– 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,