Avatar attachments in Second Life

Avatar attachment is a very big category of wearable items nowadays.  Once upon a time the most that your avatar would have been able to attach was the odd bracelet or earring.  Then the arrival of attachable genitalia brought a whole new category of "attachment" to the fore.  It's still a very big class of attachments, and includes those which chat to you, those with clickable responses and those with special effects.  On the whole, this article is not about that!  Look on the marketplace and google for the best genitalia if that's what you are after.

Since the arrival of mesh in Second Life, a whole new range of items have become mainstream, from attachable feet and hands, bouncing breasts, whole mesh avatars in large or small or fairy sizes.  It's becoming normal for creators in Second Life to have to accommodate a range of attachments which may make their creations more or less wearable for an avatar.

Prim hair and its laggy properties have been replaced with mesh hair which moves with the avatar but may not react in the way that real hair would.  However the mantra for any sort of mesh or prim attachment has to be to try the demo before buying.  This applies to hair, shoes, clothing, and any body part.  If there is a demo it makes sense to find out whether the attachment will work with your avatar before you buy it.

Mesh avatars are worn over your system avatar, and will usually be rigged to work in the same way as your avatar.  Most are adjustable using the sliders, although this is usually explained in the documentation accompanying any purchase.  Many of the mainstream makers of avatar attachments have in-world assistants or webpages to answer queries.

Mesh attachments for feet or hands are fairly simple to use, but may come with complicated instructions for making them blend with your skin.  More and more creators in the skin business are producing appliers for use with avatar enhancements like prettier feet, and they sell them in world.  Appliers make blending your skin onto the attachment very easy indeed (just wear the hud and touch the button) but you will need to check that your skin maker makes an applier in the shade of skin you wear - older ones may not be available.

System feet left, mesh feet and shoes right (Slink)

Once you are wearing a mesh avatar enhancement, you will need to be aware that system clothing will not extend to the attachment.  Thus socks or tights worn on your avatar will stop at the join between base avatar body and mesh attachment.  More and more creators will provide appliers for those things too.

Breasts are even more problematical, as clothing will not show over the breasts unless the creator has provided an applier to work with the breasts.  Lolas, tangos and other makes are often cross-compatible with each other, and it is certainly something to consider if you wish to be able to wear your breasts with clothing!  Often, making breasts blend in with the body of the avatar can be tricky, as SL treats light falling on objects slightly different from light falling on avatars, and so even with great blending you can find that the breasts suddenly look a bit different.  I loathe avatar lights, because they interfere with a lot of other things and can give a very odd effect for other avatars.  Once again - try the demos!

For myself, I find the vast difference in appearance between system feet and mesh feet makes it worth having to change feet when I change shoes from flat to mid high, and I like a lot of the shoes which work with mesh feet and don't work with system feet.  But I haven't found the big breasts worth the effort.  I think that if you spend a lot of time naked, and can overcome the lighting problems, it's probably worth it, but otherwise, not.

I do however have both petite and animal mesh avatars which I like to wear from time to time, and I feel sure that as technology moves on, the additional attachments for the avatar will become simpler and more workable.  It's still not going to make me want a vagina that has independent thought and talks, however!

Free stuff for avatars

Goddess Couture hair freebie from hunt for your inner slut

Many people are reluctant to spend money on Second Life when they first arrive in the world.  For some, it's a reluctance to invest in something if they aren't sure it is for them, and for others it is a matter of necessity because they can't afford to buy Linden dollars or aren't able to verify their account for some reason.

There are quite a lot of shops which offer special freebies for people with an account younger than 30 days old.  There are a variety of blogs which outline the best: FabFree in Second Life maintains a list of 30 days and under freebies.

If you are more than 30 days old, there is a lot of free stuff in Second Life, but much of it is pirated or of poor quality.  It can be a depressing experience to trail from freebie place to freebie place looking for something good.  The best ways to get good quality free stuff are to join groups or follow a grid hunt.

Joining Groups

Nearly every creator in Second Life will have a membership group for their brand, and most are free - but check what you are clicking on when you join a group.  Some of the designers ask for $50, $100 or $150 Lindens to join, but that's a minority.  Most realise that a good freebie will speak for them in ways they can't necessarily predict.

Normally there will be a board in a shop which you click and which will speak the name of the group in local chat.  Open up local chat, click on the name of the group and the group joining window will open on the screen.  Click the button to join the group which is about a third of the way down the window on the right, and confirm that you want to join.

