Friday, July 29, 2011

More New Avatars: The Final Cut

Wanting to post something quickly about the new avatars in our basic Inventory folder I took a couple snaps and dashed off some words ... ta dahhhh! ... my previous post. But obviously, there is more to the story than that and I hate minimal posts, so here's a more in-depth look.

The first thing I noticed when trying on the new outfits is that the days of PermaPanties are not quite gone. If you were ever on the Teen Grid, you know that you could never take your underwear off. And many of the avatars in the selection given new Residents of late also have PermaPanties. These new outfits go a bit further with some of the actual clothing on the skin. Change the skin and the outfit could be unusable.

Female Gladiator
The Female Gladiator is one of the few exceptions, though in this pic from the backside I've chosen to show just the prim parts. While the panties are on the skin layer, the pants and a shirt are on removable layers so if you use your regular skin everything should be fine. The hair is rather nice and styled appropriately for the outfit. The sword and shield are non-functional but they look nice.

Female Pirate
The Female Pirate is a different story. The shirt and the pants are on the skin layer so to use the skirt with my skin I had to make my own "glitch" pants and I've opted to do without a shirt under the jacket, though I could probably dig up something appropriate from my vast closet. However, I did keep the skin (no, that's not it in the picture) because it is very nice and I can still look like me if I use it with the outfit and my shape. Plus, the skin has hair on the scalp so the hat looks good without attaching separate prim hair. The best part, I think would be the extraordinary boots. Honestly, I like them better than the expensive ones I bought over the years.

Female Steampunk
The boots from the Female Steampunk outfit are the only parts of that ensemble I decided to keep. I wasn't a fan of the textures used in the rest of the outfit, though it seemed generally well made and fairly original. Like all the boots I kept from the new collection, an alpha layer is used to mask your feet so you don't need to resize your feet and with a little editing you don't need a fitted shoe. Here's how I did it: Attach the prim parts and edit the position so the soles come very close to the bottoms of your avatar's feet. Don't worry if your parts of your feet or ankle or calf show. Then put on the alpha layer. By editing linked parts you can drag the red, green, and blue sizer handles to cover any bits not hidden by the alpha layer. Using the white resized handles simply stretches all the prims and can make the boots look grossly oversized.

Female Future Punk
My favorite boots amongst the bunch are from the Female Future Punk outfit despite all the extra editing they required. And I think they look spectacular with the pants from the same outfit. I tossed everything else except the socks. Wearing them fluffs out the pants a bit as if they are stuffed into the boots. The shirt was nice, but it was on the skin and therefore useless. Here I'm wearing a top I got from one of the Japan earthquake fundraisers.

Female Explorer
The Female Explorer outfit, highly reminiscent of Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, was also highly disappointing. All the clothes were on the skin, leaving just the boots, the hair, and a belt. Frankly, the hair did not compliment my face at all, so it got tossed with the skin. I'm not sure when I'll need a high-riding belt with a rope and a torch on it, but the boots are pretty nice.

Like with the Pirate outfit, I suppose I could keep the skins for all of the sets. With my shape I'd still be "me" and I'd get the clothes, too boot, but I'm happy with what I kept. And very, very happy that The Lab has been so generous again.

1 comment:

SpaceCase said...

Nice report. But damn, clothing attached to skins? wth?