It's All in the HUD: SLink's New Second Life Mesh Body Could Be a Game Changer

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

One of the core problems that's plagued mesh bodies in Second Life has been compatibility. Worn over the outdated and widely disliked Second Life avatar body implemented over a decade ago (remember what other games looked like back then?) the earliest mesh bodies limited how the wearer could dress, usually to clothes designed specifically to fit the body or clothes that could be applied on a transparent layer overtop of it. Since then, mesh body designers have started offering bodies with a little more flexibility, allowing their wearers to mask certain areas to avoid clipping with their own mesh clothes (as Second Life's official mesh avatars do.) But none of those masking systems have been as highly controllable as what Siddean Munro unveiled with her new SLink Physique mesh bodies last week.

SLink Physique (which is fitted mesh made to conform to your avatar's shape) comes with a HUD offering control over a dozen different areas of the body; you can alpha out large chunks or just a few small sections to suit what you're wearing.  If you want to see SLink's system in action, check out this (mildly NSFW) video posted by Gogo over on Juicybomb, which I've screencapped above. 

While this probably won't allow as much compatibility as custom-made alpha layers give vanilla avatars, SLink Physique's user-friendly masking system seems like the innovation mesh bodies have been waiting for.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times, and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

Humans avie creators are finally catching up to furry tech, eh? ;)

[Jaqua]

Interesing in the Daz3d/Poser world when using Victoria and Michael 4, the tech works the other way around, instead of resizing body parts, the morph dials in the clothing models can be resized to fit any mesh shape or morph you have for your avatar, and as far as the feet there is the injection button that can put your feet in any pose that would fit into say a flat or stilettos with no problem assuming that the content creator included feet pose injections with the shoes, but with full mesh bodies of the future you shouldn't have to delete or reshape your avatars physique but rather the clothing should auto conform to your form.

[Motoko Henusaki]

This reminds me of Avatar 2.0 from Utilizator. Seems more advanced, though. Mad props for catching up with anime body tech!

[A.J.]

And the women score one again.

This looks like a great system, if you're a woman.

Please, somebody throw some realistic and versatile mesh bodies to the guys.

We want to play with ourselves too!

[Pussycat Catnap]

@A.J.: "We want to play with ourselves too!"

O.o

o.O

=^O.o^=

Well ok... but the 5 of you just aren't enough consumers to justify making it. Especially when 3 of you are still rocking the 2003 noob look. :P

[Pussycat Catnap]

I'm going to have to grab this. For my faun alt... because she represents my chance to try and break it.

Will it work with her legs in a smooth join, and what about if I decide to wear some extra 'body props', like a different size / shape to the bosom or behind?

What about skin appliers. I've had at least one skin maker say slink was particularly difficult to make an applier for the feet for... (I have no idea, their dev kit is not given out with the props like other makers do). Will this body work with our existing skins, and if so is the dev kit something I can get or do I have to be a skin maker to get it?

(Because anyone can make their own appliers for any other brand's body parts... as the dev kits are handed out with item sale, and all you need is the UUID of your skin, which is openly available if you know where to look...)

[Kitty Revolver]

my only comment is that a few of the sections are too large, which end up cutting through my clothes, although it is "solved" by wearing a bigger size.

[Adeon Writer]

"Well ok... but the 5 of you just aren't enough consumers to justify making it. Especially when 3 of you are still rocking the 2003 noob look."

The rest of us are animals. Because being an animal is better than the ugly default make human.

Still longing for the day I'll see a human avatar I can actually identify with, that is also the gender identify with.

These new female mesh avatars, seems a new one every month, getting a tad annoying.

Those male avies are just gonna look uglier and uglier in comparison.

In 2007 I choose an animal over it. And it's still just as bad.

[Tesla Miles]

I think this SLink avatar is brilliant, I haven't bought it yet - I read that she will be working on a version that includes the hands and feet, so I'm waiting for that to come out, as I'm not a fan of the Frankenstein seam.