Once upon a time you would automatically be wearing the tag of the group you just joined, but I've noticed that this doesn't happen for all (I'm not sure why).  You will normally need to be wearing the tag for the group before you will be allowed to pick up freebies.  If you aren't wearing it automatically, open up the groups window (under contacts, groups) and then click on the group you wish to activate and choose "activate" in the right hand list of actions.

There are usually boxes around the store with "group gift" on them, which you can click and collect if you are a member of the shop's group.  You may need to be somewhere where you can rez items in order to unpack the boxes, although many creators make their boxes wearable nowadays to overcome this limitation.

The best way to find the sorts of groups you'd like to join, is to look online.  SL Universe, for example, includes a very long Fashionista thread, which lists the names of the creators featured in the pictures.  You could try using the links often given under the photographs for the things you like.  Some of my favourite freebies are from CoCo Designs (clothing), Pink Fuel (skins).

Grid Hunts

Amazingly good quality items are often available exclusively in the course of grid hunts inside Second Life.  Creators band together to create a themed hunt which takes hunters from shop to shop, finding a grid hunt object, which remain the same for every shop in the hunt.  Usually nowadays, the search item will be displayed with a poster for the hunt at most of the venues.

The convention for how a grid hunt works is that you start off with an easy find in the first shop, which gives you a prize from that location and a landmark for the next location, and familiarises the hunters with the object they are hunting for.  You then click the landmark in your inventory, to take you to the next location and find the same object there.  Hunt often publish a list of locations and hints for the next location to help anyone who has failed to find an object at a particular location or who is lazy!  Currently the annual "Hunt for your Inner Slut" is running, with a golden model of male genitalia as the hunt object, and the list of clues is here.

Some hunts charge L$1 or 2 to collect the items, but most are free.

It makes sense for participating creators to give high quality items for the grid hunts, as customers who later decide to bring money into Second Life are certainly likely to remember the quality of those creations they like from a hunt... and they will generally have an inventory full of landmarks to those shops as the result of having done the hunt.  The hunters will often turn into walking advertisements for their shops, if they wear the items they have found.

One word of advice:  sort the folders from a grid hunt quickly, and assess whether you are likely to use an item, then file those you will, renaming the folders to identify the contents to you, and delete those you don't want.  Keep the landmarks for the places you like, and discard those for the places you don't.  You'll thank me in the end - there's nothing worse than vaguely remembering a really lovely shop and having to visit 60 locations to identify which one it was!

Different hunts have a range of items, but the "hunt for your inner slut" hunt which is ongoing includes a hair with a variety of colours, shoes, clothing, furniture, jewellery and skins and makeup.   There are a couple of objects which include couples sex animations, too.

Shopping: LeeZu Baxter

I'm feeling a bit guilty about posting this, because I fear for the linden balances of all who read it. I hate the current buzzword reporting about the financial chaos which is afflicting the markets around the world, not least because it gives the impression that some alien being is in charge of our economic destiny, instead of ourselves... but it is a hard fact that the number of islands for sale reflects the pressure that people are currently experiencing. Do not go to this shop if you need to conserve your lindens!

I went to the Wall performance and after-show party last night, and while there saw an avatar who had the most extraordinary clothes on - better than anything I have seen before. Being an experienced avatar I knew how to right click the person and choose more and then inspect, to find out who made the outfit (so much easier than real life lol!) and after I had taken a few dozen pictures of the party and the particle effects, I looked in search for the avatar named as creator of the clothes, and teleported away to To The Nines, LeeZu Baxter's island.

Reader, I am someone who enjoys creating things, but also buying things in SL. I have shopped in all the well-known shops, I have clicked on avatars all over SL to find out what they were wearing and gone to the shops to look at the items myself. I was bowled over by this shop, the detail, the beauty of the clothes, and the way that they made use of the things which SL does well.

Most of the outfits are a combination of clothing that is worn by the avatar and flexi attachments, so it is layered and possible to wear in a variety of ways. I combined items from a number of outfits to make what you see me wearing in the picture. I had SUCH fun, and found it difficult to choose what to buy and what to wear.

Much of the time, I find that what I wear in SL is a compromise between what I can imagine and what I can make or buy. This isn't like that. If it isn't overstating it, I feel that I have moved into haute couture, buying the things here. I must remember to go back to the shop and put it into my picks. It's that good.