Male Skins???

Wow a simple Question. and I should know but im lazy

Ok I have had DFO Dragonfly skins that I like a whole lot from about my 2 month rezday. Lately, or well since I really started doing close up shots I noticed that the nose and face are not good at all. I have not changed my shape at all ( well until I saw this and tweaked the sliders a bit on the nose. So here is what I am seeing (how do I post a pic?, cant anymore hu?) my guess 1st is they are not the best skins on the facial features.

the nose looks like it is ripping through the skin ! well or michael jackson ROFL as well as silly eyelashes and the EYES themself pop out the bottom of the lid (maybe a bigger head?

at the edge of the nostrils unless I make a bubble nose. this started as I can tell after 1.16 and me going to windlight and now voice first look.

I have done clear cash, rebake in client tryed 6 of 10 DFO skins I have (mind you I LIKE THESE SKINS!)

if its just a glitch I will live with it, if its the skins, can I get some sugestions on male skin shops that have non hairy bods good chest and bod details, assortment of facial hair (not just 6 diffrent gotees) I have been to AMAN and the facial hair is sub par, I go full and 5'oclock most the time .

So I am ready for a skin that has a better nose and eye area texture.

Good avatar appearance is based on a combination of shape and skin. It is quite possible to have a good skin and a good shape, and have teh combo look awful, because they weren't desigend for each other.

Almost every skin seller offers demo skins to test with your shape. Since you already appear to have your skin, I'd suggest makin subtle changes to hide those glitches.

yeah warda I have and they didn't used to be there looking back through a year of pics, can skins go corrupt? and I did the shape 8 ways (have them all saved as well) dosent seem to fix it. I tryed turning bump/cloth/shine/av vert off on diffrent combos as well. seems really odd I know it was fine before looking at snaps.

and I always buy demos and really look them over.

The eyes popping out of the bottom of the eyelid are not due to the skin, but your shape. In certain poses my eyes kind of show through below the eyelid as well and looks like a white sliver. Its from my shape, not my skin.


Eyelashes, i dont own a dragonfly skin so i cant really comment about what exactly youre referring to, but i will say that eyelashes are ugly in SL. unless you get some nice prim ones which seem to be geared toward women, of course. You can actually go into appearance and edit/hid your eyelashes.


Theres not much for the male skin market. just search "Male skins" and take a look around, be sure to try demos and play with the lighting to see what suits you best but you may have to mod your shape a little, by hiding the eyelashes and making your eyeballs smaller, to get what you`re looking for.

Try CMFF or Naughty Designs if you're looking for a realistic male skin. Both are well known, established stores for a reason. =)

As Jesseaitui says though, it sounds like your shape is a problem in some respects. Demo skins usually cost 0L or 1L so it should be easy to verify whether that's the case (by trying others on).

I recently plunked down a hefty amount for Adam from Second Skin Labs, and I'm really happy with it. It looks very real, and the set comes both with and without body hair. The only complaint I have is there's no bald head option. But the hair is short enough that many prim pieces will cover it entirely or else come close enough that what does show just looks like the natural edge of the hair. (plus it looks good enough to go without prim hair at all sometimes.)

I used Dragonfly skins for a while, and will continue to for certain looks when I need them, but I don't like them as much as I did.

And lighting - bad lighting will made even an awesome shape/skin look bad, particularily the face.

My advice for people is face west - force Sunset and look at your face - see if it still looks hideous, or does it look "right"?

If it looks right with proper lighting then no amount of shape changes or new skins is going to fix it.

I use avatar lights now so that I look mostly right from all sun levels. I got sick of adjuting the sun based on where I was standing.

and unless the rest of the people in world are also forcing sunset, then you're only going to look good to yourself. I got an avatar light too.

I have noticed that since the last upgrade, I'm getting some nasty shadows at times that look hideous... I never noticed them before.

Definitely. I take all my product shots in "Sunrise" facing East. I look ugly as a mug in noon.

That's just staying up too late playing SL!

Oh sorry, you mean your avatar?

I do the face west trick. Forcing daylight seems to highlight angles and dips atrociously.

Second ND. They include a notecard specifically recommending eye area settings to avoid above pitfalls.

Aitui skins have very detailed faces, I would probably have one myself but I'm not keen on the fact that some of the skins have eye make up! They've got a stall at Devilfish.

Have you tried the skins at FKNY? They're fun!

I have Antonio right now, new purchase and I'm in lurrrrve with it, everyone thinks I'm hot...

w00t!

I LOVE eye make-up. Or rather, my main does. This Object guy walks around as milk cartons and stuff and eyeliner tends to curdle his contents.

My problem with being a human male in SL right now is that every other guy is likely to be wearing the same skin unless there's some really unique feature that turns other guys off. Having been brought up during the revivalist mod era, i'm not averse to a touch of male eyeliner so my trademark skin looks like this:

http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=163921

..which most people said was really cool without me even asking for an opinion..

This week I went for a "just been in a pub fight" skin:

http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=179828

I like it too but people don't seem to approach me when I'm wearing it.

