Time to shed my newbie skin

Are there any other male skins I should be looking at other than those at Chip Midnight and Naughty Designs? I want a fairly realistic look, not too dark and not too muscular. I like a couple from the two places mentioned, although I wish Midnight Chip had something between the pale one and the first hairy tan, which seems a bit purpley. I don't want much hair either, although I fancy a goatie. And if there are any others I should consider are they cheaper than L$4000?!

Albion

check out a place called made men, they have some great stuff and a huge selection, the av's there run about L$2000-4000 but its very high quality work

At some point I'll be adding skin tones between the existing ones, though no promises on how soon that will be. My guess would be this winter which I know doesn't do ya much good now.

As a woman, I have yet to see any male skins that are sexier than Naughty Designs or the Max skins. They are just perfectly detailed and devine. That said, you may want to try Canimal. She has a small selection of male skins in various shades. If you are looking for a non-muscular shape indie.rainbow just released a slender male/boi shape. You should also check Adam and Eve. I don't know the price range of any of these, so they may or may not be more comfortable for you.

Mavis McGettigan (of Skin Flicks) makes some very nice skins too imo, if you're after the 'fairly realistic' look ^^

Thanks for all those suggestions, I'll check them out.

Albion

Nomine. (I may have misspelled this.)

Ignore what's up front, go in the back and look at the ones there. Those are the older ones and I personally like them better, because they're not as highlighted. They're also only $L1200 and are, IMO, some of the best looking skins that you can get in SL.

There are also mod skins which are considerably more expensive, but which you can adjust the skn tone on, which it kind of a handy thing to have.

Thanks, the nomine look a good option for now for L$1200. I'm just choosing between male light brown hairless and light rosy tan hairless...

Albion

/108/2b/127709/1.html

Yes, I'd read that thread. I just wanted to start one specifically about male skins, although I know male skins came up in that thread. And I wanted to specify the type of thing I was looking for.

Albion

She's only got the one male skin design, but it's a good one.

Like I said in the other thread, by Max skins are my favorite and give you a wide choice in facial/body hair, you could have a goatee.

Max Skins are definately worth the L$!
I got mine about a month ago and couldn't be happier...

I have also been looking for a realistic male skin but having no luck. There are some good suggestions here but I have tried most of the big designers and although they are well done they don't have what I am looking for.

Does anyone know specifically of a male skin that:

- had blonde hair
- is not dirty or rugged looking
- is light white skin tone
- has no five oclock shadow
- has pubic hair/leg hair but is not overly hairy?

I am finding if you want "rugged macho gangsta guy" you have thousands to chose from but if you want nice slim smooth blonde guy (me) you are SOL.

I would even go for "muscly blonde surfer boy" or even "Hitler youth guy" but I cant find ANYTHING in blonde at all.

Are there no nordic men in the US????

I don't get it.

I've been using Munchflowers for quite a while now - its an early one - not superduper photorealistic - but its very nice and has a 'clean' look about it.

I'm sure she has much newer ones out there now, and probably worth a look at.

I *love* Chips work - but alas, his realism doesn't work with my Av .. I want a soul patch and bald head ... but the stubble doesn't work for me

And although my Av has sort of morphed and grown over the years - its still very much got its old 'djinn' theme - so a swarthy arabic bronze is a must ... and again, not seen a lot of skins that hit that 'just right' for me.

Jeremy, have you looked at the Max skins, yet? Because they range from really fair to very dark. You can get them clean shaven.

I don't mean to sound like an ad for Max, but I really haven't been that impressed by the choices in men's skins and those are my favorites so far, they are very good. Finding a good skin is work. :/

Thanks Io, going to check them out on my lunch break.

I was just kinda surprised that Nomine, Second Skin, Munchflower and almost all the big names don't do a clean cut blonde.

I seem to remember Made Men having a Nordic one.

I went for the Nomine one in the end. From the selection in the back room as suggested by Jack. The did have blonde ones in there, hairy and hairless with various degrees of paleness and tan. They're not hyper-realist but have an authentic look about them. I'd check them out. At L$1200 they were the best value ones I found.

Albion

I guess I will have to go back to Nomine then, I was there for a long time and even IM'ed the owner and did not hear of any "back room" nor see any blondes.

I just got back from checking out all the places on this thread on my lunchbreak and here is what I found:

Max Skins - No such place or person! I looked in places, people, popular places, classifieds and "all" and did not find any mention of max or max skins. In people a huge number of max's come up but it's not possible to check each one to see if he has anything to so with the skin store. Io should keep plugging this place because it needs it. Impossible to find means no sales for Max.

