My real morphology for my avatar

Hello,

I would like my avatar to have the same body and face morphology as me.
I know that it is possible to create a 3D model from a couple of pictures.

- How is the best result achieved, with those softwares or with the built in appearance editor ?
- What are those softwares and what are the main steps from taking the pictures to the final SL avatar ?
- Am I limited to what's possible in the built in interface ?

PS : I don't care about my real skin since I want my avatar to have a monochrome and alpha skin.

Something extra to keep in mind...

In the real world, you look the way you look *relative* to all the people around you. This is the way human brains work.

So, in SL there are two somewhat different "real life" avatars of interest.

One is your real, real life measurements. Say your real height is 6 feet. Then make an avatar that is 6 feet tall.

But, there is also the relative you. In real life, 6 feet is 10% taller than average. Therefore, in SL, you should be 10% taller than average, which might be 7 feet.

Regards.
lee

Lee - your comments on relativity of appearance in SL vs RL caused me to laugh. I am 5'7" in RL.

When I was a dripping wet newbie and attempting to fix myself up I set my height to 57, assuming that meant 5'7". Much to my horror a few days later a height script at the shelter showed me to be 6' 2'. LOL

I am still 57 (whatever that is in SL) and amazingly, shorter than most people.

Those height scripts must be like RL scales. I know I am five lbs lighter than what that stupid scale says.

Jen

Height is affected by multiple factors, including the body "Height" setting, leg length, torso length, hip height, and head size. No one slider affects the total height in a way that can relate to the end result.

If you get an Avatar Ruler, (free in a lot of freebie boxes), it will report your height when you touch it. But what it reports is your eye level, and not the height to the top of your head, or to the tips of the rabbit ears on the furry avatar that you're wearing, or to the top-most curl on your prim wig. So to get an actual height of 5'7", you'd need to habe the avatar ruler report something closer to 5'3".

The only good way to measure your height is to streach a prim out next to you, and convert it's metric height to feet and inches.

Bear in mind though that most people believe what the avatar ruler says, and as a result most other people in SL are 15% to 20% taller than real life. The average height in Sl is over seven feet, if accurately measured.

Interesting, Ceera. I didn't realize that was the eye-level height.

But to answer the original question;

Napple, the only way to change your avatar shape is with the in-world sliders found in Appearance.

There is no importation of meshes, from any other 3D program, into SL.

There are a few things that will read your mesh, and build it out of flattened prims, but they are very prim-heavy, and not recommended for building an avatar, since there will be no smoothing between the polygons. In other words, you'll look faceted. If that's the way you want to look, it's fine; but since you want to match your RL appearance, I doubt it will be accurate.

So Sliders are the only way.

Speaking as someone who has a day job working in 3D, don't confuse SL with a "real" 3D program. It was all built very much with the amateur in mind. Most of the tools you might be used to using in 3D simply don't exist here.

You can't even import a Morph for your AV, like you would in Poser, let alone import a whole new mesh.

Sorry that I can't give you a better answer.

Hope this helps,

Interesting Ceera. So if most people are seven feet tall, how come we look like children in most SL furniture. LOL No need to answer, I was just pointing out another of SL-RL inconsistences.

BTW - I am happy with my height, whatever it is.

Jen

To attempt to answer the OP's question... Yes, you are pretty much limited to the SL interface to create your 'look. And while it's an amazing technology that we can change our avatar's faces and bodies in real time it's still a fairly crude tool. Your best bet is to get as close as possible to the look you want and put on an avatar UV map skin (Chip Midnight and Robin (Wood) Sojourner offer great avatar UV maps for free). Then take a bunch of photos of the av from different angles, fire up your favorite graphics program and set about making yourself a skin using the UV map photos and photographs of your own face as reference.

Custom skins can make all the difference and can make up for many of the 'flaws' in the mesh itself. They aren't easy to make...expect to pull some hair out especially if you're not used to texturing for 3D...but it can be very rewarding.

As far as avatar height... My avatar measures in at 4'9" which by my estimate brings me close to my RL height of 5'2" (me no good at math). In SL terms I'm so short that it's not uncommon for people to think I'm trying to be a child...in spite of my having hips and breasts. In fact, I actually had to up my breast size from 'realistic' to 'dubious' in an attempt to avoid being taken for a child. Imagine if in real life your height and breast size determined a woman's age!

Thanks you for not wasting my time with off topic blabla.

I don't want to use prims for my avatar's body, and you say that mesh can't be imported, so what can be, skin ? clothes ? hair ? what else ?

You can import texture files that can be applied to the various 'layers' on an avatar to create skin and clothing. Good textures can make a huge difference be it on an avatar or object. The stickies at the top of this forum contain great information to help you get started should you be interested in creating your own. And the folks here are always willing to help should you get stuck and need assistance!

You can also import animations (provided they are in the correct format) and short sound bites. You can stream audio and video to parcels you own.

While they aren't imported you can create scripts using the "Linden Scripting Language" (LSL) to perform functions from the very simple (eg...opening a door on a click) to very complex (eg...entire combats systems).

Anything built in SL is pretty much dependent on the in-world editor. Robin mentioned an alternative 'importer' but even that is dependent on the basic 'prim' building block to function. However, with the basic building blocks and clever texturing people have created some incredible stuff from whole avatars to fairly realistic sim-wide builds.

One person's "off topic blabla" is often another’s valuable information. There is much to learn in Second Life.

Jen