The great thing about Second Life is how unique everyone can be. The creativity, the imagination comes out when people are expressive with their avatars. In whatever form that may be.
As Bakes on Mesh (BoM) has started to gain steam, and creators are re-releasing, creating and updating for the system layer movement, (FINALLY! and I'll explain why) more and more people, young and old are confused by how it works. People that made beautiful system avatars 8 and 10 years ago have forgotten their latent skills because of appliers. Those convenient, push button HUDs that relegated a person to three layers only! And most times left people complaining about glitching, alpha fighting and high render rates that just made clubbing/shopping unfun because you were either invisible, everyone else was invisible (thank you Firestorm show friends only) or it was all a slideshow in an attempt to buy something you wanted early enough to be trendy.
Younger folk, those 7 years and newer really didn't have to deal with system layers and how they layered and baked onto the system avatar into one texture, reducing the amount of information they were constantly being bombarded with. Now, the prospect of getting rid of those alpha cut/multilayered bodies scares people for some reason.
When it should be seen as much easier!
Clothing creators use to provide alpha layers for their meshes. Hardly ever did we have to make our own as consumers and that was only early on. People willingly shared their edits back and forth, freebie packs of said layers on the marketplace. But there's been a definite shift the last couple of years I've noticed. People are less willing to be creative in this way and I don't think it's their fault. Since mesh has been firmly accepted, the whole idea that ordinary people in SL can contribute to the creation/addition of fashion has sort of gone out the window. People are afraid to add in their own ideas and it frankly makes me sad. Hopefully clothing creators will again start adding in rudimentary alpha layers for people who use things like Slink Redux (Which has a nifty slider setup for alpha layers that have anti-aliasing that allows a bit of adjustment, how cool is that?)
I love seeing what people come up with. I love seeing people help each other and guiding each other. In SL I have collected a sharable notecard with information as I can get my fingers on it and have shared that with others. And in turn hope they add to that and share it with others they come across in an attempt to lift the veil that Linden Labs has covered BoM with, and show that it's not as scary as all that. It's simpler than it seems! Sure, skin creators have made the process of re-learning and familiarizing a little more difficult in the attempt to cover as many body/heads as possible.
In the next few blogs I hope to show those who venture here that experimentation can be valuable. That you don't have to have the exact matching head/body skin. Old skins are useful again if you did n't toss them in the Mesh Movement. That with layers, you can -layer- your look to make it work. Yes, yes. I did go there.
Until then, be beautiful to each other. Be creative, and live your best Second Life.
Much love, Lumi
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