Parameters to decide a shape of an avi

To set up a shape for an avi you change the parameters of the different parts in shape under apperance. I have had a dicussion with an other shape constructor about that.

I thought that if you set all the parameters in the same way for to different avis with the same skin the shapes you will get is similar. But she told me that it isnt so. You can get different shapes depending on what base shape you start with. So if you have different base shapes (I dont know what that is?) you get different results even it you set all the parameters to the same value.

I understand that this is not impossible because if you have a shape and change from male to female the resulting shape will be quite different with the same parameters.

So maybe there could be more than one male or female shape as a base. If so how do I get these different base shapes?

/Perl

Your friend is wrong. If the skin, slider settings and gender are identical, then the avatars will be identical in shape. (Hair, eye color, and other differences notwithstanding.)

There's only ONE "base shape" in SL, and it's a female called "Ruth". When you choose "Male" in the appearance controls, it applies a large number of unseen morphs to the baseline of almost every slider setting in the appearance controls, to warp that female into a male. There's also a handful of sliders that only affect one gender, and are only visible when that gender is chosen (such as breast size for females, and "Package" for males). The hidden settings for the other gender are still present, just not acted upon or visible unless you toggle the slider settings.

With any male, the same slider settings WILL create an identical body and face shape on another male. Same with any females that have the same settings as another female. But if you take the male and change it to female, or vice versa, the body shape and face shape looks completely different, because of the presence or absence of the female-to-male morphs..

Different skins can make the exact same shape and gender settings look different, because we get a lot of visual cues from shading and coloration when we look at a textured low-poly model, and we extrapolate "details" that aren't really there, based on that visual data. But if you took two make characters with identical slider settings that had different skins, and that seemed different in that case, and changed nothing but to have them both wearing the same skin, or a plain solid color skin, you'll see that they are really identical after all.

What Ceera said.