SL beginners: understanding appearance

One of the things which I found most confusing when I first arrived in SL, was the appearance menu.  Unlike other virtual worlds and games where only small tweaks to a basic appearance are allowed, SL offers unlimited possibilities for changing your appearance.  The difficulty is that it is hard to understand the basics when there are so many options available.

The first thing to understand about appearance is that there are some things you can’t take off, you can only replace them.  It isn’t possible to take off your shape, for example, because you have to have a shape of some sort.  All you can do is to replace it with a different shape, you can’t simply remove it.

The second thing to understand is that like everything else in SL, the aspects of your appearance are subject to permissions.  That means you can only copy or modify or transfer those parts of your appearance that you have permission for.  In general, anything that you started out with as an avatar will have full permissions: the Linden Lab default skins and clothing will normally have full permissions.  You should note that if you make changes to your appearance, you are changing the underlying file.  Thus it’s a very good idea to make a copy of your appearance before you do any tweaking.

To make a copy of your avatar, right click your avatar in world, choose appearance, choose make outfit, check the boxes for everything you want to save, including skin and shape and hair, name the folder (maybe Saving avatar 8/8/07)  and click to save. Everything copyable will copy to the new folder.  Anything you have clicked that is not copyable will move to the new folder.  It’s a good idea to do this after you make changes to your avatar for some reason.

I think of appearance in three main sections: body, clothes, attachments.

Your body is made up with the things you would expect: shape, skin, hair.  You can change these things using the appearance menu sliders.  In each case these are things you can’t take off: you must be wearing a skin, shape and hair, although they can all be default versions that you were born into SL with.  In order to change them you must either edit the ones you are wearing, or put new ones on.  If you buy a skin or a shape, these may not have full permissions, and so it may not be possible to make changes, copy or transfer those things.

Clothes can include some things you might think are part of your body, like tattooes.  You may be able to change them or you may not, depending upon where you got them from.  You can make new clothes using the appearance menu, using textures from your inventory.  If you wish to make clothing for sale, make sure that you start with a new item, and not a modifiable one, or you will not appear as the creator.

Bear in mind that if you are wearing no copy clothing and you save your appearance, the clothing will migrate to the new folder.  This can lead to embarrassing episodes if you are used to dragging a folder to your avatar as a way of putting on your clothing, if parts of outfits are saved in with your avatar shapes and skins.  You can always uncheck items if you do not wish them to migrate.

Attachments can cover things you think of as part of the body, like hair, or jewellery, or shoes. Of course there are some avatars which are completely based on attachments.  Most of the furry avatars, mech robot avatars and tiny furry avatars are made from attachments.

What becomes confusing for new people is that there are a number of things which are included in the appearance menu, which can also be attachments.  For example, you may have hair which was created using the appearance menu, or you may have attachment hair (like this picture of Cali) which is attached to the avatar as an object.  I selected and chose to edit the hair to show it was an attachment.  Even if you have attachment hair, you will still need to be wearing as hair something which is a separate setting for hair on your appearance - even if it only sets your avatar hair on “bald as a coot” as a base for your attachment hair.  This is why I say there are some things you can’t take off … even if you wish to be completely bald, that is “hair” too.

Similarly for shoes, even if your shoes are objects which are attached to your feet, you will probably need to be wearing a shoe setting on your avatar, which controls the height and position of your feet.  Note that feet in SL have different sizes, controlled from the appearance menu, and those are not set by the shoes you wear. You can take off your shoes completely, however, and be barefooted.

Once you have saved a copy of your current appearance, you can experiment with changing appearance using the appearance menu.  You can save the individual elements of your avatar, keeping diffierent shapes for different occasions.  Make sure you rename and save them, and make the name descriptive so that you do not have to check them by wearing them everytime you want to find your shape or hair.