[Vivienne]

Does not look 1000 L$ better as the original avi. And the missing hands and feet (600 more L$ more for each) sum up to 2200 L$ for an avi shape with a mediocre skin which mainly adds client lag instead of truly improved looks and functionality.

I wonder why some people call this innovative. It uses Linden Lab technology after all for customising it. The only innovation I see is the way Slink tries to make money by the stupid´s belief that "new is better". Rip-Off.

[Tracy RedAngel]

The body isn't going to be for everyone (well it doesn't have to be, right?) It has some very good things about it, but yes there is room for improvement. I agree about the alpha hud, they need to cut up the alphas into smaller sections.
You don't have to use the default skin, since many skin makers will be creating appliers. Glam Affair, Izzies, DeeTalez and a few others have already come out with appliers. I believe Pink Fuel is working on one as well.
Some mesh clothes work pretty good with the body, some don't. I'm able to wear this Baiastice bikini top very nicely, but a similar one from Gizza didn't fit in any size I tried. The body is very smooth, and the biggest difference you will see in some poses that tend to contort the body. I took a Gyazo pic here (unedited) and you can see the torso and pelvis area is a lot smoother. The default body looks folded over. The knee area is also a lot smoother. They have demos in the mainstore so you can try it out, fiddle around with the hud, shape sliders and decide if it's for you or not.
http://gyazo.com/88123d8841ea719db94a7dcdcf89f5a9

[Adeon Writer]

Vicienne, I am in full agreement with you. I have no idea why people would use the rigged mesh feature to create rigged mesh.

It's like people assume these features are being added in order to be used, or something.

What's next, people uploading textures and building custom content with prims? That's what the library is for people. Use THOSE objects and textures.

[DrFran]

Am I the only one who noticed the temporal coincidence of the Wowmeh DMCA, and the release of the Slink body?

[zzpearlbottom]

There is a free full perm mesh body called avatar 1.65, now on fit mesh version.
So why many don't speak about it?
Still i do think fashion will tend to be like this, a skin creator will include the mesh body with every release, no need to have it just for a brand.

[PP]

Erm... The Wowmeh mesh body, now in DMCA purgatory, had the same kind of HUD to alpha out bits of the fit mesh body. From the pic pretty similar section sizes too. And it came with hands and feet.
So nice but not new: second place.

[Cristalle]

Yes, the Wowmeh hud did this first, but the sections it cuts out are not the same, not as big in some places.

[PinkQueen]

Mad props for catching up with anime body tech!

[Tanigo Inniatzo]

"The rest of us are animals. Because being an animal is better than the ugly default make human.

Still longing for the day I'll see a human avatar I can actually identify with, that is also the gender identify with.

These new female mesh avatars, seems a new one every month, getting a tad annoying.

Those male avies are just gonna look uglier and uglier in comparison.

In 2007 I choose an animal over it. And it's still just as bad."

I could not agree more Adeon, I'm fed up with having a male avatar which looks like the traditional idea of "male". Second Life is supposed to be about fantasy and yet content creators time and time again stick to the stereotypes that all men must be musclebound meat heads wearing dark clothing that's sexually humorous or classic

No playing around in skirts or dresses, no nice pastel colours, it's like Second Life is a microcosm of stereotyping and a little sexism if I'm completely honest.

On the other side, try to find a decent pair of fitmesh jeans for females, at least on the marketplace, just normal jeans, nothing shiny or bright, I haven't found any and most of them are Liquid Mesh, hardly what I'm looking for for my female avatar.

Or a female avatar skin that doesn't have the assumption that they're all going to have anything but big breasts, sigh.

Sigh, when will Second Life and the content creators understand that diversity is good?

[GatitaNeko]

Hola. Tengo el cuerpo physique y ese no es el hud que yo tengo de alphas. Donde lo puedo conseguir?

Hello. I have the body physique and that is not the hud that I have of alphas . Where I can get it ?