Ideally I'd like to wear skins I made myself, but after two months working on one I'm still struggling to come close to the design benchmark set by Lost Thereian. I don't want to make another Dante. I don't want to rip him off. I want to make something unique which is as beautifully shaded and finished as his. I'll get there one day.

@ Rigrunner- Glad to see you like how my skins look. I`m not sure I understand your post though. Only a very small percentage of my skins have eye makeup, the rest actually come without anything added to the eyes. The customers can purchase a demo pack and then buy a non demo skin from there. If they do not like eyeliner/eyeshadow they can simply buy my skins which do not come with eyeliner/eyeshadow...all can be demod before making a purchase Devilfish is great, im happy to have a stall there I do also have a main shop on the sim: Aitui. If anyone is interested in checking it out.


@ Object- Good luck on the skin, they are a lot of work. Actually when FNKY released his skin he was accused of ripping off the "Dante" line. I would not worry too much about your skin "looking like dante" to be honest with you. I can understand striving for something different, as I did, but if you make a high quality male skin (Photorealistic one to add) they will all look similar in a way though still having their differences. I can easily tell a dante skin from an antonio, but there are people who can not. If you arent doing anything "wrong", your skin will come out original.

MANY skin designers in SL use www.3d.sk and thats actually where Lost got the reference photo for Dante. Funk did not use that photo for his Antonio line. When you use 3d.sk for your source, you risk someone else in SL using that same source. Theres a male skin designer in SL who im pretty sure used the same source used in "dante"...perfectly legal as Lost does not own exclusive rights to the images on 3d.sk but probably in ones best interest to use your own face as a source, or a friends face... Something not anyone can get their hands on.


I guess what im trying to say is... "Dante" got into the skin market when there were no other male skins..atleast not many good ones. This is why you see dante everywhere. Then, when someone released something as high quality as dante, he was basically stoned (not that kind). But thats changing today with more people catching on that "hey the men need skin too!". The more talented people who make male skin, the less unique male skins will be. I definitely dont want to see another "dante" in the market, and you agree, but if youre going to do a high quality male skin..in ways, they will look similar and i dont think theres any avoiding that. Let us know when/if you release a skin. It would be interesting to see.

In addition to the risk to the designer of someone picking the same model as source, these photorealistic skins are just too *identifiable* for comfort, with the result that one recognizes one's own skin on other avatars all the time. And the better the skin, the more recognizable it seems to be, regardless of avatar shape. Somehow I don't mind if others wear the same clothing or hair, but find it quite disconcerting to meet a total stranger wearing the same skin.

Making a photorealistic skin from scratch and doing it correctly pretty much entails using some heavy-duty 3D modeling software (in addition to standard 2D graphics) and a lot of time. (Access to the model photo sources is relatively inexpensive, which I found surprising.) Understandably, to protect their work, skin designers don't distribute full-perm textures with their skins, so buyers are hindered* from customizing their very expensive skins. There are offers to create one-off, fully custom skins, but the cost is understandably astronomical.

I think there's a business opportunity here somewhere, but really can't work out how to capitalize on it.

__________
*"Hindered" but not entirely prevented, of course. And if the product is only for the buyer's personal use, it's well within "fair use" of copyrighted material. But there's no way to restrict the *methods* to personal use, which makes the topic very sensitive.

But why did you buy a mole skin in the first place? What did you expect?

/me re-reads thread title

Ooops! Sorry.

Definitely Naughty on Naughty Island. And if you don't like them, just do Search - Places - Male Skins. There are a few good skinners for men out there.

There definitely is, but it would require LL to make changes to the way skins work (which many of us have been begging for literally for years now). What we need is for tattoos to be separate inventory items the way skin and clothing are, that could be used over skins, regardless of the permissions set on the base skin. You could buy a base skin you like and then go somewhere else for facial hair, or scars, or tattoos, or makeup, or any other overlay, and it wouldn't have to be created by the same content maker.

It would also massively reduce the load on the asset server since currently every variation of a skin requires a whole new skin to be assembed. As an example, I sell a skin that comes with four different eyebrow colors and optional tanlines. That means for every single makeup version, I have to assemble eight skins (each eyebrow color with and without the tanlines). There are 34 makeups available for it so that makes a total of 272 separate versions of just that one skin. With an overlay system in place that could be reduced to 1 version of the skin and 38 available overlays (4 eyebrows, and 34 makeups).

If and when we ever get a more sensible system like that, it will open up a whole huge secondary market for skin add-on products. Why we're still waiting for LL to see the light on that after four years of asking for it is quite beyond my simple powers of comprehension.

I made it easy (but slightly less realistic) by keeping eyebrows and pubic hair transparent. The basic avatar skin color under the skin texture can be set to almost every natural hair color in the apperance menu, except for real white (looks rather like very light pink). Lips can also be almost transparent except for some highlights, to allow lipstick adjustments. Still need to figure something out for the eyeshadow though. Perhaps a prim based solution. For beards, prim beards would be an option too. Hard to adjust for different head shapes, but they could be made of different parts attached to chin, nose, ears etc.