Want to make it EASY to apply tattoos to your skin?

Pre-defined layering would be unnecessarily restrictive. To make it easier for people to know where in the stack things should go it would be cool if items could have custom inventory icons, then we could make our own to denote different things like tatts, or eyebrows, or lips, or underwear, or whatever. I think half the fun of a less restrictive system would be letting people arrange things in near infinite combinations.

We have pre-defined layering right now already and it clearly doesn't work .

My point was that if I have two tops I want to layer together with a prim skirt but one of the tops is a shirt so I'll end up wearing:
* undershirt: top A
* shirt: top B
* underpants: "belly cover" for top A
* pants: glitch pants

There's no room for tattoos so you could just add two new tattoo layers and I can wear my tattoos.

But that doesn't solve the problem if I wanted to wear tights with the skirt (socks + underpants or pants), nor the problem that if the two tops I want to wear both come on the shirt layer (or worse the top I want to wear on the bottom comes on the jacket layer).

If you can simply stack clothing one on top of the other without any pre-defined limits of what is supposed to go where then everything you bought already is instantly usable (regardless of what layer it's on right now or what the permissions of it are).

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The only problem would be finding a not too complicated way of denoting what goes where and to not make getting dressed an even bigger pain .

If you stick to just 10 layers per body part you can just use a number from 0 (closest to the skin) to 9 superimposed over the layer icon we already have.

By default undershirt would be on 2, shirt would be on 5 and jacket on 8 to still give the layers some meaning.

Wearing a tattoo for the first time (regardless of what layer it came on) would involve right-clicking, Wear > Upper Body > 0 in much the same way we wear attachments now and it would go below the (default) undershirt layer.

I would like more layers, I don't see the need for fusing.

I already make tats and sell them on as many layers in one pack as it makes sense- for the same money- since it doesn't cost me anymore to make a shirt, undershirt and jacket than it does to make just one layer.

More layers that occupy the same places would allow, for example glove nails and hand tattoos-

Given that the original JIRA request for more avatar layers is the 4th most popular issue with 339 votes yet is still unassigned, I highly doubt we'll see any action on this front.

But with the Lindens working on next-gen graphics enhancements like real-time shadows, flexible sculpties and 3d mesh import, I can't imagine that they would be completely neglecting the avatar. My money is on a completely redesigned mesh avatar before we see any improvements to the current model. Hopefully a new model will implement all the clothes layering goodness we would want.

I just added the following comment:



I don't think losing the creator's name really matters much if the item cannot be transferred.

Also, I like the idea of letting residents combine layers over having additional layers added to avatars, provided content creators are protected in the process. The skin-underwear-shirt-jacket analogy makes sense; anything you add to that is simply going to confuse the issue for new people, and the learning curve is steep enough in SL already. Better to have this new function, which residents can acclimate themselves to when they're ready, than to add another layer (sorry) of stuff to understand about clothing for newbies to overcome.

I voted for both Jiras listed here!

yes I agree, which is why I think they shouldn't be predefined beyond letting the user know its suggested position (which is where user definable icons would be cool).

Chip, currently the clipping and layer are bound together. Do you suggest a system where clipping and layering are independent? How would you propse the GUI be structured for this, and how would existing content fit into the new model?

Or are you only supporting the idea of a set of full-body layers between skin and clothing, keeping the existing clothing layers as they are?

Just trying to understand what you're thinking.

I'd keep the clothing layers as they are due to the clipping, like being able to adjust sleeve length and other things that use SL's built in adjustable masking, but there's no reason why there couldn't be more clothing layers able to operate the same as they do now, and there's no real need for them to be pre-assigned as underwear or outerwear. Clothing isn't a big problem now (except for the limitations imposed by having the layer order predefined), except people would likely appreciate being able to layer it more.

I think the primary problem that needs addressing is more related to skins than to clothing and the new type of inventory object I suggested is aimed at that. I'd like to have the ability to package makeup, eyebrows, lips, etc, as separate objects with their own permissions. They wouldn't require any clipping. They'd just need alpha channel support.

As for the UI, the skin tab should be overhauled. LL could entirely dump the default avatar skin functionality and I doubt most people would even notice it was gone. No one really uses that kind of skin anymore. You could have a list pane where you can drag and drop components and adjust their order in the stack, and a rotatable and zoomable preview pane.

I've been thinking about the slider skin layers a bit lately. I think its a real shame that this really very clever customisation system has gone completely to waste and gets covered up by conventional skins. If I were to redesign the avatar system, I'd try to work out a way in which all of those slider controls could be user-created and tradable assets. Then what we call a skin would be a complete system, with custom skintone, makeups, wrinkles, freckles, etc. I'd like to see it so that you could sell the complete set or individual components, so people might make just makeup, or just freckles or whatever. I guess all of this is probably possible today by replacing files in the Characters folder, but there's really no easy ingame way to trade and install them.

IMO, LL dropped the ball with this and left the avatar system unfinished. I think our current tattoo layer skins are just a shortcut that cover over what could have been an extremely powerful appearance system

I agree that it's a shame because it was a pretty nifty system. A couple of skin makers experimented with creating things that utilized it (namely Namssor), but that was problematic. It required an installer to replace files in the character folder, and distributing raw textures had the predictable result of so much piracy that the products were eventually abandoned. As long as the textures have to be stored on the client it'll never be viable for commercial products. At this point I'd probably just dump that system entirely.

OK, thanks for the clarification. Sounds reasonable to me!

*bump*

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1449 - "3 New Avatar Layers - 2nd Tattoo layers between existing skin/tattoo layer and clothing layer"

(Credit to Chalice Yao over on SLU for posting about it there )