Xeriko in CZ Slim and some Gild stuff

Alternative mesh bodies: The good and the other ones

When it comes to appearances in SL, it’s always been easier for me to assume something akin to what my RL counterpart is also familiar with. Surely it’s not the same for everyone but, for me, it works just fine. That’s why I’ve stuck to a human-inspired form rather than any other possibility. That’s also why I’ve tended towards slender body frames instead of the predominantly, maybe “sexier” looking, stocky types favored by similar-minded folks in compliance with the male-oriented spectrum. Fortunately, today there are plenty of mesh bodies in SL to conform to any proportions, and this post is sort of a thank-you note to those designers normalizing “slenderism” in SL.

The male market —for mesh bodies, that is— is currently divided between three popular brands. Judging by a quick look at fashion blogs and flickr posts, Meshbody Legacy products, both Athletic and Special Edition, seem to be the preferred choices. They are followed closely by old faithful Belleza Jake, which in my opinion is showing its age and needs some pressing update (apparently, words are circulating —all speculations— of a possible successor with no release date yet). And in third rank is Signature, with its undying Gianni and newcomer Davis, which is, to some extent, a noticeable improvement over the former, but not many people seem to concur.

Over the years I’ve switched between Signature and Belleza to create a slim-looking avie, but I’ve never been satisfied with the outcome: there’s no way to conceal Gianni’s steroidal biceps (or the rest of its massive volume, except its meagre backside, invisible as it is) or Jake’s siliconized butt (whether trapped in a thong or thick jeans it matters not). I had better luck with Signature’s unappreciated Geralt, but that one was discontinued to give way to Davis, for which nobody has released a dedicated skin set yet (and using one for Gianni turns its nipples into a pair of king-size saucers).

Some people suggested that I try Legacy’s revered anonymous duo, hateful as they are for those who despise their abominable complexity (according to experts) or the company’s shady past. In any case, I purchased the SE version last November during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales (at half the regular price, the only way I could justify it), but I’m still unsure if it’s the best choice for my intended use. Although it’s possible to achieve better lean results with this one, attempting a thinner figure often sprouts undesirable spur-ious deformities in the elbow area, which makes me suspect an undiagnosed case of bursitis.

Xeriko in CZ Slim and some Gild stuff

In November 2022, a lesser-known content creator introduced a new mesh body catering to skinny fans: the CZ Slim. It joined its other two older siblings: CZ Muscle and CZ Male, of which I knew nothing beforehand. Since it’s intentionally fit for the job, the resulting contours are smoother overall. However, the fingers could benefit from some fine-tuning, as they give a semi-extraterrestrial vibe out of the box. Even knowing it would be difficult to find outfits for this body right away, I decided to purchase it with the hope it would gain some popularity and attract fashion designers to provide a solid wardrobe in the months to come. I’m still waiting for that to happen though.

A few months after CZ launched the Slim body, the Anatomy “miracle” body was born, promising to suit “any male gender shapes,” as per their description. Being distributed by a better-known content creator (MaleDiction), it garnered enough marketing hype before its release but landed on equal ground: lacking fashion support. The one-body-fits-all-shapes policy is not as good as it sounds, as this body has several issues more evident around the elbows and knees. It also features —I suppose— swollen feet when setting lower slider numbers.

So, I decided to go with Cloud Design’s Slim body as the best option for achieving the slender shape I’m familiar with, despite the limited availability of products for it at the moment. In case you feel inclined to try it, here’s a list of stores from where to get some fitting stuff.

Xeriko in CZ Slim and some Gild stuff

Fashion pointers

Mesh body

It’s important to note that this body doesn’t incorporate an auto-hide alpha mask system or an encompassing HUD to control multiple niceties as more popular bodies do. Instead, it uses manual layers that users have to add to their avies when requiring similar results. Though it may seem a rudimentary solution compared to today’s standards, I prefer this workaround for its simplicity and effectiveness: it never fails… unless it’s SL going bonkers and then everybody’s fucked no matter what anyway.

