What's in a shape?

What's in an avatar shape? In other words, is it just the series of numbers you can put in on the "Appearances" dialog, or is there more to it than that?

There is that special 'something' we put into it that helps the numbers. A bit of ourselves.

But yes for the most part you use the numbers.

number don't mean anything by themselves without application... soyes, definitely something more... in SL it's about idealization of one sort or another...

A SL shape, as a single inventory item, is the created entirely from the numbers from the Appearance sliders, and whether it uses the male or female mesh as a base.

Other things that can affect it:

Animations, which can twist and deform the mesh further, usually by folding back limbs to make them look shorter or tucking in the head

Skins, which although they don't change the shape, can strongly affect how it appears.

Attachments, which can add to or conceal parts of the shape, creating hair, tails, horns, hooves, genitals, the illusion of missing limbs, cybernetic parts and pretty much anything else you can imagine.

What's in a human being, is it just atoms or is there more to it than that?


Or wasn't this meant as a philosophical discussion starter?

While shapes are "just a bunch of numbers", some people do it better than others to complement the skin they wear

So can any shape that is for sale be duplicated by entering the correct numbers into the shape on the Appearance sliders?

I know that it takes skill to make a good shape; I was just wondering if there is more to the available shapes for sale than what we can change.

Mary

yes it can, as long as it is modify, just the same way a prim (that is mod) can be copied by punching in the same numbers

that is why a lot of folks make the shapes no mod,.. but personally I would not buy a no mod shape, as I would want to personalize it (especially the face)

Your shape can, oddly, be affected by your graphics driver too. Yes, your driver can even effect how others see you. (For a while with one of the older Nvidia drivers you could be smaller than everyone else, for example.)

There is nothing extra in a shape that is being sold. You'd have to be fairly good at working with shapes in order to copy a store bought no-mod shape. And if you were that good you probably wouldn't be copying shapes.

Anyone can make shape, it just takes practice seeing the numbers.
I would never pay for shape because all it takes is little bit of practice to get
your own shapes to look certain way.
Everyone copies someone sometime be it when they learn to speak, spell,
walk, sing, dress, even use the toilet.
If no Artist existed in SL, the first prehistoric prim Artist would be copying images of the animals or nature he or she encounter around his/her home cave or some video game he played and any one who saw it after would try to do the same if they thought they could get some L$ for it.
I don't know anything anywhere in sl or rl that isn't or hasn't been copied.
Very few here do anything truly original.
Any way I heard everything is made out of triangles in SL.
The shapes might be too if you saw them on the screen with meshes
nothing but in grid form.

No mod shapes are just evil. I don't sell no mod shapes because you really need the ability to modify your shape in order to change from one skin to another. No two skins will place your lips at the exact same location! Sometimes you need to add a little, or take away a bit to certain features on your face to balance it out. Also, that pesky system skirt thing (that makes your butt 2-3x wider than in a prim skirt) requires making a skirt shape (basically making your butt smaller) to compensate for that. Say no to no-mod shapes.

agree juicy

I still need to put out the shapes I made LOL
I put out two and for some reason never did more, and I have a lot of shapes from playing around with different skins and such

*shrug*

I also need to put out the demo shapes... for a long time I was unsure how folks did it, then I found one and realized what they did LOL

demo shape is no mod with large hands and feet.... no one wants full slider sized hands and feet and being no mod they can not adjust or copy the numbers

I agree absolutely. Ive learned to choose a skin first and then mod the shape to fit the skin. Like you say even the most fabulous makeup can look very ordinary if the face is not shaped to fit, lippy specially when applied to the wrong shape mouth.

I won't change my shape to suit a skin...if it doesn't work with what I've got, I don't want it.

And I DON'T wear system skirts. *shudder*

I do the same thing... shape to match the skin...

then again I tend to change multiple times a day LOL

I rarely look the same as I switch out skins and shapes a lot

not to mention hair clothes shoes etc

I figure I got it, I am gonna use it! heh


I must be a rare one, cuz I actually like system skirts... who cares that I need to downsize the butt a little, I like how they fit and smoothness of them

*shrug*

then again, just like anything, it depends on how well it is done (I tend to favor my own system skirts, but then again.. I would... I made them LOL)

I had to learn not to do that after I bought a pack of skins. At the time they cost more than my mainland land parcel so I couldnt afford to just chuck them away. So my avatar had to goto the EditAppearance gym for a workout.

