A consumer’s guide to Second Life mesh

This is a basic run though of mesh for consumers.  If you want to know a bit more about the background and the techy stuff, check out the geeky post instead.

First of all, if you don’t have the latest Kirsten, Nirans, Firestorm, Cool, Marine’s 2.7.3.2, Dolphin 3 or the Linden Lab Viewer 3 you’re not going to see mesh.  For those luddites like me, the Phoenix team have announced they’re going to backport mesh into Phoenix soon.

If you don’t upgrade to a mesh viewer, what you will see is semi invisible people and what looks like a non rezzed sculptie blob with a texture on it.

Once you’ve got your viewer of choice, you’ll see two types of mesh on the grid, rezzables and wearables. Of the two, wearables have the potential to make the greatest visual impact because they have a nifty feature that lets the clothing move with your body, rather than having items vanish into your body.

Wearables

A wearable is either mesh clothing or accessories.  Accessories are pretty straightforward and the issues below won’t be as bothersome.  If your shape isn’t within what’s considered “normal” by sl standards you may find the problems mean mesh clothing isn’t worth bothering with.

There are three main benefits to mesh clothing

1. They’ll actually move with your body

Skirts are the best example of how mesh will improve things. Currently if you dance or move outside of a limited range of positions (like you do when you walk) legs stick though the skirts and if you sit down they look terrible and with sculpts the skirt doesn’t move at all. Mesh skirts will stick to the leg like they do in rl and will look as it should.

2. Mesh clothing it will stretch to fit your height and arm and leg length. On top of that it doesn’t just hang or flutter like prims do at the moment, it will actually drape.  Visually it will look fabulous. So for things like long jackets, skirts and sleeves it will make the outfit look much more realistic.

3. You won’t have to put on half a dozen items to wear something like a basic jacket.  So you won’t have as many things cluttering up your inventory.

Unfortunately there is a price to pay for it though and there are four main issues around wearing mesh clothing.

1. You can’t modify mesh outfits to stretch them nor reposition them, this means if the creator didn’t get the positioning right there’s not much you can do except go back to them and hope they’ll fix it.

2. You can’t resize.  As they’re not modifiable, creators will be making a few basic sizes available, if they don’t fit perfectly then your only option is to change your shape to fit.  Not a pleasing thought.

3. Your limbs will still stick through sometimes, they follow your limb but don’t recognise other bits of you

4. The final issue with mesh clothing is that you need to wear an alpha layer under it (like shoes need) to stop your body poking through.

Which also means if you’re out and about and people are using non mesh viewers you may get comments telling you that you’re partially invisible or haven’t rezzed properly.  Until mesh viewers are universal, that’s not going to change.

Some creators will eventually make full body avatars and clothing ranges that will fit perfectly. Then of course you’re stuck with buying their stuff if you want ease of use.  It’s even more restrictive than skins were before we had the tattoo layers that let you change your makeup. Also, when you wear it as far as I know you can’t wear normal clothing because the mesh avatar body hides the clothing. I’ve not tested this out yet so ymmv.

Pro tip:  Don’t wear the items, add them instead and then take off the bits of your previous outfit.

Rezzed Items

There are mesh landscaping, buildings and furniture items available. Once mesh has settled down and people know how to create good meshes you’ll find that mesh items rez quicker, don’t have the problem with the bounding box, won’t have to be phantom and will look fabulous even at a distance. Even better is that the mesh will hug the terrain better when used in landscaping so will look a lot better than sculpts when used as ground cover.

The downside currently is that usually mesh will use more prims than an equivalent sculptie.  If you’re going to buy anything at the moment you need to not only think about how many people will be able to see it but also whether the prim count is worth it and balance that against all the downsides mentioned earlier with sculpts. There’s also a new term out there called Land Impact.  This is the way that mesh items’ region resource usage (bandwidth) is calculated and is expressed as a prim unit.  Also be aware that if you resize a mesh item and make it bigger or even smaller, the prim calculation may go up as well because it takes more resources to have rezzed.

Pro tip:  Always make sure you’ve got a lot more prims available than what the item claims to need. Just in case.

Things to remember when you’re shopping for mesh.

• People are apparently giving the wrong prim count.  Mesh has a more complex way of working out how many prims it has so don’t be surprised if you rez something that says it’s low prim but eats up your Land Impact.  If you are getting short of prims be careful or you may find half your house is returned because the mesh item blows your prim limit. Update:  Nalates Urriah has advised me that LL finally fixed the random return problem and now if you blow your prim limit it will be the rezzed object that is returned.  Neither of us have tested this though, so still be aware that anything can happen.
• The keyword scammers are using the mesh keyword to try to get you to buy their stuff.  If it doesn’t say it’s mesh anywhere on the vendor or in the ad then don’t buy it.
• People are saying an item is mesh when it’s only actually partly mesh.  You’ll see this in some clothing in particular.  It’s not a bad thing as it does get around some of the issues with having to change your shape but you may be disappointed if you’ve paid a fortune for something that’s fully mesh and turns out to be a couple of accessories
• If it’s clothing and doesn’t come in multiple sizes you may find that it won’t fit.

and finally..  always try the demo first! You’ll save money and heartache if you do.

Don’t let all of this put you off.  Done properly mesh will be a fabulous addition to your Second Life, so get out there and have fun

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