Skins

Since none of the top skin designers are giving this mesh body the attention it deserves, pairing CZ Slim with a nice face from another leading brand may create noticeable skin tone mismatches at the neck area. While the most logical choice is to always buy head and body skins from the same maker, the limited options —as of now— may not help in achieving the desired appearance without resorting to some tricks (read ahead).

For instance, Gloom specializes in unisex skins, so buying a face and body skin from this store may result in looking not-so-masculine. There is some favorable news, however. This store designs its body skins like a diving suit, so they cover up the entire avatar except for the face. That technique minimizes body-neck-head tone differences, but beware: that approach may not always be the best practice when pairing with non-Gloom skins.

Raon Hausen “updated” their original CZ Slim skin set in late 2023 possibly due to rebranding or re-cycling. Because of this, the former Vertigo skin is no longer available (at least right now), even though I think it’s better than the newer LeBlon. If I were RH, I would offer both versions as two distinct products (assigning different names), and let customers choose between a matte look or a glossy finish.

And something else: I’ve noticed skins designed for the Legacy Male body usually fit CZ Slim quite well, even if the maps don’t match exactly. Consequently, there are two areas you must take care of if going this way: first, the skin is usually off around the toes, and second, dark streaks could materialize close to the armpits and upper shoulders.

Dark streaks showing close to the shoulders when using a Legacy skin
Dark streaks show close to the shoulders when using a Legacy skin

How to solve these shortcomings? Well, if wearing shoes or socks, you don’t have to worry about the skin not matching the toes, but if going barefoot or wearing flip-flops, you better switch to a skin created for CZ Slim. To address the armpit problem, just put on a shirt and never take it off, but if going topless or sporting a tank top, I would suggest wearing a tattoo to cover the affected area. In case you’re not a fan of that approach, your only choice is using a skin designed for CZ Slim.

Recently, Vanilla Cloud released the Skinny Legend Masculine Body Skin for Legacy and CZ Slim. It debuted at this year’s Skin Fair, and will surely show up in store after the event. While a new skin is more than welcome, I have to say I’m not in love with the collarbone, at all. Even using their CZ Slim deformer, which enhances the shoulders and chest a little bit, it still looks awkward. I hope they take a “second guess” and make some shadow improvements soon.

Clothing and accessories

Here are some slurls that will take you to in-world stores selling products compatible with CZ Slim. A few more exist with maybe a couple of items, but the following ones stand out for adding this body to their new releases occasionally or even regularly. Don’t forget the sacred mantra: Try before you buy, and make sure the product you want to buy is really fitted for CZ Slim.

Regarding shoes: Shoes, especially boots (with emphasis) for Legacy Male fit CZ Slim, not perfectly, but quite well. Don’t forget to try before buying in any case.

Xeriko in CZ Slim

If I wanted to, I could easily pick up Legacy or Jake, which are the top two mesh bodies among designers (and are good in themselves), and go on changing outfits every other day because there are hundreds and thousands of products available for both of them. Yet, there’s a certain satisfaction in doing things another way, and that’s why I went with CZ Slim. Plus, I have found a new hobby: searching the grid for hidden treasures jumbled together with countless items I can’t put on —exactly as in RL too.

Styling

Slurls are subject to change at the store owners’ behest and without prior notice.

Last cruise of August

A few useful refs

Don’t think a post now and then means a return to blogging. I’m doing fine not doing it, and will try to keep it that way. But recently, with the pandemonium created by the covid19 pandemic, there has been a mild resurgence in Second Life returning customers. That has prompted some active SLifers to compile some useful resources to help both oldies and newcomers with the new SL realities: that’s things such as Mesh, BOM, appliers, et cetera. So here’s a few I would like to keep handy:

