Follow These Clear Tips to Get the Perfect Fit from Your Second Life Mesh Avatar Enhancements

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

If you've ever worn specialized mesh body parts on your Second Life avatar, you know how hard it can be to get the perfect, seamless fit. Even if you have experience with these incredibly popular add-ons, it can feel like there's always something wrong with yours.

And everyone can see it.

And they're judging you.

But there's still hope, my patchwork friend, and it comes in the form of a tutorial from one of Second Life's most experienced fashionistas...

Yesterday, Alaska Metropolitan (ever a fount of virtual fashion knowledge) shared a comprehensive array of tips for dealing with the countless fitting and matching issues that mesh avatar enhancement users face. There are dozens of reasons why your new appendages might look less than flawless -- the textures, the fit, the lighting -- and sorting out what exactly is going awry at any given moment can be a huge pain. With Alaska's tutorial in hand, though, that struggle should be a lot more manageable.

(Hat tip: Anemysk Karu)

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Kotaku, Jezebel, and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I really hate the idea of compensating for the manifest and glaring weaknesses of the default model through expensive third-party add-ons.

But... grrrrrr... some, some PERSON did such a good job with the ones I saw over the weekend that I might have to relent.

Damn you and your talent, person.

[Tracy RedAngel]

That is a very good and helpful tutorial, but I wouldn't get in too big of a hurry to clear your cache unless everything else you've tried isn't working. You should always manually clear cache, because hitting the button in the preferences will take a long time and bog everything down.
The Firestorm wiki is a great source of information (even if you don't use Firestorm) : http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/cache?s[]=clear&s[]=cache

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Oh good, an Alaska tutorial. I consider her, alongside Celebrity, Sabrina, and Salome (and others), one of my fashion mentors in SL. I learned a lot from her..and my shape is a modded version of one of her freebie shapes.

@Arcadia

Actually I hate having to rely on add-ons too, but I caved in.

@Tracy

yeah a cache clear should be a last resort, after you've tried a quiet region, and tried a viewer restart. I'd also suggest upping the cache to 1024MB instead of the standard 512.

Alaska did a great guide on "looking pretty" in SL, can't remember if it covers mesh:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Book-So-You-Wanna-Be-A-Virtual-Supermodel-by-Alaska-Metropolitan-124-pages/3654160

[Adeon Writer]

I've been replacing the default human with furries for so long I don't understand why people have an issue doing it with human body parts.

Either way I've seen two male ones so far. I liked the hands on one and the face on the other. Easy enough to use both with a long sleeve shirt.