Ever Been Disappointed in A High End Skin?

Ever Been Disappointed in A High End Skin?
Yes, when a friend pointed out it was a 5 L$ one.
I coulda been just as happy to have gotten it for 5 L$...not that I want to ever wear it again.

I own about 15 skins, all in the SinSkin Stratus line. I change often as each is part of a makeup set, and i wear one based upon the occasion or my mood. I have skins ranging from almost no makeup to "out on the town" skins.

I wear Namssor Daguerre / Second Skin Labs - as i never change it was well worth the investment, and you can get customisations for them to make them even more personal and unique. With SL as with RL you get what you pay for.

If you want a completely unique custom made skin expect to pay a designer RL prices

Actually, your alts, are where I saw the darker skins and was quite impressed with them, hence my utter disappointment in this lighter tone. Thanks for letting me know you were also not happy with the give-a-way.

Last night, I found out Caproni (I believe this is the name?) was giving away a free skin for just 24 hours. Gorgeous light tone that looks great on me. Great lip detail, nicely defined eyebrows and the body itself is lovely.

It was quite amazing to see the difference between these two higher end skins that I paid nothing for. The CS, will be in the trash shorty, that's for sure. No point in keeping something useless.

/me still loves my SinSkins Reasonably priced, amazing huge choice of makeups and just gorgeous! I can't even count how many I have at this point.

The problem with shapes is that most people has the thought that the skins should fit their shape, they don't want to change the shape and this thought i think is a bit wrong, I am not saying change completly the shape but a balance, I think skin and shape has to work togheter not separatly and lot of times just tweaking some things without loosing ur look pruduce a big changes, for example I was wearing my skin one day and I noticed my eyes were very streched, I tweaked a bit and the make up was even more powerful than before, just a small change in the shape cos I think I increased about 5-10 points but was a big change in the look.

Another common problem is that people that wear other skins, with time they adapted the shape to the skin they wear and when u put another skin is obvious wont look the same, for example before i do my skin I was wearing a RAC skin, when I puted mine the nose where bigger, and I was asking myself WTH if i did the nose with SL template. The problem was that the rac skin had the nose smaller than the SL template, so I tweaked and perfect, even I had more flexibility of doing it smaller or bigger.

Include shapes in the demos is a good idea, I am planing do it in the future, just hadnt time, but btw most people want their shape.

Besides this if shapes aren't enough, Linden Lab had the great idea of include Windlight, making all more dificult to make standard skins, I really don't have any idea how people look themselves when them try a demo, maybe they have a strange preset and they look ugly, maybe they ahve a good preset and they look awesome, the true is that the defoult lighting is pure shit, make ugly shadows everywhere and all the skins (no matter creator) looks almost the same, to not say that lights burns the skins. Linden Lab wanna make belive that designers should adapt to windlight, create a windlight optimized skins and all this are lies, lies cos there is no windlight standard, the light changes radically depending how u face the sun, the preset u put or the time light u put.

About the make ups in my skins I tried do to good make ups to justify the price again that they sometimes changes completly the look instead of just change color lips. the fact is that change colors for a designer is 5 min but 5 min in photoshop, uplaod,do the demos, the ads, set up all multiply this minuts for hours and hours. I really would like to find a system to offer cheaper make ups once time a people bought the skin ,so if someone knows one share it I have thought some things but are risky due the current piracy that is here in SL and the poor protection is offering Linden Lab.

P.S. I am glad u liked the ksin Elora

When I was new and had no lindens I spent months and months trying every commonly available freebie skin I could find. Only one suited my face shape so I stuck with it for almost a year, even though it was a bit crudely drawn.

There followed months of trying endless demos of posh skins, all of which looked terrible on me until I found just one that suited me - it's like a much more professionally done version of the original freebie, so I tend to wear it all the time. I don't know if it is high-end - it cost 1500. The only problem I have with it is that the nipples are placed slightly high which makes a couple of my favourite tops non PG (actually that's not always a problem ).

My alt has two skins from the same creator, whose name I can't remember offhand. Her skins are identical except that one has runny mascara because I like to make her cry.

I know my shape makes it difficult to find skins to suit me but I would never change my shape to fit a skin - for me, shape is the most personal thing about my avatar. I would never wear a premade one.

Consider also, the flip side. Why wear a premade skin? The relative simplicity in manipulating one's shape versus manipulating one's skin is probably the reason why people feel SO strongly about a particular shape. They made it, and it IS personal. Skins, on the other hand, are not so easy to whip up on a few sliders (unless the default skin is "teh hawts" for you). A lot of people have to buy a texture that someone else made. If one can make one's own skin, then the balance of the equation is very different. Shape and skin become a single unit instead of x versus y. They do not compete with one another, They compliment one another. As a skin designer, my perspective is somewhat different from the avarage skin wearer. I change my shape, gender, ethnicity, and age almost every day, all in the name of skinning. I see all aspects of my avatar as an extension of my creative mind. A truely "high end" skin/shape/avatar works as a single unit, not as separate units. Unfortunately, unless you can make it all yourself, that kind of skin/shape has to be comissioned at a hefty price.

I'll make a prediction that within 1-2 years things will be radically different. There will not be this skin versus shape dynamic for anybody.

Me too! I have a huge collection of SinSkins in the Aurora tone, and a few assorted others in Wisp. I love the freckly versions and the makeups are great. I started out with the no makeup freebie set they have for under 30 days old residents and still sometimes wear these. I don't know, they just go very well with my (self-made) shape. I'm very cautious with any skin more expensive than 1k and those I *have* tried mostly looked odd with my shape.

Remember that the primary reason that skins are not universally compatible with different shapes has very little to do with the skill of the skin texturers. It has a lot more to do with many limitation with the SL viewer's graphics.

The designer of an SL skin has to add highlighting and shadowing directly to the skin to make up for the crude avatar geometry, and severe limitations of lighting in SL. So truly the SL skin isn't just about skin color alone; it also has to provide an illusion of shape to make up for the deficiences in geometry and lighting.

Therefore, the SL skin necessarily has to be made with a specific shape in mind.

The highlighting and shadowing just don't look good when stretched out to fit a shape for which is it not meant.

With no highlighting and shadows on an SL skin, it's going to look flat, no matter what body shape upon which it is applied. (Sorta of like the noob skin that I got when I was new, before the upgrade in newbie skins.)

Before coming to SL, I had created skin textures for Poser figures. It was much easier in the sense that a skin texture for a Poser figure needs little, if any, shading and highlighting to define the shape. Therefore, a skin for a Poser figure tends to work pretty well, no matter the shape into which the figure is placed. The detailed geometry of the figure, plus the lighting availabe in Poser, did all the work of defining the shape.

I've done two skins for SL avatars. Both are so-so for personal use; I'd never try to sell them, they aren't worth exchange of a cent. They were far harder and more tedious than anything I had done for Poser figure.

So it's not necessarily true that more skilled SL skin designers could create skins more compatible with differing shapes. Sure, there are a few techniques. But for the most part, it is a limitation of the SL viewer, not the skin designer.

If the SL skin merchants did anything wrong, it's not providing a little bit of consumer education about how skins look better with specific shapes. There wasn't any kind of information on those lines when I first came to SL and did a lot of skin shopping.

Though I haven't done any recent skin shopping, in passing I've noticed a lot more skin/shape bundling, so maybe merchants are adjusting to help the customer understand the limitations of that which the customer is buying.

I went from newbie skin to my first skin. Not long ago a picked up a new skin from the same creator because I felt the one I had was too pale. Other than wearing animal shapes and skins, my human skin does not change.