Mesh Head & Body Basics – How to transfer your preferred body shape onto your head shape

If you’re new to customising your Second Life avatar with mesh heads and bodies and you’ve maybe been playing around with demos (or with one of the generous gift heads and/or bodies that creators sometimes give away), you’ve probably already realised that it’s not as simple as ‘Wear shape, wear head, wear body, and you’re done’. In fact, if you’ve followed that very simple guidance, you might be looking a bit… odd. The simple fix for that is to wear the shape included with your mesh head instead of the shape included with your mesh body, but… what if you don’t like what that ‘mesh head shape’ does to your body? This post will help you get that fixed in no time at all.

But first…

The terminology for avatar customisation in Second Life can trip up a lot of people, especially newbies. I’ve seen many people who confuse shapes with mesh bodies, which – if I think about it – kind of makes sense. I mean, in a manner of speaking a mesh body is a shape (it has shape to it, after all). But that’s not how it works in SL, so we’re going to begin with the basics, and that means… it’s glossary time!

Shape

A shape is a list of numbers that sets the parameters for your underlying avatar skeleton and physique. It alters things like how tall you are, how long your legs are, how much body fat or muscle you have, how high your cheekbones are, etc etc. Think of the shape as being akin to everything underneath your RL skin: your skeleton, and also to some extent your muscle and fat (although in Second Life muscle and fat can also be affected by which mesh body you choose). You can edit your shape by right-clicking your avatar and choosing ‘edit shape’ under the appearance options.

The image right top is from my recent review of the ‘Kario’ mesh body by Inithium. From left to right, we have the three included ‘fit’ body shapes, and on the far right we have my own edit of the third included shape. The mesh body is the same, and the skin is the same; only the shape parameters have been changed, using the Edit Shape sliders:

Of crucial importance here is the fact that you can only wear one shape. At this point you might be scratching your head over the title of this blog post, and muttering, “But Skell, you’re talking about head shapes and body shapes, and now you’re telling me I can only have one shape?!”

Yep. Bear with me a bit ;-)

Skin

A skin is the layer that goes over the top of the shape and gives it texture. It can add the illusion of altered physique (e.g. a six pack of muscles) via its texturing, but it doesn’t physically alter the underlying shape. Think of the skin as being visually the same as your RL skin. It’s technically a ‘paint job’ for the ‘chassis’ that is your underlying shape.

System Avatar (sometimes called the ‘classic avatar’)

The system avatar is the one you start out with in Second Life. At its absolute basics, it comprises a shape, a skin, a pair of eyes, and a hairbase. These four system items are essential for every avatar, and you cannot take them off (if you could, then your avatar wouldn’t rez properly). You can read more about the system avatar here.

Mesh Body

A mesh body is an object that you wear over the top of your system avatar. It has much finer detail than the system avatar, especially around the hands and feet. There are many different types of mesh body, from many different creators, and – once you’ve chosen one – you will usually need to look for clothing that is created specifically for that body. This is why you’ll see multiple brand logos on various clothing items; those logos denote which bodies they will fit properly to.

Most mesh bodies can be altered by changing the underlying system shape parameters using the ‘edit shape’ sliders, as mentioned in the ‘shape’ section of this glossary. However, mesh bodies all start out with a specific 3D mesh model, which will limit what you can do with the shape, to some extent. For example: if you start out with an extremely skinny mesh body, you will not be able to edit the underlying shape to make that skinny body look extremely muscular. (Remember the bit in the ‘shape’ section, above, where I said that muscle and fat can be affected by which body you choose? This is that bit in action.)

Mesh Head

Like a mesh body, a mesh head is an object that you wear over the top of your system avatar. Again, it has much finer detail than the system head, and some mesh heads have HD (high definition) texture capability, allowing you to create some realistic looks.

Also like mesh bodies, mesh heads are available from several different creators, and within those creators’ brands you will find multiple mesh heads, sometimes in different types: basic, frames animated, Bento, and HD types.

Basic and frames animated heads cannot have their shape customised by editing the sliders of the underlying system shape, as they only respond to the basic ‘stretch’ sliders. Bento and HD types of head can be customised by editing the sliders of the underlying system shape, and it’s these types of head that we’ll be dealing with here, as they’re the ones currently being released by creators.

Hopefully now you have a better understanding of the basic difference between shapes, mesh bodies, mesh heads, and skins. So we’re going to move on into the meat-n-potatoes of this post, which is: how to transfer your preferred body shape onto your head shape.

As mentioned earlier in this post, you can only wear one shape. But if you have a mesh head and a mesh body, you will very likely have two shapes to choose from: one in the mesh head’s inventory folder, and one in the mesh body’s inventory folder. We’re going to look at three hypothetical examples now:

You try on the shape from the mesh body’s folder, and you really like how it looks. But it does horrible things to your mesh head, and makes your face look like a monster!
You try on the shape from the mesh head’s folder, and you love how it makes your mesh head look, but you hate the fact that it makes your body look too short or too tall, or bow-legged, or any other thing that you don’t like
You have an existing body shape that you already love, but when you put on the mesh body and head over the top of it the mesh body looks fine but the mesh head looks awful!

All three of those scenarios have one thing in common: you have a mesh body shape that you prefer – either your own existing body shape, or the one from the mesh body’s folder – so you’d much rather wear that if you can. But it makes your head look freaky-weird. Why is that happening?

Well, mesh body creators don’t know which of the hundreds of mesh heads in Second Life you want to wear, so all they can do is give you a shape that makes their product – the mesh body – look good. They will probably have made some edits to the head part of the shape, but those are likely to be specific to their own preferred head, or even to a system head, so there is very little guarantee that they will work on your specific choice of mesh head.