Overweight Avatars

I'm going to post this to both complain a bit and to ask a little advice.

Full Disclosure: I'm a little new, so maybe these things have been discussed into the ground. If they have, I apologize.

In SL, my avatar is decidedly pudgy. Not just a ghetto booty, but all around the hips, belly, chest, etc.

First off, the skin textures stretch horridly when subjected to this. Specifically, the navel area doesn't work right, and areas around the chest and crotch get heavily bent out of shape. Does anyone have any experiences on how to get around this sort of stretching? I also get some nasty sitching problems that don't show up on the preview window. (Again, could we make the preview window reflect our current avatar? That'd be greaaaaat.)

Secondly, the base skeleton itself doesn't handle the sliders being so high up. When you, for example, give yourself big hips, you also get a cavernous amount of butt cleavage to go with. It's as if the hips are fully attached to the butt. Big enough to land planes in. I haven't figured any way around that. Is there? I have to settle for relatively narrow hips that don't give me a Grand Canyon down the tush.

Thirdly, the "Body fat" slider doesn't seem to affect the legs and arms that much - one has to bump up the musculature of those areas in order to make them proportionate...but then you're doughy about the middle, and rock-solid on the extremeties. X_x

...not to mention how badly wide hips destroy skirts.

I guess what I'm asking is, am I alone in these sorts of frustrations? From what I see, almost everyone else's "idealized self" is skinny. Any advice for getting around these issues, or should I make a proposal and see about at least getting some of the more frustrationg ones (The butt canyon and body weight slider) fixed?

I feel oddball for even asking, but....

Hi Wynne!

And now you know why everyone tends to be slender.

Yes, large AV = large amount of stretching, and no, there's no real way around it, since the very same texture has to fit every body.

It is possible to compensate for it a bit, by compressing the texture on those polys when you are making it. But since it's going to be stretched, the end result (at best) is a blurry texture.

And yes, the butt crack enlarges as the hips enlarge because... drum roll please .. the hips are attached to the butt!

All that's really happening, when you move the sliders, is polygon displacement. The amount and degree of displacement was determined by the person who designed the "morph" for that particular slider. A lot of them aren't the way I would have designed them, but, for a lot of them, there really isn't a good compromise with a low poly figure, such as the Avatar.

Avatars don't have skeletons in the way that real things do. They are nothing but mathematical descriptions of four point polygons, without any real volume. You can see this, if you camera into your Avatars head. There's nothing in there, except the mouth and eyeballs. The flesh is just a shell.

So, when the morph was made, the designer had to choose between stretching one or two polys a whole lot, or stretching a whole series of them just a little. Trust me; stretching one or two a lot would make the texture stretching problems even worse.

I can go more into the technical aspects if you'd like, but the short answer is;

Yeah, everyone who ever tried to make a heavy Avatar has seen this.

And no, there's nothing that anyone can do about it.

Sorry that I can't tell you how to solve it.

The main problem with having a big butt is the animations don't work properly and one's hands go through the hips while walking. One must use a different set of animations, which is a bit of a bother. (In fact I don't bother, but then again I'm always very busy.)

Also the heaviness only goes to approximately 375-400 lbs. and you must design a prim fat suit if you want to go further. (I know a couple of furries who have done excellent jobs with fur fat suits, but so far no humans yet.)

However, prim fat suits seem to be the way to go if you can attach the arms differently so they swing correctly, but I haven't experimented with this.

Hmm, well, I'm not shooting for the "huge" size at all, just a rather curvy one. I certainly didn't think the sliders went up *that* high.

Yeah, I've just come to live with the animations.

Compressing the textures is a good idea, I'll have to give that a try one night when I'm feeling adventurous. Thanks for the feedback.