It’s the final installment of this Bakes On Mesh series. When I decided to write about my experiences with BOM, I thought I’d get one or two posts out of it. Turns out it was more intensive than I thought – and I didn’t even cover everything! This last post will cover using the SLink Physique Redux body bundle and some final thoughts.
After all my testing with the Maitreya body, I decided to try out the SLink Redux body, since it was specifically made for BOM. I put on the body and since I was still wearing the Glam Affair Margot skin on my system avatar, it applied that to the Redux body parts.
The head looked okay, since I was still wearing the LeLutka head. So I just needed to check out the hands and feet.
Here are the hands as they appear with the Glam Affair skin. You can see that the nails from the system skin show under the mesh nails.
As mentioned before, included in the Redux body bundle is a fix for the hands and feet. Here are the hands with the fix added. You’ll notice that the shading is off – you need to tint the fix to match whatever skin you’re wearing.
The tinting is easy – I just used the color picker and matched it by eye, but of course you can find the RGB of whatever skin you’re wearing so that it will match exactly. Keep in mind, your lighting may affect how the fix looks.
Ta-da!! Perfect hands. Now for the feet! The feet without any fix applied:
Again, you can see that the nails from the skin don’t match up with the nails on the mesh feet. After wearing the included fix layer for the feet:
You can see that the nails on the feet look much better.
Now that I knew the hands and feet looked good, I turned to playing around with some of the system layer clothing I still had floating around in my inventory. The Redux HUD also has a few things to help with issues that might arise with using system layer clothing on a mesh body. There are buttons on the HUD that let you turn the nipples of the body on and off, as well as smooth out clothing so it looks better when applied to a mesh body.
System layers follow the UV map of the system body, so clothing that in real life would stretch across your chest, for example, may ‘sink’ weirdly when applied to your mesh body. SLink has thoughtfully provided a button to help with this issue.
Here is a pic of a system layer shirt applied – notice the area between the breasts, where the shirt appears to be tucked behind them.
Using the smoothing button in the HUD, you can smooth the area so that the fabric looks more realistic.
You can do the same thing with two other buttons – one for your rear end, and one for that pesky camel toe! The difference is subtle, but often those subtle details make a huge difference.
I tried several other outfits, including this old system layer dress. There is a mesh panel for the dress, but the shirt and pant system clothing layers applied without a hitch.
Once I was happy with the hands and feet and I had a handle on how everything worked, I decided to try a complete outfit – with shoes and hair!
After going through everything, I realized that I had forgotten to test the rendering cost of the Maitreya/LeLutka combo versus the SLink Redux/LeLutka combo. After all, the whole point of BOM was to try and reduce the rendering load on your computer by getting rid of extra mesh layers.
Now, I expect the Maitreya to be heavier, because the body hasn’t been updated for BOM. So the onion layers are still there, they just aren’t being used. I was curious, so I went back and did some testing.
Wearing the Maitreya body and LeLutka head, my render weight/ARC was 25,262. If I remove the hair and shoes (which are mesh attachments and add to my ARC), the ARC drops to 19,772.
Wearing the SLink Physique Redux body and LeLutka head, my ARC was 21,890. If I remove the hair and shoes, the ARC drops to 16,400. So the Redux body is less ARC, as expected. Keep in mind that ARC isn’t exact, and sometimes removing things in a different order will change the ARC you get. However, I am happy with the way both the Maitreya and Redux bodies look.
I can’t wait to dig out some of my old system layer clothing and start playing around with different looks!! If you haven’t given BOM a try – you should. I hope this series was helpful in explaining how some of it works. Thanks for reading!
A Kat and A Mouse 