Now that Philip Rosedale's back advising Linden Lab, challenging modern metaverse platforms like Meta's Horizon, can he help fix Second Life's complex avatar system? I asked that question last week and a pretty amazing reader conservation ensued — culminating in this excellent rant by the excellently named content creator Allegory Malaprop, of the style brand Schadenfreude:
I desperately desperately desperately want Linden Lab to come out with a new avatar to put an end to the avatar wars. I might actually make clothing again if I wasn't reminded every time I do that it is the most horrible tedious thing on earth to try to re-fit and re-rig and re-fit and re-rig and re-fit and re-rig and I'm just going to cry now and never do this again.
With Meta and the hype, now is the time. Now is past the time to be able to scream to the hills "Hey you get no feet and you can't actually get anywhere near people there [in Meta's Horizon], come here look at this!!! Also we have cookies/amusement parks/dance clubs/cheese caves*/sex dungeons/probably anything else you could want already built and ready for you to check out."
Now is the time to be easy to sign up for SL [and] …to have an avatar that just works. AND works without the whole very super obvious us vs. them you're totally a n00b (or backwards mainlander with your 2005 blinging shoes and of course people are going to divide into their tribes and their snobbish preferences but let's not make it THAT easy, ok?) divide.
Even getting SLers "up to date" is a massive headache that takes literal days if they haven't been following along the whole time. (I've helped walk a few [of my store] returnees through it lately, it's awful, and that's WITH people holding their hands AND having an idea of how a lot of it works). And even if they have, once the new thing comes out, and how many times have you personally had to explain BoM to someone again?
It's too much of a pain in the ass to think anyone who is coming in from zero, who is not already invested, is going to put up with any of this.
Except…how are they going to fix it?
Ms. Malaprop proceeds to dive deep into the SL weeds on the problems facing Philip. Buckle up:
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The "original" (Ruth, I'm not talking primvatars) SL avatar was/is a lumpy mess, low poly, poorly rigged in spots and what is going on with the random spikes on the hands, LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID TO THAT THUMB, that don't seem like there are there for any actual reason other than sloppiness? and also incredibly flexible. Massively, amazingly, astoundingly flexible: the same mesh does everything. The same mesh does men, women, huge torpedo boobs, flat chests, pecs, skinny, fat, super tall, super short, butts of all sizes- it goes from "realistic" (we'll use this term loosely) to crazy over the top. Squint a little and it does pretty much everything a human could be shaped like and then a whole bunch of cartoony no-you-couldn't's.
Philip is super proud of all that the sliders can do, and he should be. We started out with a beautiful spectrum of customization.
And we want all of that. We want ye olden days of you wear some texture clothing and it's just there, it's on, it'll fit, and boys can wear dresses too. Anyone could wear anything, unless you expressly choose to set yourself outside the "standard" market. (No comment on no mod attachments and not being able to make your jellyfish skirt fit, that wasn't the system, that was someone's misplaced paranoia.)
We were lumpy and misshapen, especially if we went far off the "intended" shape (nevermind boobs, look at the men's neck/shoulder/hump area…), and it was what we got, so we liked it. Until we got custom mesh (until we got sculpties, let's be honest, starting to mainstream goodbye flipper feet was the beginning of the end), we accepted it and didn't even really notice how rough it was.
But lumpy and misshapen had a few huge advantages.
If it's all a lil bit abstract, you don't have to hit the target as well. You can push those sliders all the way out (or in) and sure, there's some bumpy, and maybe that isn't as well defined as you want, but hey, it works! When you start getting into realism, you start getting into the way bodies are assorted stretchy bags and ropes and muscles and bones and fat and then there's this layer draped on top that sort of moves and stretches and softens it out a little bit but it's still all kind of there to be seen: muscles deform the undercarriage in a different way than fat, knobby bony bits just under the skin, and that's not even getting into all the different ways a nose can be shaped, nevermind sized. There are defined parts and squishy parts and parts that totally change how they look when they are in clothing (and back to boobs: look at the various boob styles of bodies. Some bodies are made to never wear a bra, or any clothing, and without entirely covering up that whole area and just starting over, you aren't going to hide that fact).
And then how you even actually MOVE that lumpy misshapen around: shape keys, I do not want to deal with all those shape keys, no one wants to deal with all those shape keys. Ruth uses shape keys to shove bits around, there's a slider for everything that has a "start shape" and an "end shape" and it interpolates in between those. The mesh itself is moved around to target for each shape key and hoo boy are there are a lot of those. Hand positions? More keys! (Don't miss those, thank you bento, THAT is one thing that's more-or-less better done the other way entirely.) Turn those flipper feet into something that will fit IN shoes, or hey! BE shoes? More keys! And THEN you get into this muscle slider and that fat slider. Nose keys! Eye keys! These arm keys and THOSE arm keys and hey there are probably some more in here. Hit that "male shape" button? ALL THE ****ING KEYS! It's like redoing mesh to each body, except you're doing it in sections, for so many bodies, so so many bodies, and each and every single one has to be done all over again every single time. You don't have to re-rig it all, but you do have to move it for even more spots. p.s. Rigging of Ruth is as bad as it is because it's all rigged the same regardless. I mean, it's also bad on top of that, but that's gonna mean it's never going to be pretty because you can't have the same thing work in every situation.
