– Its that time of the year again ! –

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

Be there or be square!

– Wip anime body skin –

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.

Will post more pics soonish.

– wip3 anime body –

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.

So yeah thats all for now,

– Anime train

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

Related items:

– Wip – New anime body –

This is still very early in development and everything you will see here is subject to change, but everyone and their mom are already dieing from curiosity and keep asking me about how it looks and stuff, so heres some early work in progress stuff and some info on where im currently at with this.

Im still in the process of shaping it and rigging it as i go to get the best possible bend in in the shoulder area.

One of the major problems with kemono were the shoulders, main problem was that its hard to predict how exactly its going to bend when modeling it and than rigging it after you are done modeling it, leads to less than ideal results.

This time around i was using my later developed technique of rigging it while im modeling it and constantly testing how it bends as i go, which finally gave me shoulders im satisfied with.

Another thing that bothered me about the kemono was how its ass was sitting a little bit too low, while this made for a very good bend in that area, it was also a problems for creating short skirts, it was a delicate balancing act between covering enough of the ass cheeks from showing from the default SL camera angles but at the same time not being too long to still be sexy, not to mention it also looked anatomically incorrect between the thighs and crotch when they bent upwards, and also suffered from that same problem of being rigged after modeling is already done.

The bend on the new body is not as nice looking, i will improve it a bit more later but even as it is now, at least its not as bad as pretty much every normie body in existence so at least im happy with that lol.

Oh yeah also the area of the bend in the front has also been modeled with consideration to clothing items like panties and such, which was also a problem with the kemono.

Another big issue with pretty much every body i did before this one is that the geometry follows the contours of muscles and other anatomical features, which is great for shading and needing less polygons to have these anatomical details, but its terrible for things like alpha cuts and UV maps. This is the reason i had to scrap my plans for LL UV for avatar 2.0 and kemono because the LL UV needing a straight horizontal upper and lower body division as well as vertical seams being straight.

This geometry is not final and there will be more detail around ares like the belly button and such.

So that is pretty much it for now, next post is going to be about the head against desk banging challenges of working with fitted mesh so look forward to that one lol.

– 3 Days left –

Till its that time again!

Starting on first day of christmas (Dec 24th???) at AMH 2.0, you will find the chirstmas tree behind the cat statue, the event will last 3 days, so come back every day for more gifts.

– New M4 Heads, updates and lots of otehr stuff released –

Ladies and catboys, the new heads are done and out!, but first i want to get your attention to some sorta important updates first so they wouldnt get buried down under all the cool new shit.

M4 Annimeay:

-
Fixed - More restructuring done to the head to fix the alpha glitching problems with blush layer and eye texture/lashes once and for all (hopefully).
Fixed - A problem with the "fix alphas" button not hiding a part that is supposed to be invisible, appearing white and glitching through the skin around the face.
-

General updates to all M4 heads:

-
Extended the click detection delay a bit more for the HUD's title bar to combat HUD flying off screen bug.

Fixed - (mis)Clicking near eye roll buttons would trigger 'Clear' command.
Fixed - Rikugou necks now contain rikugou joint offsets to address deformations to the body and neck that happen when an M4 head is worn.
Fixed - Kemono neck scripts have additional auto-hide code added to keep kemono(body/mod) neck hidden.
Fixed - Something with the remote relay HUD, i forgot what it was :C

M4 Tongue pills and piercings have been updated to work with the new heads too.
-

M3 M4 eye collection:

In the bonus item of your M4 head you will now find a new bonus item which is a HUD that has all the eye textures form every M3 and M4 head, if theres any eyes you are missing from previous heads, this will let you use them with your current head.

Ok and now with that out of the way, lets get into all the new stuff!

The new M4 heads:

And and heres some day day one content for the new heads !

But wait, theres MOAR!

Kijo outfit set and separate pieces

And bunch of jewellery i had made a long time ago but never released.

whats next

Now that this is out of the way, i can probably start my experiments with fitted mesh and all that stuff for the future body im gonna make (dont expect this any time soon, probably next year), but in the mean time, im planning on making a lite version of the kemono body that i can than pack into anime avatar starter packs for new people that are joining SL, its going to contain some kind of simple anime head, body, hair and some clothes, maybe even an AO but not sure how willing i am to make a whole set of AO animations, will see. Also some avatar 2.0 clothing packs that someone requested and i thought was a good idea. Another thing that is in the works is a Kemono to LL UV skin transfer thing. Im also planning to give the M4 Mars head another try, will probably be a shape 2 update and also investigate what heads use what joints so i could make more of those face edjustment hud thingies for them, the jaw line adjustment HUD that comes with the M4 Momo/KeMomo is very possible for every other head cause those joints arent used for anything else.

Gonna make another post soon with all the dummies and texture kits, but that is all for now.

– WIP M4 Rikugou and some teaser images

OK so everything is pretty close to completion, just need to iron out some bugs and add some finishing touches here and there. Not sure if i mentioned this before but i didnt want to make just another anime head and wanted to bring something new to the table and try out some ideas i had rolling around in my head for a while. One of them is rigging and animating the head in a way that would free up some joint to serve the purpose of moving the face features around to make up for the shortcomings of the appearance editor sliders.

You can move the nose, chin and mouth up and down to better match the anime style you are doing for and it also allows you to make a more meaningful use of sliders like “head stretch” and “egg head” moving the eyes back into place if they have been move apart too much or too close together, i hope people can make good use of this.

And here are some teaser images

more images: https://imgur.com/a/s31zFCa

more pics: https://imgur.com/a/ScGrG4T

more images: https://imgur.com/a/sPjbt6q

– WIP – New M4 heads –

Finally got to work on the new heads, not much to show yet.

This will be the new chibi head, not sure how im gonna name it yet, probably potato head or something.

New furry head, this ones gonna be a fox

And finally, going ro remaster the rikugou head, better smoother topology, M4 anime UV map, 2 sizes, regular fit and rikugou avatar fit

On subject of rikugou, im also going to be updating all rikugou human hands and outfits for them to bento, its gonna be a free update .

– More new things and stuff –

People have been asking me to release some of the props i made for the new AMH expansion, so i made a few packs.

 

I also plan to release the train later, it just needs new general purpose LOD models (current ones cut away the side of the train that is facing the wall) and some tweaks.