– M4 Mars head and M4 updates –

And its here! the long awaited Mars male anime head. This is something i wanted to make for quite some time since i never could make the exact anime guy avatar i wanted.

– Things to know –

Snce i was working on this alongside the M4 Anime head, it has the same problem of a small cranium and large face (my original thinking was that making the cranium smaller will prevent hairs clipping through it, only i scaled the head wrong and instead of matching the face area with the LL face, i matched the cranium, and the rest you already know), but hopefully this time it wont be much of a problem since the majority of male hairs are unrigged and resizable, so if you arent completely blind, you will adjust the scale of the hair to match the face and wont look weird….. (im scared that normies that will be buying this head have no idea how to scale and position hairs though) But if that does cause problems, i might do a shape 2 as well with a smaller face.

Another thing, in case this isnt already obvious, the M4 girl skins will not work with this head due to different face structure and UVs

Anyway, here it is!

– M4 Updates –

M4 Anime and M4 Chibi HUDs now have a Simplified way custom textures are loaded, now all you have to do is click add and select what you are adding from a pop up menu and than paste your UUID without the need to write any additional parameters.

 

Thats all.

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– M4 Chibi head and updates for the M4 Anime head –

And its done! The M2 Chibi head was one of my personal favorites and something i always wanted to redo in mesh all the way back when i was redoing the venus head in mesh for the M3 system.

– Things to know –

The M4 Chibi head is functionally identical to M4 Anime head, that means it has the same broken appearance editor sliders and all the shit some of you hated about the M4, if that is an issue to you, please do not buy this head.

This head works with the same skins that are made for the M4 Anime head. As with M4 Anime, M3 eyes, lashes, and blush textures will work too (for older appliers, use the M3 Retro loader that comes with the M3 head)

– Known problems –

Problem with joint offsets on some of the non standard tiny avatars, on some kid avatar bodies the neck will get extended due to a conflict with joint positions, i have no idea why only some though, or how to fix this, so i made a work around for it using animation joint offsets, you can find a version of the head that uses this work around in the bonus item box, the M4 Anime head should have this bug as well and i will make this workaround on the next update.

There is a problem with the game itself that makes the eyelashes clip through a little through the eye socket if you are very high up in the sky, like 3000-4000 meter high, its weird but that can be fixed by adjusting the eye opening or eye size setting by -1 or -2  (already done in the default shape that comes with it) also this same bug applies to the M4 Anime.

 

– M4 Anime head update version 1.2 –

M4 Head
*FIxed – Script error caused from repeatedly clicking an AO option from the hud.

M4 Neck [Avatar 2] [Kemono] [LL/Normie]
*Nothing – Changed version to 1.2 to make things less confusing

M4 Hud
*Fixed – Reset textures now fixes blush texture
*Fixed – The changed 1.1 HUD graphics somehow didn’t get implemented into the 1.1 release, this update fixes it.
*Changed – Script optimizations, turning the menu pages is now a lot faster.

– Bento for Dummies –

To clear up all the confusion and misinformation about the appearance editor sliders, heres a list of sliders that work and slider that dont work.

– head –
head size ———– works
head streach —– works
head shape ——– works
egg head ———– works
head length ——- works
forehead angle — doesnt work
brow size ———- works
upper cheeks —– doesnt work
lower cheeks —– works
cheek bones —— doesnt work

7/10

– eyes –
eye size —————- works (but only verticaly)
eye opening ——— works
eye spacing ———- doesnt work
outer eye corner — doesnt work (HUD has a setting for it)
inner eye corner — doesnt work (HUD has a setting for it)
eye depth ————- doesnt work
upper eyelid fold — doesnt work
eyebags —————- work
puffy eyelids ——— work

4/9

– nose –
nose size ———– works
nose width ——– works
nostril width —– doesnt work
nostril division — doesnt work
nose thickness — works
upper bridge —– works
lower bridge —– works
bridge width —– works
nose tip angle — doesnt work
nose tip shape — works but effects the whole nose

7/10

– mouth –
lip width ———– doesnt work
lip fullness ——– works
lip thickness —— works
lip ratio ————- works
mouth position — doesnt work
mouth corner —- doesnt work
lip cleft ————– works
lip cleft depth —– works

5/8

– chin –
chin angl —- doesnt work
jaw shape — works (but adjusts chin shape instead)
chin depth — doesnt work
jaw angle —- works (but doesnt effect the whole jaw, does the same thing as chin-neck)
jaw jut ——– doesnt work
chin-neck —- works

3/6

I did not include sliders that are not supposed to do anything on bento heads, these would be eyelash length, both chin cleft sliders, eye pop and jowls, these sliders not supported by bento in general.

