what I consider to be the top three blockchain-based virtual worlds (Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, and Somnium Space) for quite some time now. I find it endlessly fascinating.

You might not be aware that all three worlds have assets for sale via OpenSea, which is the world’s largest marketplace for digital goods, including collectibles, gaming items, digital art, and other digital assets that are backed by a blockchain like Ethereum (ETH for short). According to their FAQ, there are over four million items on the OpenSea market, but according to one of my sources, it’s closer to 10 million now.

When discussing these worlds, you will hear the term Non-Fungible Token (NFT) thrown around a lot. An NFT is a unique, distinguishable, indivisible blockchain-based asset which has some sort of monetary value, usually denoted in a cryptocurrency like ETH.

The classic example of an NFT is Cryptokitties, a passionate phenomenon which utterly baffles me. (Then again, I have never understood why breedables became a thing in Second Life, which is the closest non-crypto analogy I can give for NFTs.) The information contained within a non-fungible token is unique to that token, like the colour and design of the stripes on a Cryptokitty, or the location coordinates for a parcel of LAND in Decentraland. This means that one non-fungible token can never be simply swapped, or exchanged, for any other token. Each is unique.

Cryptokitties for sale on the OpenSea website
(and no, I still don’t get the appeal)

All three of Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, and Somnium Space have both virtual land and virtual items as non-fungible tokens. And you might be as surprised as I was today when, out of idle curiosity, I investigated and discovered just how much money is trading hands per week in these virtual worlds!

Here is a screen capture of the trading volume of the past seven days for both Cryptovoxels and Decentraland, two virtual worlds which have consistently appeared in the OpenSea top 5 list by trading volume:

US$54,000 trading hands in a week is nothing to sniff at (although I suspect significantly more money is still being exchanged in Second Life on a weekly basis). I can now begin to understand how Cryptovoxels’ lead developer, Ben Nolan, can work full-time and be supported financially by his platform! There’s some money to be had here.

In fact, the distributed nature of blockchain ledger-keeping allows anyone to see at a glance how well (or poorly) sales are doing on any blockchain-based platform. Unlike Second Life sales volumes, which are considered confidential, proprietary corporate information by Linden Lab (aside from the occasional statistic tossed out on anniversaries), you can’t hide the information; it is available to anybody who wants to look at it!

(You might be interested to know that the 7-day trading volume in the third blockchain-based platform I mentioned up top, Somnium Space, is about 7.9 ETH, which works out to US$1,134. I am willing to predict that investment in Somnium Space will increase during 2020 to a level comparable with Cryptovoxels and Decentraland. They simply have too much potential to be overlooked, given their planned feature set.)

So do not be tempted to dismiss the blockchain-based social VR platforms and virtual worlds so lightly. People are already avidly buying and selling virtual land, and virtual items such as avatar wearables!

Cryptovoxels wearables (including a sword, a cellphone, a baseball cap, and a boombox) for sale on the OpenSea website

Am I tempted to participate in these markets? Absolutely not. Blockchain/crypto still seems like voodoo medicine to me. My major achievement last month was to successfully transfer a minuscule amount of ETH from one crypto wallet to another, to cover the transaction fee (or “gas”) in order to set up a custom username on Cryptovoxels! (Yes, like Decentraland, you gotta pay. But not as much.)

But it is fascinating to watch all this from the sidelines, nonetheless.

UPDATE Jan. 11th, 2020: Jin has alerted me to a brand-new resource by OpenSea, called The NFT Bible: Everything you need to know about non-fungible tokens, which is an excellent starting place for the newbie to learn all about non-fungible tokens in much more detail than I have covered here.

There is also a bar chart in this section of the report that shows you the top non-fungible tokens by trading volume over the past six months:

The market for non-fungible tokens is still quite small, and somewhat harder to measure than the cryptocurrency market given the lack of spot prices for assets. For the purpose of this analysis, we focus on secondary trading volume (i.e., peer to peer sales of non-fungible tokens) as an indicator of market size. Using this metric, we estimate the current secondary market to be roughly $2 – $3 million USD in volume per month. In the last six months, the following projects led the charge:

In this “top ten”, the red arrows point out the trading volume for:

  • Decentraland (roughly US$1.5 million in trading volume)
  • Decentraland Estates (i.e. parcels larger than a single piece of LAND; about a quarter of a million dollars in trading volume)
  • Somnium Space (approximately US$250,000)
  • Cryptovoxels (also approximately US$250,000)

Somnium Space Will Be Moving to Version 2 of Their Client Software, and Celebrated the End of Version 1 with a Party!

On December 30th, 2019, blockchain-based social VR platform Somnium Space held a farewell party, both for both the year 2019 and for the first version of their client software. They are planning to launch version 2.0 of their software sometime early this year, which will feature full-body avatars, as opposed to the head-and-shoulders avatars currently available. (I had reported in October 2019 that they had already released version 2.0, but that would appear to be referring only to the virtual land, not the client software itself. I find it rather confusing!)

If you missed the party, there is video of the proceedings. Vivian Chazen (of The Hive VR) was the host of the event, which featured a live performance by the talented singer Luke Reynolds, and a speech by Somnium Space CEO Artur Sychov.

You can see me merrily throwing virtual snowballs at the start of this video!

Also, Artur says that Somnium Space will be releasing an Oculus Quest version of their client to landowners sometime in January 2020. I assume that this will eventually be rolled out to all users of the platform over the course of the year. Artur also tweeted:

Native MetaMask wallet integration [is] coming into [the] Somnium 2.0 PC client. Connect your wallet to Somnium account and browse your NFTs [Non-Fungible Tokens] including [the] latest contract and price details from OpenSea, and insert them directly into the Builder.

Looking forward to all these new developments!

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: There Have Been Major Changes at the Free Dove!

I discovered today (while visiting The Free Dove looking for outfits and shoes to wear on the latest freebie version of the eBody Classic mesh avatar body) that the proprietor, Palomma Casanova, has made some significant changes to the layout of the venerable Second Life freebie store!

Here is a quick summary of the changes:

  • Almost all of the old freebies have been replaced with brand new items! And all the new items are modern, mesh clothing and footwear (there are no system-layers-and-flexiprims outfits to be found, with the exception of one ballgown I did find);
  • Instead of grouping items strictly by category (menswear, womenswear, jewelry, etc.), there are now many smaller tables with freebies from a single store/brand, both men’s and women’s items shown together;
  • The number of men’s freebies has increased, but you will now have to wander throughout the whole freebie store to find them all;
  • There appears to be slightly fewer free jewelry gifts than before, and definitely fewer freebie hairstyle options to choose from (but it’s still the single best collection of free hair at any SL freebie store on the grid);
  • And the lag is still absolutely terrible 😉 …so be forewarned!

For example, here is one table of free items by KingBal, both men’s and women’s freebies (including a very nice pair of hiking boots in sizes to fit various men’s mesh bodies):

This display of women’s freebies by AvaGirl includes clothes, shoes, and jewelry:

Vanity Fair paid a visit today, and here are just a couple of the outfits she was able to put together:

This schoolgirl outfit consists of three separate pieces:

  • the Emily plaid schoolgirl dress by Poème;
  • the Alice shoes with ruffled socks by Paper Sparrow; and
  • the Rina braided hair and hat combo by Lara AC.

Here we have:

  • the silver Melody ballgown by LUXE; with
  • the Lacrecia updo hairstyle by Firelight Hair (comes with a HUD with three different shades of brown).

So if you have not been to The Free Dove in a while, now would be a great time to come down, browse the new merchandise (all still free, of course!), and snap up some fabulous, fashionable outfits for yourself.