Want Better Avatar Head

Um.. not talking about animation...btw
I see alot of great looking characters. Human characters whose face shapes don't look like anything I could come close to with the basic avatar attribute controls, no matter how much I played with them. Are these people creating or modifying their heads in some other way? And how can you make them change expressions, like the girl sticking her tongue out on the Second Life Banner?

Welcome to SL, Bastage!!

I think you might be talking about what are called "skins" in SL--custom-made avatars that are, in a sense, worn like clothes on your avatar. There are nearly limitless ways to customize your avatar many of which can extend beyond "attribute controls" or, as they are called here, "sliders."

In the second part of your question, you *are* actually talking about animations. You have folder of default animations (including one called "nayah" or something like that) in your inventory. Check under the heading "Library" in your inventory--you will find an animations folder that includes some of the basic animations (smiling, "wow," "no," "LOL," etc.).

I am moving your thread to "Textures" where you might find more intelligent answers to your questions.

If you need a Live Helper in-world, you can click on "help" at the top of your screen after you log in.

Best of luck to you.

So you can change the shape of your default head, without adding prims, changing sliders, or changing textures? The general shape of the head with all the default sliders pushed every which way don't seem to make a very attractive character. The defaults are okay, but who want to look like the default. And prims tend to look, well, too primmy for a detailed seamless head.

By "skins" do you mean textures on the avatars body or modelled shapes?

Can you change the default facial expression animations, or add new ones? Let's say I wanted to make my character cross his eyes and blow out his cheeks like a frog, could I do it?

How do you quote, just part of somebody's response... btw?

How about the stupid name I picked for my character, whilst in a rush to get started, can I at least change the first name.

Sorry no, you can't, but before you write off the sliders it's worth experimenting a little. The differences between two very different human faces are really quite subtle so maxing out the sliders isn't usually the best way to go.



Skins are simply textures, but you'd be amazed how much they affect your appearence - shading for example makes up for a lot of prim shape defficiency. You can buy complete AV shapes, but these are nothing more than bodies made with the Linden sliders you could do yourself, though again, subtlety in their use is the key and getting it right is quite an art.



While you can create animations for yourself in Poser, the face is not that controllable, but there are some preset options for facial expressions available to you.



I hit the quote button and then move the QUOTE tags around and edit the response in my reply.



Sorry, no again ! you could create an alt - another character for yourself and get it right this time, that's the best you can do.

Oh and welcome to Second Life !

Hi Bastage

If you want to have some fun with your face (and who doesn't?) and see some of the facial expressions that are possible, pop over to Yadni's Junkyard and look for his freebie Emote HUD attachment. You can even mix up more than one facial expression at the same time for some truely bizzare looks. If you have trouble finding it, message me in-world tonight and I will drop one on you.

Have fun!

Hi Bastage -

Human avatar characters are made up of two componants - the body, which includes the shape of the face and is setup using the sliders, and the skin, which is what covers the body from head to toe (not including hair.)

If you don't like what you can come up with using the sliders, you have the option to buy a body shape. Personally I find male avies a lot harder than female avies; I bought a male body shape from a store called Adam 'n Eve and it was great right out of the box.

The skins you get with your avatar are uniformly terrible. There are many, many skin vendors in SL; you can shop around and try demo versions at various stores. Its also worth looking through the skins at SLExchange.com or SLBoutique.com just to get a sense of what's out there - everyting from goth waifs to tanned body builders.

You guys have been very helpful. I have a much better understanding now. I bought one outfit, thinking it would modify my whole character. I thought it would change my hair and body and shoes as well. Oh well, lesson learned. The outfit looked so much better on the picture model. Hmm. I guess that happens in real life too. Too bad there isn't a try before you buy option. I'll have to check out this Emote HUD thing too. Sounds interesting.

So new question? Are Makeup and Tattoos the same thing? Can you have both without the same texture? There Textures right? Is it better to have a skin with no makeup on and then get makeup separate so you can change it separately?

Yeah, clothing, shoes, and accessories (usually prim attachments) are generally sold separately. Although there are hair sliders, the prim hair attachments are generally more robust and detailed than what the sliders can produce. Assuming yours is a male avatar, there aren't many hair designers out there. Lost Therian, Glossy Page, Lash Xevious and others make a few good styles - take a look at the Forum's New Products - Body Shop topic. Lastly, there aren't many options for try-before-you buy clothing items, but many skin and hair designers provide demo versions that you can try on before making a purchase decision. Those demos usually have the word DEMO printed all over the item, or as in the case of hair, the designer may apply some weird color streaks to signify a demo.

Best of luck!

