Shapes - worth it?

Not quite, but almost. The skin is way more important than the shape in the appearance - whereas in your metaphor the paintjob is of less importance; it does not a materially alter the car, whereas the skin makes all the difference. I'd be pretty ticked off to get a car in matt emulsion, it's true, but the paintjob is just a cosmetic extra.

With shapes and skins, it's more like seeing the car advertised and buying it, only to find that all you get is an engine and some seats and the bare chasis; non of the body panelling that should go on the outside.

Ah, but for that you need a freezer and somewhere to mix everything up, and to be able to carry the freezer around with you everywhere you go just incase you fancy an icecream. Are you seriously saying that if you could make icecream appear merely with the power of your mind alone in real life, that you would still pay that $2?


I know it looks like I have a habit for picking holes in other peoples' metaphors, but that's a lot easier than coming up with my own

THAT .. depends on how big it is!

LOL Conan

Seriously though, I don't understand why people will pay so many lindens for things they can do themselves for free, in very little time too.

My rl g/f does it - I can make clothes, and make them well (even if I do say so myself), but she still insists on buying things others have made! SL is a world where you can make anything you like appear with no need for raw materials, nor much in the way of skill, when you get right down to it (let's be honest, making SL clothes, shapes, furniture and buildings is easy - skins and scripted devices are a bit harder); it's like being a sorcerer, and having the ability to make things appear simply by waving your hand (I love the way the avatar's had points at objects while you're making them - it really looks like they're working magic).

Still, atleast it's not rl money, that's one consolation.

we-ell, you can say that .. you and I and a lot of others here mebbe, can and do create/modify convincing shapes .. but I had to look in horror the other day .. someone had managed to make a CS Passport look .. well .. it was criminal, let's say?

Some people just don't have the dexterity or co-ordination I guess. They know when they see something they like but not all have that creative or technical bent?

Maybe it's just not so easy for some of us to make nice shapes. It's not that we don't know the difference between what looks good and what doesn't. But perhaps we lack the ability to discern HOW to make something good looking. It's all well and good to say that moving a few sliders will have you attractive in no time. But it's not exactly true. It does take some time, often a considerable amount of it too, to make something that is attractive and is what you want. Some people may lack the patience and may not want to spend the time.

I bought a shape. I love my shape. I'm not sorry for the $L I spent on it. Personally, I lack the patience it would have taken for me to make something I'd like even half as much. Also, my time has value as well. And for me, paying someone else for their time was worth it rather than using my own. In the end, this is what consumerism is all about. I'm sure in RL many of us could make some of the things we buy. We choose not to because our time has value as well. In the process we support others, fuel the economy, and get what we want. What's wrong with that?

As for buying things from other designers that you or your loved ones can and do make? Two points. First, variety is the spice of life. Each designer has a style and it's nice to be able to switch things up for yourself. Second, it's nice to support other players. Aside from rampant consumerism being plain old fun, it is a means of supporting the system. And it feels good to know that we all can be a part of that now and again.

Some tthings are easy for some, while not for others. Fact of life.

I paint..it's easy. People pay me for my paintings. I don't know why....it's so easy! But I'm glad that they do.

It really comes down to how someone wants to spend their time and money....since it is their time and money.

Why would I want to mess with something that I hate doing when I can spend L$300 and get one already perfect...or from a creator who will customize it for me?

Comes down to priorities.

And it is RL money. The time I don't spend messing with those annyong sliders is time spent making something that I enjoy and will eventually sell.


Best,
~Ari

Maybe it's just me, but I hate getting other people to do things for me that I can easily do myself. Particularly if it involves parting with money. Still whatever works for you. Shapes are particularly easy though. I think a lot of people are scared of trying. Painting and making shapes are two very different kettle of fish; one requires skill the other simply requires the ability to move some sliders with a mouse.
My advice to those people who, despite knowing what looks good, say they don't know how is simply this; just give it a try.
A lot of people I know are scared of ruining their existing shape. Simple solution - copy it as a backup. Then if the shape you make looks hideously deformed, there's no harm done.

I did consider exactly that, but decided it wasn't worth twisting the metaphor round.

I think "easy" and "quick" are sort of relative. It reminds me of an old story about Picasso:

A woman asked Picasso to draw her portrait and said that money wasn't an issue. Picasso grabbed a pencil and with a few quick lines sketched a beautiful portrait. The woman absolutely loved it, but became enraged when he charged her $700. She said "But it only took you a moment!" To which he replied "Madam, it took me my whole life." The point being that skill definitely plays a part in making skins and shapes, and the better you are, the more you are likely to charge someone for them.

