– New body progress update and lessons learned –

Ok so i finally got something to show again, most of the work i was doing was the under the hood so not much to show and i ran into some major setbacks that made me wanna throw blender/sl out the window if it was a physical thing you could pick up and throw xD (more on that later), but im at the scripting part now and bulk of the scripting done but i still need to polish up and optimize and do a bunch of bug fixes with both the scripts and also meshes needing to reflect those script fixes. It was interesting project, had to learn a whole bunch of new LSL stuff that i never dared to touch before to develop several new systems for this project and also put to good use some newly added LSL functionality that i wish SL had in some of my previous projects and im pretty happy with how it all came out.

Heres how the HUD looks so far, not final, missing some options and polish, the title isnt final either, still not sure how to call it but it has to be something that fits in the titlebar.

So the setbacks and lessons learned were related to proportions and joint offsets, i have come to realize that normie bodies look like featureless blobs for a good reason, having very distinct proportions and anatomical features on your body, while not a problem on something non fit-mesh like the kemono, become a huge problem when the body is fit-mesh rigged. It will look right in the default SL avatar shape but will start looking odd and anatomically incorrect when the shape is adjusted by sliders the volume bone sliders. Features like the chest width, boob position, rib cage line, hips and so on.

Another mistake is using custom joint positions for a humanoid body instead of just going with the default ones. SL is really really bad with handling joint positions and that just opens a whole new can of problems and cripples the body, needing all kinds of ass backwards fixes and workarounds to get it to work right and than you have firestorm that throws all that out the window anyway if you use the body fat and knee angle sliders. So this was another roadblock for a while, i had to reduce the default length of the legs and thickness of the lower leg because it would look weird anatomically with half of the shapes i tried to make with it, making the legs this long was dumb from the very start cause you can just do that with sliders anyway. So to match the new leg length, i had to change the joint positions, but than the body would hover above ground so i also had to pull the whole skeleton down to the origin point, but doing that would fuck with the nametag position and neck length, fixing one thing would break the other, and it was driving me nuts so i ended up having to start over and redo the whole skeleton because editing the existing one would just break everything, Thankfully all the M4 necks and animations i made still work fine with the new skeleton so i wont have to redo all of that too. I kinda wish i could just stop time and scrap the whole thing and start over, but too much time and effort already went into this, i cant stop time and i made you all wait far too long already.

But yeah, with all of that nonsense now done, all theres left to do is a bunch of polishing up and testing and fixing any problems i find here and there (fingers crossed no major rig problems again) and some extra last minute additions.
I still need to come up with a good name, some names im considering are Hitomi, Naomi, Himeko, Sakura and Izanami, any suggestions are welcome too.

Also heres some features to look forward to:

Auto materials – The body will automatically apply its skin, normals and speculars on any attached mod.
Mod linking and AUX slots – The body has several auxiliary slots for mod body parts linked directly to the body, as long as your linked parts contain the names of those slots, they will be treated as parts of the body and will have skins and materials applied to them when chose from the HUD or an applier.
Mod priority system – You can manually set which mod has priority over other mods in cases where multiple mods overlap over over the same alpha area, to prevent glitching.
Multiple foot positions – Flat, medium and tip toe.
More hand positions – 8 this time!
Built in materials – Several normal and specular maps to pick from to give your skin some shine, muscle tone or android lines.
Various shape fixes – Optional fixes you can enable to accommodate more different body shapes.
Various small quality of life features – Things like the HUD correctly representing what is being hidden or shown by external commands (mods, clothing), correct parts being shown or hidden when logging in or changing outfits, Built in BOM functionality, optional ankle lock for tiptoe position.

Thats all for now, hopefully next time around i can show more pics of the body itself when i put some avatars together with it.