I also didnt include these useless face deforming sliders: face sheer, shift mouth and crooked nose.

 

Now lets talk about why these sliders dont work

 

I mentioned that there are technical limitations that are preventing the head from using all the sliders, but what are these technical limitations? after all the ASR head can use all its sliders…
An anime head is not a standard human face, therefore for an anime head to work with bento, it needs to have joint offsets for all the face bones (custom bone positions), and Bento uses bone scale and bone position to manipulate the face in the appearance editor. Now the problem is, due to the way the second life skeleton is set up, second life cannot tell the difference between an joint offset made by an appearance editor slider and an offset made by the creator, meaning your face shape will be overridden every time you log in or another person comes into the sim and looks at your face, therefore LL has disabled sliders from adjusting bone positions. Bone positions are used for things like mouth width, eye corner position, cheek bone position, etc so you are only left with scale adjustment for things like head shape, nose size, cheek size, lip size and so on.

If you are interested in more detail on what bones do what to change to appearance, check this out. https://avastar.guru/knowledge/slider-mapping/

So what magic does the ASR head use than? The way their heads work, they do not have joint offsets in the head itself, so no sliders get disabled, instead they uses a deformer animation trick to move joints to custom positions, same way the kemono deformer works to put the kemono’s shoulders, hips and feet in the right position. I have thought about it at one point but theres a bunch of drawbacks with that, like for example, sometimes the animation gets stopped and your face looks deformed to anyone who enters the sim after the animation has stopped, while you see yourself fine, and if you are a kemono user, you know this problem well, when your shoulders, just break and you end up with wide, detached, or dislocated feet, or the annoying shoulder pop that happens when you detach or attach something, or your shoulder width setting having no effect on your shoulders. This was a whole new can of worms that i didnt wanna open, but looks like i opened an even bigger can of worms, and now im begining to think that creating a bento anime head was a big mistake, with all the people who have never made a thing in their life and have no idea how SL even works, talking out of their ass like they know better than me…

 

Roadmap for the future development of the M4 heads

 

So next step is an update that is coming soon, fixing problems like the blush texture bug, restructuring the faces to allow asymmetrical textures and some other things.
After that im going to be working on the dummy model, once that is done i will resume work on the chibi head and once that is done, im going to try making a version of the M4 anime head that has a smaller face, the thing that bugs me the most about it right now is how massive the face looks with some hairs, people say the eyes is too big but its not just the eyes, the rest of the face bellow the eyes is too big, so theres gonna be 2 versions because the face does look really good with other hairs. I might also try to make some sort of an animation deformer based appearance editor aid for controlling eye, nose, shin and mouth position as well as mouth width, will see. And after all that is done, im finally going to resume work on the male head.

 

– The M4 Bento Anime Head –

The long awaited M4 Bento anime head is here! and now you can be one of the cool kids are riding the bento craze wave.

– What is bento and why does it matter? –

For those of you who still dont really know what all this bento hype is about, Bento is a new set of bones that LL has recently implemented into the game, such as face bones, wing bones, tail bones, finger bones and some other bones. These bones are used to animate specific body parts such as the fingers on your hands or the expression of your face, and is what this head uses to animate its face.

The main advantage of using bento bones for anime heads is that there is no more need to have a bunch of invisible meshes for every face expression, using just one mesh to do every expression instead. This in turn greatly reduces the render weight of your avatar, on top of that, anyone can now make expressions and face animations, so you are no longer limited to what is in the HUD.

The disadvantage is that since the head is rigged, it can no longer be positioned and face expressions are sadly somewhat limited due to the way bento bones work, meaning some expressions are just not possible to make without looking really weird or deforming your face

– Features –

• Full mod – Edit it, link stuff to it, rip or replace its textures, go crazy with it but make backups before you do!
• In depth customization with lots of options – Customize your head, choose its eye styles, colors, skin color, ear and nose types, add custom textures and specular maps. 2 types of ears, noses and eye shapes to choose from.
• Full facial control – Eyebrows, eyelids, Eyes and mouth can be controlled separately, mixing and matching different positions to create your own expression.
• Smooth animations and built in AO – eyes blink, look around, the mouth moves when you type or talk on voice chat, emotes as well as 3 different face AO styles.
• And more!

The head is also compatible with existing M3 eye, eyelash and blush textures.

