So recently the creator of the thunder thighs mod has retired all her old kemono mods and other store items, which kinda pulls the rug from under all the other creators and everyone who were dependent on it, so i decided to make my own thick thighs mod that would replace the Thunder Thighs [S] for the Kemono avatar.
This is not a perfect recreation, the rigging, geometry and overall shape will differed from the original mod, so there will be some really bad clipping in some areas with more closely fitting and skin tight clothing (mostly the back side) you will need to use the Kemono alpha HUD to hide those areas.
Loose fitting clothing should be fine, most of my existing clothing have been updated to be fully compatible with this mod and all the future clothing items will be fitted to it. There is also a rigging dummy provided with it for anyone who wants to port their existing or create new clothing items to the new thick thighs mod.
Items that have been updated so far: Sports shorts Loose socks Breezy shorts Kijo skirt and belt Thong Assertive bikini (bottom) Swimsuit (theres a small seam problem, will fix later)
Partially updated items: Punk belt and short skirt (only the included thong has been updated, the thunder thighs version of the skirt and belt should work fine) Sports pants (updated the scripting to auto hide clipping parts when pants are pulled up and show when pants are pulled down) Kijo Full set (only the skirt and belt, will do leg parts later)
Things that should work without updating: Party dress Spy dress Holiday party dress
I have also updated the Kemono boots and bonus clothing items with a new texture change system, you will now have a texture change HUD included in the bonus item box, but i forgot to include the top in the HUD so you will still need to change the texture son that one the old way (by clicking it)
I wanted to do another big road map post like i did last year but than i realized i dont really have much to put on that roadmap, my main focus is to hopefully, if everything goes right, release the new body by the end of the year but not sure how realistic this is because im also busy irl with some stuff that may or may not become my new passive source of income which will allow me to do more stuff i like doing instead of stuff that makes money, but im not sure how realistic that one is either and i may be just wasting my and everyone else’s time with this …:D
Im also planning to release a new M4 head which will bridge the gap between all the female heads and the mars head, its going to be primarily male head but will also be able to be used as a female head, your typical isekai male protagonist head type of a thing.
And finally, heres where we are at with the new body, i took a bit of a detour to make some extra content, i made a bunch of muscle tone height maps that i will turn into normal maps that will be selectable form the HUD of the body, im currently finishing up the flat chest versions and i will post pics on how it looks ingame once the normals are done.
After that I will need to do few types of nipple meshes that will also be selectable from the HUD and necks that connect to different heads, theres also going to be a normie neck if you wanna use it with normie heads.
And this time im doubling down, so in addition to the usual 3 day long christmas gift event, that is starting on 24th and ending at 26th, there is also a 20%off sale for all items 500L and above that is starting tomorrow. The events will be taking place at AMH 2.0
Christmas sale – Dec 22 – Dec 26 Giftmas tree – Dec 24 – Dec 26
I always thought about doing something like this for christmas but every year the thought popped into my head like few days till christmas or during it when its too late already and than when christmas is over im no longer in the mood for it, so this time i actually sat down and did it ahead of time lol. Also might do some kind of a sale this year, havent fully decided on it yet though.
Ok so skins are almost done, i had to tone down some of the realistic detail in the end as many of you suggested to stylistically match anime head aesthetics better, just need to touch up on some detail here and there and the skins are done. But im a bit of a road block with this and i have no idea what to do. Heres some new ingame test pics
So heres the situation, there is a bug in firestorm (and other viewers that mindlessly copypaste firestorm’s code) that permanently deforms your avatar if you use the body fat slider or wear a different shape after using one that has the slider set to anything thats not 0. As i already mentioned in this post https://utilizator404.wordpress.com/2023/05/30/wip2-anime-body/ The bug causes the volume bone positions to not reset, having you to switch shapes and reset it manually every time you wanna use a different shape or adjust the body fat slider. In the official viewer this isnt a problem because it fixes itself as soon as you exit character editor thing, but in firestorm it stays permanently fucked like that till you switch shapes and reset skeleton and than switch back. There has been multiple reports and this problem is known to firestorm devs but they dont seem to care and deem it a minor issue because it doesnt cause permanent damage and the user can fix it themselves, so it doesnt require fixing on their end, which i disagree with because the user wouldnt even know its a problem with the viewer and not the product and wouldnt know that they can fix it themselves unless instructed to, so for all intents and purposes in practicality, permanent damage is being done. https://jira.firestormviewer.org/browse/FIRE-31361 https://jira.firestormviewer.org/browse/FIRE-33246
As for why i am using custom volume bone positions in the first place, as i mentioned in the previous post i linked above, im using custom volume bone positions because the appearance editor sliders move the volume bones around and scales them in directions that make for very bad looking deformations, like for example, shoulders collapsing in on themselves or the whole pelvis being pushed backwards when butt size is increased unless you counteract that by also increasing belly size, and all that other stuff on normie bodies when the body fat slider is used.