The 'selling ice to eskimos' reference is right on target, but SL is full of yellow snow. I think for L$600, they should at least be modifiable (the only shape I've bought was for L$600 and was modifiable). I think that in most cases the shapes are shown with a skin because of makeup and nipple considerations, but I've seen some that did not include a skin and it was obvious that the six-pack was pretty much all highlight and shadowing (that's what I call false advertising).

Of course I've seen skins that weren't worth the $400+ they were going for, but were on decent shapes. I think it's all about having a good eye for what looks good and always buying something you can change whether it's a skin or eyes or a shape.

I'm starting a store that sells shapes and clothing, and I'm selling the shapes with a basic makeup skin (because that's what the display shows). I think that if the shape you buy looks really really horrible, I think you should flag the shop for abuse for false advertising.

But in the end most people are willing to pay something to buy a shape or skin or eyes instead of making one themselves. It's really the same situation as clothes: sure you can make them, but if you find something you absolutely love, why not buy it?

yup, I claim all responsibility for choosing an entirely inappropriate metaphor ..

.. I think I should be taken out back and thrashed ..

.. oops! that's a different thread!

A pedant writes:

It was actually James McNeill Whistler, who, in an 1877 court case was asked by a judge how he could charge 200 guineas for an afternoon's work. He replied that he was charging for the experience of a lifetime.

Many professionals could sympathize, I think.

By the same logic painting only requires the ability to move a brush with your hand.

No, that is not the case at all. It's a matter of degrees of freedom. Your paintbrush can go anywhere, with any colour, any stroke, any strength, and nothing but your eye to guide you.

Contrast with moving a slider from "fat" to "thin". OK I'll have 65% thin, next slider, please.

That's lovely that it's easy for you. But you need to stop and consider that just because something is easy for you and you are able to do it well, does not make it so for everyone. We are all different, thank heavens. So for you to say it is "particularly easy" and people should "just give it a try", is actually particularly dismissive of the fact that not everyone is exactly like you. If you find it so easy, then add shapes to your shops and be done with it. But it you shouldn't chastise everyone just because they don't have the exact same skills, abilities, and talents that you do.

And then you go out into SL, look around and realize how many people can't apparently do that, or can't be arsed to. Or maybe just like having disproportionate AVs.

Seriously if it's so easy to do for you, make a business out of it. If the idea of few hundred L$ for a shape is outrageous, charge 25 L$ or whatever. Beyond that it'd seem the thread exhausted its basic "it's soooooo easy and hence people charge too much" point some couple pages ago o.O;

And then you find that the next slider alters the same thing too, so you go back and change the original, but then it still looks wrong, and then the third slider makes a different part of your body look better, but ruins the look that the other two sliders provided, so you have to go back and change them again, and so on.

According to LibSL, a complete avatar has well over 218 slider-based degrees of freedom. That's getting pretty close to that paintbrush I think!

Hey, thanks for clearing up something I didn't understand. Please correct me if I got the wrong impression:

"Shape-only" is simply a set of slider settings, which I could do myself if I have the skill, and without using any additional programs (like the animator). Right?

If so, that's good to know, and glad I didn't waste any money on shapes. I was looking at a bunch of shapes for sale, and I couldn't tell the differences other than obvious slider adjustments. I assumed it was actually a modification to the underlying av model, or something like that.

When buying a skin, it's clearly best if it comes with a shape (to use or not), so you can see the skin using the shape it was designed for and modify shape at your own risk. But personally, I won't bother buying a shape by itself.

BTW, copies of RL shapes probably aren't to scale. I was surprised to find out that my av is 6'10", to scale (based on a "touch to find your height" object). Yet, when wearing it, I don't feel like I'm much above the average height for males. Well, no big surprise there -- men like to be tall.

Hmm basic AV shape is set with 78 sliders, each with 100 possible positions... i think each slider is associated with separate morph, but not sure. 100^78 means something like 1E+156 combinations. Obviously quite a few of these sliders are more crucial than others, but even taking extremely tiny fraction out of full range results in mind-boggling number of possibilities -- dropping down to 25 sliders and only taking 5 point sized changes (which makes very visible difference) ... that's something like 3.35E+32 shapes. Pretty good as far as freedom goes.

It's not easy for anyone who hasn't used a program like poser before. However, 500L seems a bit excessive unless they are throwing in a custom skin as well (which most seem to do).




I made my own shape when I first joined the game. I was pretty happy with it. I found out that my shape was only mediocre. I bought a shape for 1L$, made some tweaks and it's what I still use today. I would never pay 500L$, but that's me.


