Night Terrors - Shape and Skin Shifting

I frightened Hal the other night. Seriously gave him a chill so he logged off for a few minutes:

I changed my skin

He was very disturbed by the blurred and haunted creature that emerges as we change our skins - hollow eyes and no lips like a "weetigo" from First Nations legend.

I teased him about it and shifted back and forth a bit but he was genuinely disturbed.

Do any one you have teh same unease at that process or have some other sl fears? I remember being alone one night in Caledon (or so I thought) and a green orb on teh mini map started to rapidly approach me. Instantly, I tped away. There was something dark there that night and it wasn't Uncle Des!

I just arbitrarily change my shape between adult and kid at times. Clothing layers are just textures so they remap automagically, but anything prim-based (tail, ears, whiskers) I put in a folder with the shapes so everything changes at once. Occasionally I change the skin too, but usually it is to the same basic skin but different colour tiger stripes.

It really freaks out people who have issues with kid avatars.

I change bodies a fair bit. Haven't had anyone complain yet.

I know what Hal means. That in between blurry skin is CREEPY! The same when you rebake yourself. Who was that late great comedian who said "The problem is, I think bigfoot IS blurry." (?) Well, if bigfoot looks like that I'd run like hell. Never mind taking pictures.

Another way I grossed myself out was when I used a Compsognathus avatar. It is very small and to hide your human form it uses a kind of invisible prim that stopped working with one of the upgrades. The human form was all distorted and squashed down inside it, and it looked like the Compy had gaping wounds with pink innards and eyeballs inside. Most disturbing! Like Picasso, meets Bosch, meets Clive Barker. I do miss the functional version of that avatar sometimes. A lot of ladies wanted to take me home with them ( ), but I am now more widely accepted as a beagle.




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Thanks Weston. Yeah, it's really not how we feel ourselves about it but just how we can impact others who dont take what we do quite so much for granted. SL is not such a plesant place at all times and in immersed world there can be plenty of things that get into those suspense afright triggers in our brain. At least, I hope so - otherwise what's the point of an immersive world?

I change shapes often when I'm testing my animations - I found it a bit unnerving at first, but then I got into the fun of it. It's amazing how you can fold up the avatar shape to make a tiny or a quadruped.

The texture re-baking, when your avatar goes blurry, is a graphics thing - it can happen anytime you change any of the avatar layers. If it keeps on happening when you have not changed skin or clothes, then try clearing cache.

considering some of the actual shape settings used by both my mechanical and kitty selves.... oh yeah

fo some reason, despite the huge prim head to hide it, the makers of my kitty av's base shape desined to make the head very... conical and flat... rather disturbing to look at when SL takes it's time rezzing the head...

my bot self has a shape that is completely hidden in attachments, but the base resembles a cross between a grey alien and one of Larry Niven's Pak Protectors swolen joints etc... also a bit creepy when rezzing...

changing to or from either of these or worse, between them can be more than a little disconcerting to look at.

The one thing that seriously creeped me out in SL was someone who insisted on wearing an avatar that was essentially a mechanical skeleton, topped with a fairly normal looking Furry fox head. Looked like someone had carved away all the soft tissue below the neck, and somehow, horrificly, left the poor creature alive. Or beheaded someone and attached their head to some bizzarre high-tech lab experiment. *shudder*

It bugged me so much that the person who wore it in my presence is under threat of perma-banning from my sim if they ever wear that avatar on my land again.

Women want to pick up a Compsognathus???? Well, I never! I would much rather pet a beagle on my lap.

Although I got the best laughs of my life when I wore a Velociraptor av to a club one night and danced in it. Seeing a Raptor making those sexy dance moves is just hilarious.