Question, about models

hey what's up, i have a question why are there only templates for female models ?
for clothing and stuff ? Is it same concept ?

Because, technically, all SL Avatars are females. Males are just morphed females in this reality. Seriously!

oh ok i was thinking that at first but it didn't make much sense to me i mean... blah you know what I mean lol.

I had the same question when I first started designing for SL. I think LL doesn't WANT us to design for men or something!

I am interested in doing modelling. No female turning to males here.

edit: base av is female all default avs are..but I haven't even met male portraying models on here yet...

Wait. You will.

(Or you already have, and don't realize it. Lots of the females you meet, even the ones that look like models, are actually guys playing women. Just a Fact o' SL Life. )

Must be the reason my avi turned into a woman twice when I went to a new region! LOL!

If by "this reality", you mean SL, you might be interested to know it doesn't stop there. If you'd care for an interesting tidbit of useless trivia, the fact is RL males are just morphed females too. No joke.

All fetuses start out as female. At a certain point during fetal development, those with a Y chromosome become specialized as male, while those without remain unchanged. This happens well after the spawning of the mammary glands, by the way, which is why males have nipples. Yes, guys, you do have mams. They just remain undeveloped without estrogen in your system. (So, if for any reason, you might want boobs of your very own, you can take pills to grow them. Again, no joke.)

Also intersting is that it's not just our bodies that start out the same, but our brains as well. At a certain point in the pregnanacy, if the presence of a Y chromosome is detected, the fetus is given a hormone bath which changes brain physiology from female to male. Specifically, what happens is much of the corpus collosum is dissolved, effectively severing most of the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain. This is why men tend to seperate their emotions from their logic, and why women tend to amalgomate the two.

If you want to know why males and females tend to have trouble understanding eachother at times, there's your answer. Our brains are quite literally wired in completely different ways. In short, the male "OS" is lenear, and the female "OS" is random access. There are, of course, plenty of benefits and drawbacks to both.

For benefits, the segregation grants males a greater capacity for single-minded focus, which in evolutionary terms, provides an advatage as a hunter. For females, the more integrated structure makes for a much better ability to multi-task, which to go back to evolution, makes them better at keeping track of and caring for a tribe full of children.

As for the drawbacks, well, those are a pretty easy to point out. Just ask any coupled heterosexual what bothers him or her the most about his or her spouse, and you'll get a nice long laundry list. For a quick example, one of the things I was fascinated to learn is that in males there is no direct connection between the right hemisphere and the speach center, which is why males tend to find it difficult to talk about their feelings. Every word that comes out of a male mouth is authored by the left hemisphere, the logic center of the brain.

Since the right hemisphere contains the emotion center, and since the right hemisphere has no access of its own to the speach center, anything the the emotion center wants to say must first be sent to the left hemisphere, and then the left hemisphere has to repeat it to the speach center. Since the left hemisphere is logical part of the brain, it is obviously incapable of understanding what the emotional part wants to say, and quite a bit gets lost in translation. The resulting text that comes out of the mouth is only a vague approximation of the feeling, a logic-based interpretation of an emotion, not the emotion itself. This allows men a buffer to carefully prepare their thoughts before speaking, which can be a good thing, but often it's a forumla for deep frustration.

Females, on the other hand, not only have a direct connection from the emotional center to the speach center, but an uber-broadband superhighway that happens to be one of the fastest, shortest, and strongest connections of any in the entire brain. This is why women are able to say what they feel without thinking. They can just let it spill. Sometimes that's good, but often it's not.

Say what you want about the strengths and weaknesses of each emotion-to-speach wiring plan, but one fact is undeniable. Put the two together, and arguments inevitably follow. Ain't neurobiology grand?

Anyway, I could go on all day talking about this stuff, since it's a subject that I find to be absolutely fascinating, and I'm pretty well read up on it, but I'll give it a rest since this is all way off topic. If you're wondering why I know this stuff, by the way, well, without going into too many details, I'll just say there was a time a few years back when my significant other and I were having some issues in our relationship. When it got really bad, I made it a mission to read everything I could get my hands on regarding male/female interaction so I could learn how to solve the problem. Most of the books focused on psychology, of course, but a couple of the really good ones also talked about the physiological reasons behind the psychology. That was about ten years ago, and we've been happily together ever since, so I'd say the information was valid.