As somene else suggested, if you find shapes so easy to make, I would start a business selling custom shapes. Take it a bit further and make some basic skins to go with them, if you choose. My spouse makes creating skins look like child's work with Photoshop CS.

"Why would anyone buy a SKIN when they can spend 10 minutes making their own?"

(Just to avoid confusion, for the purposes of this post when I say "tweaking" I'm referring to the twiddling of knobs, sliding of sliders, or other adjustments made basically on a trial-and-error basis)

I don't think it's fair to try to argue the merits of tweaking on such a broad basis as seems to be going on in this thread. Doesn't mean anyone's wrong, however. In my experience (which, when it comes to tweaking, is considerable) you're dealing with a psychological inclination, not a quantifiable skill set or creative inclination or aesthetic 'eye' or anything else. Some people see a big set of sliders as an enumeration of variables, made that much worse when assigned to seemingly arbitrary values ("why doesn't the height slider just work in feet and inches?"), others are able to conclude that once they start tweaking a significant demand will be made of their time, and yet others just stay away from fiddly knobs and sliders because they've never been introduced and don't care to right then.
Conversely, some of us see a big set of sliders and a kind of obsessive-compulsive mechanism is activated; we're going to tweak the little bastards and we realize we'll likely never get it just the way we want it, because we keep accidentally overtweaking or misplace our little scraps of paper with disturbing ciphers and annotations scrawled on both sides. Other folks see that matrix of sliders almost like a puzzle; the challenge of figuring out how it works is as motivating as the actual result. There's even a worrisome subset of such folks who go to bizarre mathematical lengths to essentially rename the sliders' functions to suit their demand (the coders who made the av-height thingy and write scripts to figure out how fast a vehicle is moving in "real world" units, and perhaps the Masons) or make sense of things.

I seem to be a sucker of the highest order for software with tweaks. Photomanipulation, layout, graphic design and typographical concerns; sliders for everything, an insane amount of control. Audio: I can't even sit back and enjoy music without being tempted to go to work on Ozone, tweaking and sliding things I have no comprehension of. Now I'm getting my feet wet with Poser, and it's a big departure, but the siren song of the fiddly knobs is still strong enough to get me to waste a few hours making hideous Tupperware-featured, Charlie-Brown-haired, RealDoll-creepy 3D models that I have absolutely no utility for. The Twiddlin' O' Th' Knobs seems to be a comfortable retreat for my mind when I'm under stress and procrastination grips me. It's peculiar in that nothing even remotely like this happens when I'm away from a PC, but I digress...

Bottom line, I think, then, is that you're probably not going to become a tweaker if you're currently tweak-averse, and vice-versa. At least it doesn't happen within the design and photomanip circles I dwell in, where the topic infrequently arises. There's a strong "grass-is-always-greener" tendency that I urge you to resist; just imagine how much time you'd start wasting, or how silly it would seem not to tweak things in all that spare time you just earned.
Think instead of lollipops. They don't have worries like these.

Mmmmm.... lollipops.....

See, this worries me. When people first started selling "shapes" for a very long time my attitude was "WTF??" although I know a lot of people have difficulty with them, obviously. So, ok, convenience for the shape challenged or the lazy (I can make my own skin but bought it for the same reason, I was just too lazy). But this confusion on your part concerns me because I wonder how many newbies who don't know that these shapes are nothing more than someone else's slider settings are part of the customer base for these shapes. They think they are getting something extra.

I will also add that, aside from it making me feel like someone else was dressing me, that my other issue with shapes is that I find they must be tweaked to suit each skin. I can't keep my same exact shape from skin to skin, it has to be tailored to each one. And these shapes are no mod, correct?

I dunno. Maybe SL needs an Ivory Tower of Shapes, heh. Basic Proportion, "Saddlebags" in small doses are actually Good Things, How Tall? ect.

Wasn't somebody working on a set of notecards for this? A good attachment would probably be a little image that explained what each inventory icon stood for.

That seems to be a common misunderstanding among some noobies - in fact the shapes that are sold are simply the product of adjustment of the sliders just like the ones you make yourself, there is nothing "extra" added, no special software needed and no special modifications made to the underlying avie model. What you are paying for is someone else's vision and judgment of what makes a well proportioned and pleasing-to-the-eye combination of slider settings.

Its not like a skin where extra content in the form of handpainted or photorealistic textures come from an external source and are then manipulated in outside software like Photoshop to produce the skin.

I suppose that's my philisophical objection to buying a shape, it really should be so individual that to walk around knowing I am an identical clone of others wouldnt appeal to me, if shapes that were sold were adjustable then you could at least tweak them for individuality. While beauty is found in symmetry its also found in individuality.