SL Petites: Great Avatars... Not So Great Avatar Accessories

Aemeth Lysette has a sharp if probably necessary post on the problems with petites, those pint-sized mesh-based SL avatars which have recently become all the rage in the fashionista community and which Iris recently blogged about here. Yes they're great says Aemeth, but evidently, the buzz is leading to some sub-standard accessories: "A lot of items, clothing, and areas made for petites suck," she writes. "New designers are jumping into the fray to make clothing/items/whatever, and don’t have enough experience to know what looks good in a store and what doesn’t... [there's r]ampant use of templates and obvious photosourcing when it comes to clothes. Some stores I’m actually afraid to buy from, because I wonder where they got those jean and shirt textures from." Sounds like many content creators are still learning how to develop for petites, or are rushing things in an attempt to capture a hot market. Hope it doesn't deflate the excitement around a new kind of avatar (though it might). Read the rest from Aemeth here.

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Comments

[Nalates Urriah]

Mesh is too new for most creators. Blender is changing rapidly and few are using Maya and 3DS. So, there is not much specific information available for them.

It took me 2 weeks to figure out if there was a difference between the Default Avatar and the Default Shape... not really. And how does one get a Default Male Shape?

After figuring those things out I wrote a tutorial. Then found out Blender 2.63a has a gotcha that changed the tutorial.

Gaia Clary's and Ashasekayi's video tutorials go out of date in 2 or 3 months. So, it is hard for new designers to get in. Plus most are not tech oriented. While I believe everyone is doing their best, there are a lot of beginners.

http://blog.nalates.net/2012/05/20/second-life-mesh-clothes-blender-2-6-setup-2012-tutorial/

[Rusalka Writer]

I've seen one of these mini avatars, and for some reason the avatar rendering cost (or whatever it's currently called) was 300,000+. I don't know if that was the avatar I could barely see or the accessories I couldn't see at all.

[Natali Naglo]

How exactly is this different from every other segment of the community? There's always going to be some sifting through the good and the not so good.

[Pussycat Catnap]

There's a lot of junk, and a lot of good stuff. One just needs to pay attention when shopping.

A lot of builders are just taking their stuff and shrinking it down, then re-releasing it. If the item was good to begin with the smaller one -might- also be good. But with some items the builders will forget to adjust attachment locations or make buildings they forget to try and enter with an actual petite. I've seen houses that you cannot enter, because of bounding boxes not being where they were at full scale.

On the other hand, there is also plenty of stuff one can look at and wish it was also available at a larger scale.

The petite avatar is mesh, but most of the things put out for it at present are -NOT- mesh. So Nalates comment is not the driving factor here. The 'gold rush mentality' is.

[Kala Bijoux]

Most designers/creators are already creating for pennies on the dollar - with the time it takes to make something from 'scratch' (ie no templates/premade sculpts/premade mesh), we need to move volume to make up for that time. Petites are a niche in SL, so the audience you get to make up that volume is even less than the general population. That is one reason why you aren't seeing the very popular designers jump into the petites market and you see a lot more smaller designers who are already in the niche business or who don't have the higher volume anyway and/or who use templates.

The other problem with the petites is more complex. To design a mesh item for a petite that is fitted or rigged requires me to have a downloadable version of the petite mesh that I can take into blender/maya and work with (like you can with the SL av mesh). Understandably, Yabusaka is not licensing/providing the mesh to every creator. I totally understand why he is doing this, he is protecting his creation. (And I think he has done a great job of building a team of excellent content creators to make skins for the petites.) But it does become problematic for designers who want to make a mesh object rigged to the petite mesh - and I think this is a problem we will see more and more as mesh avs become more popular. LL will never want to jump in or contribute to finding a solution to safely licensing out a mesh object, so creators will have to find a way to do this so the original item (and its integrity) is safe.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

The hacks to overcome the limitations on SL avatar dimensions are just that--hacks. I hope readers will consider voting for, and more importantly, watching VWR-1258, https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1258.

[Pussycat Catnap]

"LL will never want to jump in or contribute to finding a solution to safely licensing out a mesh object, so creators will have to find a way to do this so the original item (and its integrity) is safe."

Nor could they.

So a search for Poser / Daz3D Studio content creators. Pick a few popular names and go for it. Scroll through the first 3 pages of results.

Notice how many of the links are illegal...

The warez stuff is often higher ranked in search than the actual creator's shop...

Once you get the mesh - some people will do all sorts of things with it.

So you can't the Petite's guy for using a closed creator list. He can hold each of them accountable and if the thing shows up on Google, his lawyer has a short list of names to work with.

It's not going to be pretty moving folks onto mesh avatars like this. Unless the base mesh gets some upgrades, or we get a new one (optional I would suggest), content is going to start splintering into camps of people locked into the line of a few folks that make base avatars.

If I had the skills to make a new base human avatar - now would be a GREAT TIME to cash in. In a year, it'll probably be too late to enter the field - either other solutions or something else will make it less viable.

[Mad]

I rather be unique then look like everyone else. The camera still looks like garbage too