Okay, Discovery Channel interlude over. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming. Yes, there is only one avatar model, Ruth. To create the male avatar, Ruth gets morphed. Most notably, the sculpt deformers in her chest are reduced, one in her groin is enlarged, her hips are straightened, and her face becomes more angular. This is not unusual in character modeling at all, so don't feel like LL had some sinister female plot in mind. It's just that turning a female model into a male is MUCH easier than going the other way around.

As for texturing, yes, it's all the same concept. Don't let the templates fool you. Just because they appear to have slightly wider hips and a narrower frame than the ideal might have, and there are some unnecessary UV's in the chest area, and a noteable lack of "manhood" in the crotch doesn't mean anything. Those chest UV's can remain flat, just fine, the frame will expand, the hips will be straight, and if you're really concerned about the "package", well, prims work perfectly well for that. Just operate on the templates like it's a coloring book, color in the lines, and everything will turn out fine.

Wow, it really IS the Discovery Channel!

Anyhoo, yes, you’re very much correct, and it’s nice to hear someone else rattle off all these details so I don’t think I’ve gone completely batty….

And yes, the physical differences in both body and brain (resulting in changes in behavior… hee, I guess this post has been brought to you today by the letter “B”!) seem to exist to support grand old reproductive function: Men are geared to hunt, protect, and procreate wildly, while women are designed to create a stable environment so that the children might thrive and mature to perpetuate the species.

(I suppose that comes across a little dry and doesn’t sound politically correct, but I’m afraid it’s what the physiology supports.)

I still vividly recall one recent science show about gender differences where the producers pulled men and women equally from their office and had them attempt to park a small car in a very cramped space along the street. The men consistently parked the car in a third of the time that the women needed to squeeze it in. (Men are designed to operate spatially, so that they can better navigate/hunt and deal with physical challenges.)

I should just point out the obvious, for which I seem to have a special talent for (thank you very much): There is a broad spectrum of gender expression in human beings across both genders, and so you will find some very sensitive artistic males as well as some very linear and “tough-minded” females that seem to break the stereotypes. The extremes are easy to describe, but individuals are more spread out and not as cleanly described.

What is amazing is that artistic males may be able to vocalize their emotions because they seem to use both halves of their brains, but in many ways they still have the “flavor” of typical males in how they interact with other poeople. And the same with “hard-minded” or linear-type females – a woman can seem very hard in how she deals with her work and life in general, but her relationships still look different from men who possess the same degree of hardness.

Anyway… I suppose we have now veered WIDELY off course… but it was fun.

Discovery Channel at 3AM
We have covered, male and female psychology and physiology but like all things in life, sometimes things go awry. All fetuses start out as female and while they grow, they are exposed at different times to specific hormones that effect the development of the brain or sexual organs. For the vast majority, these hormones are released with in normal tolerances at the right times, resulting in male or female. The odds of things going awry are alot higher then you might think, it's in the range of 1 in 100 for minor abnormalities and up into the 150,000 for major abnormalities. The abnormalities can be in the brain or groin. For the last hundred years it has been it has been common practice to assign a sex to baby at birth, when it is vague. This can lead to confusion and depression later in life when the brain doesn't match the body (man trapped in womans body or vice versa). The condition I have described is called Intersex, I've probably not done it justice in the description. For people with this medical condition a sex change operation may bring relief.

About this time last year I learned on of my friends was traveling down the path to get a sex change, citing intersex as the reason; and at the time not knowing anything about what it was I set about the task of finding out. I'm glad I did.

This doesn't have much application to SL but it does explain the psychology behind some of it's residence. IMHO out of respect for the hunders of thousands (if not millions) it shoudln't be a radio box choice of male or female but a slider bar.

Yes.