And stretching that clothing layer t-shirt over those melons still shows signs of "stress" aka deforming in ways you really really did not want especially if you move the cleavage that way instead of that way and no, I totally did not design that for that much sag, come on, lift those up in utter defiance of gravity with that other slider and THOSE OTHER SHAPE KEYS.
(And feet. Insert a very long bit on feet and flipper feet/bare feet/sock feet here. I'm torturing you enough already if you're reading through all this.)
But wait! "I can resize my mesh body!" you cry!
Yes, but under completely different rules. We use Volume Bones (or collision bones or "those vertex thingies with the capitals except when they aren't" or whatever you want to call them) that's another full skeleton (more or less) tacked onto the avatar skeleton.
It's like a nesting doll of skeletons, seriously, even aside from extra secret bento centaur legbones you've always got hiding behind you, it's like we have bones within bones layered on top of each other, different sets do different things. The Volume bones scale and move themselves depending on your sliders but not the same way the system avatar does.
This is why Standard Sizes were a thing, you could try to aim for making it fit certain bones at certain sides, but then (back to boobs) your boobs are going to move…inwards and sideways and wait, no, why do they move that way? No, seriously, I'm asking, they move that direction until the slider gets to there, and that makes sense but wait, why did you decide to make a 90 degree turn there and go a different direction entirely now???? and aside from the perplexing choices and they are, oh, they are (why do the butt cheeks clap when you use those bones? In/out, fine, but in AND out at the same time and then they move towards each other but also straight out backwards huh? Did you do that entirely so someone would ask you what is the sound of two cheeks clapping?), Volume bones that scale and move around can't deform mesh into different underlying shapes as elegantly as actual shapes.
And so, the effective workaround is….more mesh bodies. And parts of mesh bodies.
Flat chest AND petite because those alternate shape-key-deform into actual different underlying base shapes, as well as going smaller more elegantly than current bone controls allow and better than any ever could even made by the most skilled bone deformer of all time because the system simply…doesn't give that much control. Vague overall size and placement can be jiggled, but that's about it. Don't get me wrong, there's some impressive jiggling to be done, especially if you get into the animation deforms you can lift this and move that with on top of the body (also see: your fingers clicking in and out of place when it's updating positions inherited from your body), but it's still "move and scale" not "completely redesign this entire section."
I'm just going to yell "Belleza" and run the other way, and if you know, you know. Especially Jake. Though hey, the Blender kits FINALLY actually just work for all that now, so get an updated kit. Still the pose thing to deal with, but the shape stuff is now actually possible without 7 versions of Blender and hoping you did each part in the right one.
There's already the Maitreya camp vs. the Legacy camp vs. the curvy body du jour camp (I'm behind, Freya and Hourglass, I was up to there, but is it still split between eBody and Kupra now, or has it changed since yesterday?) and of course all the "but those aren't it for me I prefer ____" camps (which is actually me, and yeah, it sucks that I don't like certain shaped features on the popular options and you can probably even guess my least fav shaped body part), and Ruth could, more or less, satisfy all of them: but there are so many bodies for body types now because you can't satisfy them all with the current tools, entirely aside from the body brand war. Also, hey, we get to be picky once you open that door, and picky we shall be.
So yes, please, give us a new standard avatar that gives us a standard but also while you're at it, fix all those technical limitations and come up with an entirely new system we actually can use and make things for that is not insane and does not make us want to die, because we won't switch- and we won't stop sneering at n00bs- unless we can have our cake, all our cake, our male and female and androgynous cake, our fat and skinny and muscular cake, and eat it too. p.s. let's just do away with the male/female toggle while we're at it and let people do shapes all through in between there, eh? So many men shapes were "technically" female because you chunked that up too much. Also poorly, but just…too much, unless that was what they were really going for. Poor lanky boys.
And if you've read this far, you deserve a cookie and/or sex dungeon, and you can find many of them in SL already, still sucks to be you, Meta.
*p.p.s. The cheese caves are in the Destination Guide under "Strange & Mysterious".
Standing O for Allegory! All her points are so painfully put, they almost cause me joy in other people's suffering. (See what I did there.) Except that I happen to like those people quite a lot.
Imagess from Ms. Malaprop's Flickr.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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