  • The *SK*[BoM]*IN* Project™ – bizarre way to call a website. In non Dyslexic dialect, it goes something like The Skin (BoM) Project, and is a good catalog of inworld BoM-ready skins stores sorted by the classic gender-binary scheme (I would –maybe– just call them regular and boobs-ready skins instead), plus a Fantasy category where non-natural skin colors go. Male oriented avies, the not-so-loved residents of SL, have there a good source of male focused stores to check out.
  • If already having a hard time guessing what BoM is, then head straight to the Virtual Bloke. Its author has a well-rounded and encompassing post or two (or more) explaining all those nuances and how to deal with them (check the latest, for example, which is a sticky-worthy one). The site is mostly male-oriented, but the concepts are for general usage.
  • I’m also having a good time reading Billy Beaverhausen’s blog. His frequent well-narrated and quite illustrated posts cover everything there is to check out regarding male avatars. He not only tells readers what he’s wearing and where to find the stuff (as most fashion bloggers do), but also he hasn’t forgotten that words are still an excellent way of communication (old soul, that guy). A NSFW warning though: there could be some pictures you don’t want your boss to see… unless you’re ready to explain it all.

That’s all I wanted to share for now. If I find something else worth referencing, I’ll add it to the list. Just remember there are a lot more stuff about Second Life out there, so if you don’t like these three resources, just do your own search and pick whatever you prefer.

A sign and a shadow

Still alive

It’s been a while since my last blog post… 24 months to be precise (that’s two years). Even I thought it was dead –yes, dead–, but all habits die hard, they say. And so I’m kind of thinking in getting back to business, though I don’t know why. Should I?

A blog is like a conscience with public outreach in mind. Most of the time, it plainly helps the poster (if at all) to organize his/her thoughts and experiences into a coherent map that may unveil some course of action taken in the past –that perhaps we didn’t understand so well– or that is under consideration for a future event. If someone else stumbles upon it –very likely by chance– and finds it amusing, said random visitor may later decide to come back and start reading it regularly. That’s why I refuse to let this blog die, so to speak: mostly to refresh my memory from time to time (it costs nothing, so it doesn’t hurt), or to entertain readers with all the nonsense I naively post at random intervals.

Anyway… I would like to start by saying I’m still involved in SL, and as active as usual… Well, I want to believe so, but the truth is that since September 2017, after the land of my RL avie was hit by two category 5 hurricanes in the course of two weeks (yes, you read it right, no kidding), RL hasn’t been that fun and SL hasn’t been possible (no wonder since the second storm destroyed everything on its path, and it happens his house was right in the middle of it). At the time of writing, he still have no internet at home and electricity comes from a portable generator that, even when it’s pretty benevolent to the ears, it still adds some unwanted background noise to the collective cacophony at night (sooo hateful). That can happen (and frequently too) when you live in the countryside of a mountainous tropical island short on all kinds of resources, overpopulated, and possessing an economy only rivaling that of Greece (yes, it’s mostly dead). In any case, that translates to almost no SL whatsoever, except for some 3 hours a week distributed at irregular intervals of some minutes per day (down from about 30 hours before), temporarily based in a spot that is not home. If friends have been wondering why I have suddenly stopped talking to them, know that it’s not that I don’t like your new T-shirt or that colorful underwear.

Have you ever feel you’ve been violently cut off from the rest of the world? Or an alternative: as if the world has forgotten your existence? That’s how it feels somehow (sighs).

In the meantime, I’ve been going over this old blog, perhaps as a nostalgic approach to see how life was like in better times… and it happened that I came across these two posts: Mesh body… (snatchers) and Mr. Defaulthead. The first one is from 2015 and the second one from a year later, but right now both are worth revisiting. Why? Because things have changed since then –a little bit late for me, a regular SL user (that’s to say, not a fashion idolescent whatsoever), but it happened at last: I’m all mesh now, woot!