So yeah i have no idea what to do from here on, should wait and hope they fix it, should i release the body in this state with some sort of pop up warning about this problem and instructions on how to fix it on the user’s end when they first wear the avatar (which is a sign of a shitty product in the eyes of the user), should i urge them to not use the body fat slider or use a different viewers like black dragon or alchemy, or should i just give up and go back and redo the joint positions and have the body deform badly and have the collapsed shoulders and all that fun stuff, no matter what i choose this project is kinda fucked and its dampening my enthusiasm for continuing working on it….
I took a summer break and went on some biking trips and other stuff but im back to work now that the weather is too cold to get out of the house again and next on the to do list is the skin. One thing that always bothered me is how bland and dry my skins looked, i never put that much effort into making them and they were always just there as a placeholder before people change them out for some fancy shiny marketplace skin, but this time around i wanna do something that looks at least semi professional and wouldnt make people want to change it as fast as they can.
Here are some very early previews, still working on just the general lighting and anatomy details, later will add skin texture details.
The Anime Avatar UV, AAUV as i will be calling it, is done.
These are the problems this kind of UV solves: * Maximizing the use of the available UV space for maximum skin detail and minimum stretching. * Being as seamless as possible for ease of texturing using traditional means, no more unecesery pesky seams cutting in the middle of important and hard to align detail like the elbows in the LLUV. * Grid uniformity, i modeled the body to follow a square grid as wherever is possible, this allowed for an easy square grid unwrap and this makes it very easy to add seamless tiling patterns such as fishnets or stripes (fishnets were a huge headache to do on the LLUV back when i used to make clothing texture layers.) * Unlike the LLUV, left and right arms have their own UVs so you can do things like for example have a tattoo on just one arm, this also solves the need of 2 different skin textures loaded on both sides of the body like you had in the Kemono UV, both left and right sides of the body are now on same page and still makes a much more efficient use of the UV space and have higher texture detail than the Kemono could ever do. * The upper and lower parts of the body are split into their own UV to make the correct use of the BOM system and also double the texture detail. * Upper and lower textures can be joined into a single image when editing to ensure a seamless join and than split back up into 2 images when its done, the upper and lower edges are also duplicated into the opposite upper and lower parts of the of the 2 textures to ensure there is no wrap around texture bleeding causing a black line in the middle when zoomed out, anyone who made skins for the M4 heads will be familiar with this method of seam elimination, those who arent, basically you will need to copypaste a small strip of the connecting edge at the top/bottom of your texture when you are done with it (the areas are marked in a faintly in the images posted above)
Yeah, thats pretty much it for the UV stuff, just need to do a few small tweeks on the LLUV and the next step is stuff like flat chest and different neck options.
Ok time for another sneak peek at the progress on the new body, most of the work on the mesh is done and im now working on the UV maps, the LLUV is pretty much done but i still need to do its own original UV. I was thinking of making it match the Kemono UV at one point but the kemono map is not ideal, having both upper and lower body on the same page and a bunch of things on it that this body doesnt have, using up precious UV space, so in the end i decided to give it its own UV that is split down the middle like the LLUV for better texture detail.
The LLUV was making me bang my head against my desk though, theres so much wrong with the LL avatar model and its UV, the wireframe is all over the place, there is no edge flow and it looks like the whole thing was lazily auto decimated from a higher polygon model to whatever this is and not modeled by a person.
The UV itself is something else, the way its unwrapped is just as messy, theres broken off and overlapping pieces and the UV seams are all over the place just like its edge flow
but probably the best part i discovered after i spent a whole day and a half matching my foot to it is that the THE FOOT IS ON BACKWARDS
The foot arch being on the same side where the big toe is would make a whole lot of sense no? yeah, LETS NOT DO THAT!
But it doesnt end there :D, i was naive to think that simply doing the SLUV would make my body compatible with all the normie skins, but the linden avatar has no clearly defined detail such as collar bones, nipples, belly button and so on, leading each skin creator to put them wherever they feel like, which became a big problem when the first mesh bodies were being developed. The creators of every body matched their body detail to whatever skin they were testing with, as result you have no consistency between any of the bodies, none of them follow any kind of standard.
For example, the makers of one of the most popular bodies back in the day (that i wont mention here) based their UV of a skin that had its belly button drawn way too high up and slightly offset to the right, since the skin was wrong, their UV was wrong too, but their body was so popular and every skin creator wanted their skin to be compatible with it so everyone started making skins with that specific defect done on purpose, which broke every other body that had their belly button UVs in the correct position.
A huge number of skins were produced during that time that are still floating around today. Luckily their body wasnt all that good and better looking bodies took over the market ever since and the offset belly button skins are slowly being phased out, yet still there are no skins that would have their nipples and belly buttons and collar bones in the same locations so there is still no parity between any of the skins and bodies and special skins need to be made to fit each one.
