Admin: A note about mesh clothing (and why I won’t be blogging it yet)
Now that mesh has been rolled out across the grid, we’re starting to see some designers making good use of it. Jane has released mesh clothing, Pixeldolls has released mesh jewellery, and mesh will become more and more prevalent across Second Life.
BUT… until mesh is supported by the majority of viewers then I probably won’t be blogging it here (for exceptions, see the end of this post). The latest official Linden Lab viewers support it, but the vast majority of TPVs (third party viewers) such as Phoenix, Imprudence, etc currently do not, and these TPVs are used by a great many residents in SL.
What does this mean for those wearing mesh? Well, a large portion of the grid will not see your lovely mesh dress. What they will see is this:
Or something along those lines. It may be a squished sphere like that, or it may be a big cube.
Mesh is still in its infancy, and for those of you that don’t know, it’s non-modifiable by the end-user. That is: if you buy a mesh dress and the alpha layers don’t quite fit you and the dress is too small or too big… there’s nothing you can do. If you start searching online you’ll begin to see some blogposts about this. One that I came across yesterday was here, at Crybaby. You can see the benefits of mesh (heck, we’ve all been waiting for skirts that our legs don’t poke through when we sit down or dance, right?) but scroll down for some of the pitfalls.
There is a JIRA requesting the ability to modify mesh in-world. To read more on that and to vote, click here and log in using your avatar name (it’s an official Linden Lab site, so it’s perfectly safe) – CTS-693: Request for Rigged Mesh Parametric Deformer. (UPDATE: This JIRA is no longer viewable, because it’s been moved to be actioned by Linden Lab, so hopefully we should see some ability to resize mesh items soon!)
Exceptions
If an outright mesh bargain is available, then I may blog it, but since I’m not using a viewer that’s currently mesh-enabled I won’t be able to model it for you. Thus, my pics will be of the item’s ad board, and I will ensure that the post states the item will only rez properly to those using a mesh-enabled viewer.
2 thoughts on “Admin: A note about mesh clothing (and why I won’t be blogging it yet)”
I did buy some mesh clothing from Jane – lovely stuff. However, the “small” in the dresses didn’t fit my breasts and the “large” had a huge booty on it, so I ended up using the small and modifying my shape for that dress. I know everyone is excited about mesh, but the thing I loved about SL was that when I bought something, for the most part it fit me. Having to change my shape for clothing doesn’t really make me happy.
Last night I wore a cute little mesh dress from Jane to go dancing with a guy friend who hadn’t seen me in a while and all he could see was something very similar to the picture you posted. This makes me sad, because on my end I looked adorable (even with smaller boobs).
I agree that this is a huge problem, Catarina. For quite some time a very large portion of the grid won’t be seeing these outfits as they were intended to be seen (as well as other mesh creations, such as homes and furnishings).
It’s worse than any of the previous ‘certain viewers only’ issues, such as the floating Emerald extra attachment points, the oddly-placed mirrored sculpts before other viewers caught up to mirrored prims, or the Ruthing of avatars using physics layers to those not on a physics-enabled viewer. Mesh clothing is integral to an entire look, and a lot of people will be wearing ‘blobs’ to a lot of others.
I know that creators are including alpha layers that are supposed to hide poking-out bits of boob etc, but if the shape of the dress itself is too small it’s going to look as if it’s emerging from your skin and, as you said, the other option is a butt that even a system skirt couldn’t emulate!
I do suggest voting on the JIRA that I linked to at the bottom of the post. The good news is that it’s been assigned and is being worked on, so hopefully soon there will be some way of editing mesh items in-world. That won’t help much with the viewer problem, but eventually most people will be on mesh-enabled viewers. It’ll just take time, and those at the cutting edge of mesh fashion will just appear more… avant garde in the meantime. Hey, Lady Gaga would be proud, right? ;)
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