Gavindira - Interesting store and highly original, but no blondes. All dark scruffy types again.

Skin Flicks - This is the only place I have found that has actual blonde and somewhat hairless types as one of the main items they sell. Not to my taste as they are not so realistic in the details. The female skins in the same shop are excellent though.

Naughty Designs - I was really impressed with the workmanship on these ones. Very nicely done indeed. I especially liked the inclusion of a flacid uh... attachment with the skin (except its not in the demo). I had two quibbles with ND though:

1) The store is also hard to find and overdone. Search gives you a link to the main store but there are no male skins there nor any mention of them at all. There is a giant sign with a naked man and woman on it that indicates it will give you a LM to the "new store" and once you get to the new store that is where the male skins are but how the customer is supposed to know that is hard to see. Once you get to the "new store," it's beautiful, but outrageously prim heavy. I have a good new machine with a ton of memory and it took me minutes and minutes of standing there to even get the geometry loaded and then longer still to see the textures. It looks fab once its loaded, but not necessary at all.

2) The skins are not blonde again and still in the rugged five oclock shadow mode. They are also, like most skins in SL a very "cut" look. Unless you have your muscles turned all the way to the max the shading on the chest looks very wrong.

A blonde "boyish" version of their pale model would be very very close to what I am personally looking for though and might be a good seller as well.

I don't know why someone doesn't make an adjustable skin like the Linden ones for men so things that are personal preference like muscle tone, freckles and five oclock shadow can be dialed up and down. I am super happy with the Linden skin if it was just a tad more realistic and detailed

Sorry!

Skins by Max:

secondlife://Eventide%20South/60/224/35


The right thing to search for is "Eventide South" where these are located. Apologies.

There are only two ways to do adjustable skins. One is to replace the tga files in the users "character" folder on their hard drive. The drawbacks to that are pretty obvious - what's to keep the buyer from giving those textures to all of their friends or simply resell them? They don't even need to go through to trouble of stealing them. They already have them in pristine condition. The other major drawback is that distribution to the buyer has to happen outside of SL, meaning the seller would have to provide some kind of password protected download mechanism. Ultimately it's just not worth it which is why there are very few skins that you can modify in appearance and many of the ones that used to be sold have been discontinued by their creators.

The other way is to do the skin as semi-transparent so the default skin shows through underneath. With that method it's very difficult to get something that doesn't look muddy, and any kind of sharp detail is right out.

Makes sense. I have seen a male skin at SS Labs that does this and the shading was excellent, but only darker skin tones again and curiously, the user is forced to sport a van dyke beard and a bald head!

Thanks I will check it out this evening after work.

I saw an ad for max skins, and I immediately told some of my friends. I thought they were probably THE sexiest male skins I've ever seen. To me, they are worth the Lindens, but that's something you'll decide for yourself. Good luck on your hunt

I used to sell a client side male skin way back when. It was discontinued for all the reasons Chip has mentioned. Also, the skins needed to be reinstalled each time the SL client was updated. I'm sure you can find several pirated versions floating around if you look (I certainly have!), but if they are being sold in SL then they have been uploaded onto the SL server, gone through lossy compression, and no longer function like my client side skin installer. I still sell the original server side MG1 version at my shop bearing the elongated SS watermark in the textures.

Additionally, to save people the headache of trying to duplicate what LL has done with the "Default" skin, don't bother trying to make a skin this way. With it's 36 layers of color, shading, highlight, makeup, and other details dispersed into 8, 24, and 32 bit TGA files, the default skin can never live up to a single highly detailed 24/32 bit TGA file. The reason is twofold:

1. All those 8 bit greyscale images that control the slider behavior can only produce a fraction of the smooth detail found in a 24/32 bit image since they only sample a small range of transparency values. As a result, the facial hair and other features can not carry much detail at all. It will always look very flat, banded, and jaggy like the familiar default facial hair.

2. Attempts to alter two or more of the 8 bit images brings the client to a crashing halt. My guess is the server is expecting certain file information, and any deviation from that norm sends up red flags that ultimately bring the client down.

All that aside, the benefits of having a client side skin are very worthwhile:

1. People can apply thier own makeup, facial hair, tattoos without asking the skin artist to bake them into the skin texture.

2. All the default slider functionality works at full opacity (with the expection of pigmentation adjustments).

3. People can wear the same skin on as many ALT accounts as they wish.