No makeup and tattoos are not the same thing. A face full of makeup is part of the body skin. A tattoo is overlayed onto one specific body part.



No, it doesn't work that way. When you "buy skin" what you get depends on the vendor. Places like Nevermore and Celestial are selling you one skin - that's one makeup on it. Stores like Luxe and Adam 'N Eve are selling you a *pack* of skins - IE there will be 2 or 3 or 8 or whatever skins in the pack, all exactly the same except for the makeup. When you want to change your makeup, you change the entire skin but the only thing that *looks* different is your face. Generally skins run from 500 - 2000L.

Virtually every skin sold in SL makes your character bald. Once you buy a skin, you override the hair settings on the sliders, so that's it you have no hair. The hair you buy after that is really, for lack of a better term, a wig. Or for people like me who REALLY like hair, 54 different wigs You can take this hair on and off and change between them very easily.

Both skins and hair often come with demo versions you can try before you buy. Shoes and clothing, not so much.

Well, a makeup can be a tattoo too. I sold my makeup as tattoo for many months. Unfortunately there are few skins that allows you to put tattoo layers on top of them, without asking the skin creator to do that for you. Only two comes to mind right now - the default Linden skin and Second Skin Advanced. Both these resides locally on your harddisk - that's why tattoo layers is possible on them at all. Other skins use the tattoo layer to form a skin, so unfortunately you cannot put a tattoo layer on top of those (for upper and lower body you can put on tattoos as underwear, but for head you are out of options). LL have a huge avatar project going though, so we can only hope we will get more texture layers for head in some months.


Lis

Ummm... Sabrina, skins don't make the Avatar bald. Wearing a Hair that's been pulled back into the skull does that. I sell no-prim Hair to people who have skins all the time.

In fact, it works better if you have a skin because, for some reason, the Lindens decided to link the hair color with the factial hair color. So, if you make the hair color white (so that you can see the painted texture on the hair,) any facial hair (including the eyebrows) turns white as well. So I just eliminated them in the Style for the hair (since that's attached, too.)

I include eyebrows that you can put on the Tattoo layer, for people who are wearing the Linden default skin, but I'm afraid that's all I can do.

Because, ummm, yeah. The Tattoo layer is, in fact, the same as the Skin layer. People who are wearing tattoos over their skin are either using the Default Linden skin, some other skin that resides on the client's hard drive, or the tattoo is actually on a piece of otherwise transparent Underware.

The Lindens have been promising us multi-layered skins (and maybe garments?) for some time. But, if you take a look at the list of Known Issues in the last update, I'm guessing that they have their hands full at the moment.

So we'll be waiting a while longer for that.

(Oh, and I sell hair for guys, too. Low or no prim, in several styles. )

As was stated above, you have your shape and your skin. The skin makes a LOT of difference in how good the shape looks...especially in the face. It's all in the shading of the different features. The shading is so effective that it can make noses look bigger or smaller, or rounder or pointier...just to name one area.

As a (minor) shape maker, I play with different skins on each of my shapes to find the look that I think works best...of course, everybody's eye is different, so your best bet is to work with a shape and then get as wide a variety of demo skins as you can. They're usually sold for L$1, so you can get a LOT of demos to work with. When you find the right skin, then buy it!

Also, please realize that when you change one attribute in your shape, you may have to alter others to keep a nice balance. On a female, if you widen the hips, you may have to shorten them, add saddle, change belly and waist...and on and on, until you find what you're looking for. Even working off a picture can be difficult, because of the interrelation of the features.

Faces can take quite a while to get just the right look, just because of the very large amount of details in the features. The best thing to do is work on it a while, take a snap, and put it away for a while. do something else. Then go back and look at the snap to get a feel of the whole and see what you may need to alter.

Take notes, write down the numbers of the sliders, and play, play, play. If you have a specific look in mind, you'll eventually get it. Just don't quit.

Yeah I can't get my face right. I got the shape of the face the way I want and the nose the way that I want but the nostrils have some sort of subtle rectangle boundary around them that makes it look like the nose was plugged in like a Lego piece.

I'm hoping that after deciding on a skin to buy that shading may take care of that.

If you go to Yadni's make sure to set your graphics settings low in Preferences. I loved all the fun free stuff (my inventory hates me for all the noobie freebies) but I was getting frames per minute. Let's just say it's a dense environment.

One way to find places to shop for really good quality things is people's profiles! Odds are that person with the photo-realistic skin, great hair or interesting clothes (or amazing house or anything) might have links to their favorite stores/malls in their Picks tab.

A lot of people are pretty cool about giving you a link or a landmark if you ask nicely where to look for things.