While I acquired a mesh body almost as soon as they became available, by February 2016 (the time when the blog went dormant) I was still holding on to the original avie head –the last vestige of old times– because the first generation of mesh heads were too rigid for my liking (and money). There was no way to make them more “unique” because you couldn’t tweak them to your liking. With the advent of Bento, the official way to call the long-awaited improvement of the old avatar skelly, the mesh is no longer so static, responding to adjustments easily done with SL’s built-in shape editor. Basically heads function as mesh bodies do (they’re one and the same), so now it’s possible to alter your facial features to your head’s… I mean, heart’s desire (though there are still some sliders that do nothing at all –they seem to add nothing significant anyway, so who cares), and what is even best: your eyes blink –not only at the normal rate, but any speed programmable–, and winks look even sexy, I tell you. I think your nose twitches too (kind of), and your mouth definitely works as if having its own personality disorder. The ears… well not so much has happened to those, but you can mask them and attach a third-party offering and be done with their lack of charisma that way. They could do better out of the package I presume, but anything out of the ordinary (staying put, that is) would surely hit the ear entrepreneurs too hard and possibly endanger that part of the SL economy, and we don’t want that, do we?

Not a face...
Not a blurry face, nope.

Faces are a pleasure to look at now, really… as long as you don’t leave all features on all the time. Doing that would have strangers asking –from a safe distance– if something is wrong with you and dialing 911 as a precaution. Actually, now that I think of it, the world of animation overwrites (commonly known as AOs) in SL should be more “complicated” than they are now adding so many facial expressions as there are individuals online. Is that part of the market still unexplored?

I won’t say much about male mesh bodies, except that there are –finally– more options than there were a couple of years ago: Belleza, Signature, Slink, Lelutka, just to name some major brands with Bento technology, varying in their degree of muscleage and epic prices; there are some lesser known choices –for me, at least–, even those catering to specific audiences. (A quick advice: Avoid any product that has seen no updates in a long time –like never– or hasn’t moved from the beta stage since release day, with no indication of being alive or currently under development. It’s for your own good). My only regret is that, as far as I’ve noticed, none of them adjust so well for skinny types, though that’s partly to blame on skin designers, who rarely have options ready for the thin and slender. Anyway, skinny, though favored by a few fashion designers and manga addicts (sorry, I didn’t mean it that way) are never considered sensually appealing by most, and so they are mostly avoided (low marketability perhaps), even in SL’s expansive gender-bending –seemingly– plurality.

Part of the good news is that the shape market is also on the rise after so long being on the low.

So, after so many years, the SL avatar is on part to today’s standards… more or less. It’s far from wonderful, but it’s a better attempt at being more maleable, somehow. So now, instead of going mad at the pathetic bumpiness of the old basic body, we can settle down to worrying about that collar on the neck where seamlessness breaks down like the results of paternity tests (99.99% of the time)… and may herald the rebirth of chokers and turtlenecks back to fashionable. But that’s a minor glitch that –let’s hope– won’t take another 14 years to fade away, literally. Or you can also pretend you’re Matrim Cuathon reborn and go missing your left eye one of these days…

(Some things don’t change, though, and I’m still a bad photographer, so that’s why the pictures accompanying this post are as crappy as usual.)

Something old... from 2016.
Something old… from 2016.

Sansar is also a reality now, too. The Second Life sibling probably developed to kill… I mean, to succeed it, is trying hard to catch a hold on the virtual reality market (maybe it’s doing it right now, and I don’t know it yet), but that one has even higher computer specifications than the old renown resource-hogger SL ever did, and so far it only runs on Windows. That leaves those with Mac or Linux flavors stranded in the old vicinity for the time being (I guess it would be possible to use an emulator to run it in other platforms –albeit not natively–, but I haven’t heard of anyone trying it yet… and I’m not in a position to experiment right now). Even when some people may be embracing the new virtual environment with equal favor as the old one (be either Sansar or another option –because there are more choices now), people tell me SL population is still stable and willing to go on for some more roller-coaster rides.

As a matter of fact, my biggest problem right now is the lack of proper clothing… or how to find and fit it. But that story will have to wait for another post, or 24 months will turn to 25 before I even realize it.