Second Life Won't Make it Easy to Imitate This Real Life Trend, but Clever Designers Could Still Prevail

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

One of the most eye-catching RL fashion trends of 2014 seems to have been all but ignored by Second Life designers. Metallic tattoos, like the ones sold by Flash Tattoos (above) have become a staple on many fashion blogs and Instagram accounts, especially during the summer, but if you're searching for them on the SL Marketplace or your favorite virtual fashion blogs you'll probably come up empty handed.

It's probably unfair to say this trend has been "ignored". In fact this is exactly the kind of deceptively simple RL fashion that can be the hardest to replicate well in the virtual world, and here's why:

Here's the dilemma that a Second Life designer is facing if they want to make metallic/jewelry tattoos for their avatar: While Second Life supports the specular/normal mapping needed to make these tattoos shine (literally), those maps can only be applied to objects. That means that the metallic look that would keep these tattoos from looking like particularly flat, grimy body paint isn't an effect that can be applied directly to the avatar via something like a tattoo layer.

"No problem," you might think, "There are already so many mesh bodies and attachments out there, why not just make metallic tattoo appliers with the necessary maps for those?" The thing about that is that most mesh attachments that allow 3rd parties to apply textures to them, well... They allow 3rd parties to apply textures to them. A normal map and a texture may both technically be square images, but they serve very different purposes and more importantly plug into two very different spots. As far as I'm aware (and of course I could be wrong) most of the currently available mesh enhancements don't give people creating modifications for them the access necessary to add any of that shimmer and shine.

That puts us back at what content creators often did before the advent of tattoo layers: transparent prim (or mesh) attachments with a design on them, fitted as close to the avatar as possible. Because of the wide variation in avatar shapes this was always an imperfect solution that worked well for some while being utterly unusable for others. On average, if you didn't mind having a sliver of space between your avatar's skin and your mytical floating tattoo, this was acceptable. 

All of this means that even though some clever individuals may be able to bring the look into SL, it may have a hard time getting a foothold comparable to what it's found in reality. Second Life fashion is often so eager to imitate its physical counterpart, but in this case it's a tangle of technical factors -- a mangled mess of limitations and established standards -- that mean a relatively straightforward trend simply may never take off in the virtual world.

Tweet

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 Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[krasnirex]

I agree that there could be multiple technical limitations. However, another big factor is that painted jewelry even if it looks metallic won't stick with a big number of people in SL after the initial 8 years of over-exposure to flat looking, and pretty much painted-on items like non-mesh clothing.
The majority look for palpable detail on items with the least amount of painted-on details as possible. That's one of the reasons why mesh is so popular with a big part of Second Life's population. This section of the population sees painted-on items as unreal and fake.
Of course, there is another section of the population that generally dislikes mesh, but this other section would also prefer palpable prim jewelry to painted on jewelry even if it imitates metallic tattoos.
Lastly, materials open many possibilities with regards to creativity and design, but the fact remains that most of the population on Second Life has materials off most of the time, some due to ignorance, others because advanced lighting decreases performance too much for them.

[Pussycat Catnap]

This highlights why the current 'no-mod' fad going around mesh bodies is such a failure of a notion...

It prevents end users from doing the very kinds of things many would want a mesh body to do - customization.

I believe fusion and maybe lena lush/perky (or petite? I forget the name) are modable bodies.

They each have their own other problems - but this might be a reason to get one of them.

I've been planning a part 2 of my mesh body review on my blog, and if I do it, I'll have to examine that.

(my plan was to review fusion, eve, and one other - that I'm blanking on. Maybe it was Lena. Last time I reviewed The Shops, Belleza, and Slink, and dismissed Lena for its poor alpha system.)

If I do find a mod body, I'll be sure to note that. And I will try to test whether or not it can do this.

[Aliasi Stonebender]

Several mesh bodies do, however, and a number that don't are modify-okay so you can always roll your own.

I liberally make use of all the materials options on my newer avatars.

[Tiffy Vella]

Oh my, this article gives me horrible memories of how virtual jewellery used to be: a jacket layer texture or as you mention, a textured prim fitted over the avatar (usually with a bad alpha of a rl piece of jewellery on it). We have spent many years since reacting against these early techniques, from Random Calliope who was one of the first to skillfully design in miniprims, to todays designers who boldly use mesh in celebration of a truly 3D experience. I can't speak for all jewellers, but I do think we have been striving for more rounded, more technically believable work ever since the introduction of sculpted prims.
For this reason, perhaps those of us with longer memories might be loth to return to flat textured work again, despite the use of materials. However, I, and absolutely totally everyone else, would LOVE materials to be applicable to skin and tattoo layers. Just imagine!
Materials can be used to create incredible metallic texturing to a prim. That's entirely do-able. Fitting a textured prim to an avatar is too horrifyingly close to 2005 for my liking though (and I can't do it for a rl instagram photo, but that's an entirely different issue)
I believe that materials are now recently scriptable though? If so, cannot makers of mesh appliers update their scripting to include normal and specular mapping?

[Pussycat Catnap]

Eve, Fusion, and the Lena mesh bodies are all mod.
- That's three right there.

Slink, Belleza, and theMeshProject appear to be the only major choices that are NOT mod...

They're the 3 I've reviewed, each unfortunately having at least one major flaw:
https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/mesh-bodies-themeshproject-vs-belleza-with-a-little-on-slink-physique/

[zz bottom]

I tried a few demos and for sure the only one i liked was lena's lush as it is mod and it fits my shape perfectly and also slink s size high feet and slink hands.
lena's perky didnt match as well my shape and show seems on the neck and hands even after i modded my shape.
All the non mod bodies i skipped.
Sadly the one i enjoyed most, free full perm avatar 1.65 fit mesh, for some reason slides a bit to the right of my shape and all attach will not work as well (slink feet and hands, also stay a bit to the left not linking correctly).