This whole thing has reached whole new levels of insanity at one point when one of the most popular normie head creators (that i also wont mention here) at the time, sent legal threats against another head creator for tweaking their LLUV to match skins that were made for those popular heads for better skin compatibility, it was a huge shitshow.
One thing the normies got on same page with was fingernails, they stopped adding them to their skins because all mesh bodies had their own mesh fingernails and the drawn ones were all over the place and messing up your fingers, but sadly common sense did not prevail when it came to the toes and each normie skin now still has toe highlights and shadows in wildly different places.
The shoulder blades are such a lost cause that some of the body creators dont even bother adding that detail on their bodies
All this leads me to the dilemma, should i even bother matching my UV to whatever most popular body or skin of the day? because either way this kind of beats the whole purpose of doing the LLUV because even if i did, it would still never be fully compatible with majority of the skins and people will be complaining about issues mentioned above and perceive it as the fault of the avatar and not the skin they are wearing. But if i release without the LLUV than everyone will bitch and moan about that and it wont see as wide of an adoption and will remain a niche body like the Kemono, and now that most of SL’s talent has long jumped ship for better games and career prospects, and what creators remained became complacent and only making normie stuff now, there wont be anyone to make custom skins for it. One positive thing is a lot of skin creators now days release their skin in several versions to match every popular body on the market so maybe things wont be as bad if you can just try every included version of the skin till you find one that works. And i do have some idea on how to go around some of the problems though, like do what some bodies did with nipples and use a custom texture/mesh nipple overlay, and some ideas on what to do with the toes as well.
BTW, what kind of normie anime skins or skins in general are the most popular for normie bodies now? let me know in the comments.
Was putting this post of cause i didnt have much visual progress to show but im sort of close to being done with modeling/rigging the base mesh. I ended up redoing the upper body several times cause it just looked off, especially when uploaded to SL, the part where the shoulders connect to the chest still bothers me so i might redo that area one more time.
So heres where its at now.
No more skinny kemono fingers.
Proper detailed feet this time too, no more lazy low poly feet xD
As for what made me redo it several times, biggest problem is blender itself, i normally do most of my modeling in metasequoia, but for this i had no choice but to use blender because i wanted to rig it while im modeling it to get the best possible bending, but blender is a joke of a modeling tool and zooming is unusable in perspective mode and needs all kinds of tedious tricks and workarounds to get it to zoom, and even then when you zoom in too much it just clips through the camera.
It blows my mind that after all these years and so many versions, they still haven’t fixed something so basic that no other modeling tool has a problem with. So because of this i have to work in the orthographic mode and because of that the model ends up looking completely different when uploaded to SL than it did in blender’s viewport, so while the upper body looked ok in blender, it looked very amateurish and bad when on SL. Another problem i ran into is the default volume bone positions and behavior when scaling, volume bones are the fitted mesh bones that let you adjust things like thickness of your legs or size of your ass in the appearance editor. The problem comes in 3 parts, part 1 is that the default volume bone positions dont give you the best looking deformations, so you need to use custom joint positions, which in itself wouldnt be much of a problem if it wasnt for part3 of this problem. Now part 2 is the body fat slider, when increasing body fat, in order to simulate the effects of gravity on the body fat, the volume bones also get dragged downwards, pulling the mesh down with it. While this is a good idea in theory, it doesnt work too well in practice, resulting in really bad looking deformations (another reason for using custom joint positions is to counteract this), and the most “galaxy brain” part of this is that the arm fat gets pulled downwards IN THE FUCKING T-POSE orientation.
Now as far as i know, no one walks around in a fucking t-pose, the arms are down when at rest, making the body fat go inwards towards the body and not downwards.
This results in mangled/collapsed looking shoulders that you often see on normie bodies, i always thought thats just because of bad rigging or the A pose, but all this time it was just the body fat slider. messing up peoples shoulders.
And part 3 of the volume bone problem is some bug that makes those bone positions effected by the body fat slider to get out of sync when editing shape in the LL viewer and completely break when changing your shape on firestorm. It an annoyance but still usable on the LL viewer but its a complete showstopper on firestorm, so untill this gets fixed, this is kind of a big road block for this whole project. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-233884
Other than that, the lower part of the body is scaling pretty nicely.
(Old wip image i forgot to post last time)
All that being said, all that remains to do now is UV mapping and than i can do stuff like different necks and breast sizes, some detailing between the legs and skin textures, hopefully LL/firestorm will get the volume bone bug fixed by than.
The standalone version of the anime train from AMH,
Sim decor item includes: Locomotives (front and rear) 74-73Li Train car 52Li Texture change HUD
Things to note: The seats are not scripted but have proper physics shapes so you can still right click and sit on them Driver cabin is not accessible and has no physics inside to save on land impact, same for the car to car crossing. Doors can be opened and closed through the HUD
- UTILIZATOR - 