What I learned after lots of effort was how to rework the eyes and mouth on different shapes so that mostly I look like I have the same physical face no matter which skin+shape combo Im wearing.

Hmm.. I don't get why some people are adamant about not tweaking a single slider. The reason I mod my shape (not drastically, mind you) for every single skin I wear is so that my avatar can still look like "me". Some skins make my lips too large? Np.. I just make my lips a little smaller with the sliders, etc. To NOT change your shape at all, you risk missing out on wearing a lot of really nice skins. I have a slightly diff. version my shape for every single skin I own, but its mostly tweaks to my face not body.

I am with Ann, although I sometimes will wear the system skirt.

I bonded enough with my shape while I still had Linden skin so much that if a skin doesn't fit my shape, I deem it unworthy. If a skin exaggerates something that would otherwise appear normal in Linden skin, I feel that the skin is the problem, not the shape.

Once I found a brand of skin I was happy with, I pretty much stopped shopping anywhere else. I have a few others for potential modeling, but they don't get worn - my look is fairly consistent. I don't change it but once in a blue moon. One of these months I may go looking again, but that's not likely because I like the way I look, and I don't need a ton of skins. I already have about 10 that I wear with any kind of frequency, and all from the same makers.

I've had a consistent appearance in SL ever since I joined. I have made enhancements, like better skin and hair, plus a few tweaks to sliders but all in pursuit of the look I wanted right from the start.

Obviously I do change my clothes and vary my hair between loose, ponytail, bun etc.

In order to maintain the consistent, realistic look I do use more than one shape, though. I have one with narrower hips and flatter butt to go with system skirts to counteract the poofiness and it works well. So my look in a skirt is consistent with how I look in jeans or bikini.

Nearly all my skirts and dresses are 'system', worn with matching glitch leggings. I find they work well except if I try to do the kind of dances that I couldn't do in a skirt in RL either!

The slider numbers are more of a guide for recording what you've already set. All my slider settings for shape are written down on a piece of paper and stored safely, just in case anything untoward happens to me in SL. One bonus of doing this is that when I joined Open Life and also acquired a free standalone island on my own computer, I was able to recreate my SL avatar appearance on these by entering all the slider values from that piece of paper.

If you have full perms on a shape - one you've made yourself, for instance - it's a good idea to back it up by giving a copy to an alt. I've never lost a shape though inventory glitches, but I have found the values to have drifted from the settings I'd made. Not sure how: it might have been something in SL, or maybe something I've done, like an edit gone wrong, but either way I was glad to have a backup.

Thanks to everyone who replied to the OP. So a shape is what I'd grown to suspect: just the Appearance numbers plus "that little extra special something", namely marketing hype and profiteering from people who don't know that. Oh, I know, I'm a cynic ...

Yep, this is exactly why I asked the question. I'm trying to get my av on OSGrid to look like "me", by duplicating those values, but it ain't working very well. In this case, I guess it must be the skin (my SL skin's no-copy so I'm using a found freebie) but it's pretty surprising how different the shape looks, and I was checking here for possible variations I might not be able to reproduce with pencil, paper and sliders. Also, I guess, maybe the avatar mesh in Opensim (and hence in OSGrid and OpenLife and all the others) is somewhat different.

so youre not going to be turning into a stegosaurus in the near future then ??

I think the Open Life avatar mesh is exactly the same as the SL one although they are working with RealXtend who are making a completely new avatar system, but from what I saw on the demo video, the SL type avatars look better.

"What's in a name?
That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."


Just consider it a "save file" for all those slider adjustments.

Yes its just a collection of numbers, Of course ..

A word processor document is just a collection of letters,
But arranged in the right order those letters might be something important, like "Romeo and Juliet"

Or rather trivial, like a Forums Post.