To think that I almost missed this imformative discussion because I thought this thread was about fashion modeling.

my personal opinion of the default Ruth avatar is this: Its easier to 'add' a penis than 'remove' one and retexture. Its also easier to adjust the breasts to a male model than to add them from a male default. "Ruth' technically isn't a female avatar but a gender nonspecific.. a blank slate. It appears feminine because most see androginous as female. (I've seen Herm, shemales, and adrogonous avs in game as a finished project as well)

Very interesting discussion!

But, as I've said before (and will probably say again,) fetuses don't start out as female and become male in the presence of testosterone. That would mean that they start with ovaries and fallopian tubes and uteri, which would somehow morph into the male counterparts. That's not what happens.

They start out as undeveloped, and if there's testosterone (or enough other androgens to mimic testosterone,) the bit that is developing at that moment develops as male. If there's not (or if the fetus is immune to the effects of androgen (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome)), that part develops as female.

This is true no matter what the chromosomes (XY, XX, XXY, XYY, XXXY etc.) say. And yeah, those aren't typos. Although the majority of people have either XY or XX, there are plenty that have extra "sex" chromosomes. In fact, people can have up to six extras before the fetus is no longer viable. (Since many people with multiple chromosomes don't know that they have them, no one is sure exactly how common this is. But it's common enough that 3% of the men who go for infertility treatment turn out to be infertile because of extra chromosomes. But I guess, if the 1999 "One Man One Woman" ruling by the Texas courts stands, and only people with XX or XY chromosomes are allowed to marry in the US, we'll find out when the testing starts.)

As Strife pointed out, things don't always go smoothly, and gender isn't as simple as we've been led to believe.

One of the things that I find very interesting, and is rarely discussed, is the brain differentiation; especially the parts that make us "feel like" males or females. It seems that is determined by the BSTc region of the brain, and is "hard wired" during fetal development.

There is even some evidence that the brain differentiation begins very early on, possibly even before fetal hormones are produced, with the hormones (when they come along) acting to modify the pre-existing differentiation. Studies indicate that that interaction might be what gives us our "gender identity."

When that doesn't match with the physical characteristics, we have transgendered or transsexual people. Lynn Conway has estimated that the incidence for transsexual people (women who have the bodies of men, and vice versa) could be higher than 1 in 500. (See this page for more about that. In fact, if this topic interests you, take a look at the whole site.)

Fascinating stuff.

This concludes this segment of the Discovery Channel. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Graphics forum.

It's been more years than I care to remember since I studied embryology - but by and large I have to agree with Robin. A foetus starts our neutral and in the presence of the right hormones develops to be male (that's more than just testosterone, although that's the main one). In the absence of those male determining hormones it produces other hormones (the androgens kill the receptors I think, but it might be the producing cells too) causing development of the ovaries etc.

There are, IIRC, some other funny bits that happen - Chosen's quite right about mammary tissue and male nipples for example, it's obviously not an evolutionary disadvantage. The people that describe the clitoris as the female penis are also, broadly speaking right at an embryological level - it's the same somite that develops into the relevant body part in males and females and the nerves that feel sensation are very much the same ones.

Robin's list missed out the X0 apparent females, several versions of XX males or apparent males (Freemartins and those with the APR transfered onto an X chromosome) - it's a whole mishmash of fun things that can go wrong out there! Freemartins are more usually found in cattle - twins are more common and errors of placental separation too, but it's when an otherwise genetically female foetus is exposed in utero to her twin brother's male producing hormones, leading to a phenotypically male development although rarely to fertility. The APR is a genetic reassortment issue - the somatic chromosomes undergo recombination in gamete production, and so do X and X chromosomes. X and Y rarely do (huge differences in size make it tricky). When they do one of the commonest viable outcomes is the X chromosome picks up the part of the Y chromosome that is responsible for producing the androgens (APR) and so the foetus develops entirely normally as a male because it has the right hormones around, although often as a male with reduced fertility for other reasons. When they go to be tested for infertility they show up as female on the tests, or they did until this was discovered and is now tested for. I've forgotten the current name for this syndrome, it's obviously changed a bit, if I can dig it out on google I'll edit back in here.