– M4 Venus rigging dummies –

The rigging/animation dummies are done, you will also find the necks for the M4 Venus head if you wanna adapt it to your own body or body part mod, everything is in different object layers

Get them here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/zdygf5yqw67j63y/M4V_dummies.zip/file

– M4V LL neck and other updates –

M4 Venus LL necks and M4 texture appliers

A small but important update for skin creators and people that wanna use the LL neck, The M4 Appliers have been updated to support the LL neck texture for the venus head, you will need to update your venus head as well and grab the updated LL necks.

Other updates

Updated the LL skin appliers in the bonus item box of the M4 Anime and Chibi heads, the skins had finger and toe nails drawn in wrong places, looking messed up on mesh hands and feet, its fixed now, also included the manuals that were missing from the latest versions.

Fixed the MGA2 Venus body suits, there as a UV error on the belly and the small chest version of the suit had a typo in the texture selection script that made the red texture not load.

– M4 Venus Head –

You wanted it, you got it ! The M4 Bento Venus head is here!

– What is Different from the other M4 heads ? –

Unfortunately, there are no alternative nose or eye socket shapes, but as a tradeoff the head is backwards compatible with M3 Venus appliers and retains the M3 tear effect!
you now have full compatibility with old M3 Venus appliers (skins, eyes, brows, lashes, blush, tears) as well as M4 Venus appliers, however because of this specific compatibility, other M4 and M3 head skins that were not made specifically for the venus head, will not work with the M4 Venus. One thing to note is that mouth uses M4 mouth textures instead of the mouth included on the M3 Venus skins.

As mentioned before, this particular head has the tears option, you can access it through the blush button by clicking it repeatedly till it switches from blush mode to tears mode. Due to a technical limitation regarding alphas, switching on tears, sets the eyelash texture to alpha masking in order to not clash with the tear alpha, this degrades the quality of some eyelash textures. One interesting thing we noticed very late into development is that for whatever reason that same alpha clash bug is not happening between the blush layer and tears, we will look into why this is happening (or more like, why its not happening) and hopefully we can implement tears in other M4 heads. A separate HUD button for tears will be implemented with future updates but for now if you wanna have both and you know what youre doing, first turn on tears and than unhide the blush using SL’s build menu.

The default eye size setting is now size 2, if you make the eyes bigger in the appearance editor, use eye size setting 1 in the M4 HUD to match it.
The Rikugou necks will apply Rikugou skin tones to the rest of the head if you select a skin from the HUD, light skins will apply Rikugou A tone, dark skins Rikugou B
the LL/normie neck will apply its own tone to the head as well for the medium skin tone, matching the medium LL skin tone from the appliers included in the bonus item box.

– M4 Venus neck blending tutorial –

This tutorial will show you how to blend your Kemono/AV2/Rikugou/LL body skin texture with your M4 Venus head’s neck using Blender.

I will assume you already know the basics of how to use blender, if not, this older M4 neck blending tutorial covers the process in greater detail.

If you haven’t already, download the M4 Venus texture development kit and find the “M4V_neck blending kit.blend” file and open it in Blender.

What is where (object layers)

Step 1, baking the neck texture.

Make sure you are in “Blender Render” mode at the top bar.

Select the object layers you will be working with, for example if you are transferring texture of the Kemono body UV onto the M4 neck UV, select both of those layers (you can select multiple layers by holding shift).

Select the source object (a neck with original UV or the M4 head stub).

Go to texture data tab on the right and click “New”.

Click “open” and select the source texture that you wanna bake onto the M4 UV neck.

Now hold shift and select the M4 UV object that you will be transferring the texture onto.

Press tab to enter edit mode and than press A to select all polygons if its not already selected.

In the UV editor window on the right, click “+New” to create a new image, set a name and set the resolution to 512 x 256 and click “OK”.

Go to render tab and scroll down to baking options.

Bake method has to be set to “Texture”
“Selected to active” checkbox needs to be marked.
Margin needs to be at least 32 or higher for best result(it extends the edges of the rendered image to fix problems like black seams).
Leave “Distance” and “Bias” alone for now unless you are getting spots where the texture inst baked right.

Click “Bake”, once done, save your image somewhere from the “Image” menu in the UV editor window on the right.
Step 2, baking the head texture.

Pretty much same deal as before, select the M4 head stub object and set its texture in the image tab to be the texture of your head, hold shift and select the M4 neck onto which you want to bake your head texture onto, make new image in UV window, bake your texture and save it.
Step 3, merging the baked textures.

I wont go deep into details on how to use an image editor since i assume, as a skin maker, you already know how it works lol.

So anyway, fire up your image editor and paste both baked images into it, layering one over the other.

Select a very soft eraser and start erasing away the top or bottom half of one of the textures till the 2 blend together.

You can test how your textures blend by loading them onto the included necks or test them ingame using the local texture option.

– Soon –