 

– known bugs and limitations –

Due to technical limitations, the kemono, avatar 2.0 and LL necks dont join right and you will occasionally see seams from some camera angles.
changing the head’s default attachment position will mess up the facelight, right click and choose add to attach the head.
No rikugou compatibility mode yet (will be implemented later)
No asymmetrical skin support yet (will be implemented later)

If you find any other problems not mentioned here, please report them to us.

For texture mod creators we already got appliers too.

Next is the M4 Chibi Head which if all goes right should be released this month, if not than the next one.

That is all.

– WIP M4 anime heads and whats up with the update server? –

Okay so first of all, whats the deal with the update server?, as some of you noticed by now, the update cards do nothing, this is because the update service we use has collapsed and not much is clear with wtf is even going on https://hippo-technologies.info/2018/02/14/rackspace-service-issue/, there’s lots of speculations that the company “hippo technologies” is loosing money and bailing out on their web based services and making up lies about their web host “rackspace” having a catastropic server failure (that they do not mention themselves anywhere) as this predatory blog post from their main competitor “casper tech” mentions. https://blog.caspertech.co.uk/the-fall-of-an-empire/
All these assumptions come from a follow up post from Hippo tech https://hippo-technologies.info/2018/02/16/rackspace-cloud-infrastructure-failure/ 
This post gave me more questions than answers, not much meaningful information was given and they arent being very clear with things. Rackspace is working on rebuilding the database so they arent taking any action yet, so they will later when work is done? but than they are going to step away from those legacy services, so are they going to migrate all the data to their new services or whatever they are doing now? and what the fuck even are those legacy web services? are all their current services like vend and updates and all that shit considered legacy? if so what else does hippo tech even do now that is current and not legacy? do they still have any other web services that they could merge our data with, or will they at least let us migrate to another server before they step away?

So yeah these are the questions, so im going to wait around a little to see if any more information will come out of them, but im not keeping my fingers crossed and will look into better update service alternatives, I will come up with a way and post instructions on how to migrate to a new update service when i have that worked out.

– And now, for the anime heads –

So where am i now with this, i had a few bumps in the road and had to redo the main anime head 2 times but its pretty much final now. Both the Anime and Chibi heads are rigged and unwrapped, i just finished making a bunch of skin and other textures and created a bunch of necks and special textures for those necks to make the heads fit the kemono, av2 and the LL/normie bodies seamlessly, i will make a dev kit for custom skin creators to be able to blend their body skins with the head skin by using a method called baking in blender. The UV maps for both female heads will accept same textures, so there wont be any more confusion like when people used to buy an M3 anime head skin and wonder why it doesnt work on their M3 Venus head, or the other way around, one skin will fit both. Eye textures are still the same as M3 heads, so all the eyes you already have should work right away, Eyelashes will work for the most part too, some might look kinda funky on eye shape B though, but other than that, the texture is the same, and also the blush texture, if anyone ever bothered making mods for that.

The male head still needs textures but the base skin texture is finished, Also gonna make a neck that makes it work with the kuro body.

I ran into a dilemma with the Chibi head, will probably need to redo its shape a little, but the problem is that it doesnt work with half of my hairs, they clip at the sides, also its ear position makes hairs with very specific ear locations look weird, so some kind of a compromise will need to be made. Other than that, everything is pretty much done, now i just need to create a new HUD and all the face animations and hand it all over to Kourtnee for scripting.

Heres a bunch of random work in progress images.

That is all.

 

– The Greatest Dane –

I have been helping my friend with a project for quite some time and im glad to see it has finally come to fruition and its getting released today, so check it out!

And if you do decide on getting it, check out some of the other items in store.

 

– Normie Expression HUD –

This HUD allows you to customize your face expression, In order for this HUD to function properly, set your Normie head expression to neutral using the main HUD that comes with the Normie.

Some expressions might not look right depending on your mouth and lip shape, Same goes for the eyes.
This HUD will work with other bento heads too but im not sure how well.

 

– wip – anime man head –

Another M4 bento anime head im working on, didnt post this earlier cuz i didnt have much to show yet. This is a little something i always wanted to make but didnt have enough time and motivation.

I All the anime guys on SL looked like dykes and kids with strap on beards or girly looking pretty boys, but no one has made an anime man head.

– The normie bento head is here –

Are you a filthy casual? do you have friends and leave the house on friday nights? are you active on facebook? not living with your parents and think anime is gay?

Well than this head is for you!

The normie bento head is the answer to all those overpriced, no mod, weird alien neck mesh heads, that you see on the market. This head Is SLUV/Omega compatible so you have a wide selection of skins, makeup, hair bases and other options. The head is also full mod so you can add those finishing touches.

 

– Almost done –