pancake

Perhaps it's just me, or just the mesh clothing I've been looking at, but it seems there are a few silhouettes that I'm seeing over and over again.

I'm not accusing anyone of copying, not at all, but I suspect it may be related to creating mesh in general?

That the baggy long crotch pants, the knee length tank dress, and the tube top like bubble shirts lend themselves best to mesh? Maybe it's not that at all, maybe it's just a fashion trend.

Has anyone else noticed this? Can you share some insight into why certain shapes or silhouettes are common in mesh clothing? Can you point out some different or unique mesh clothing that I can explore?

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Elysium Hynes

Baggy long crotch pants: Awful trend.

Knee length tank dress: Well itīs summer you will see a lot of those some way better than others and a few templates everyone getīs bored of after 5 mins.

bubble shirts: A template that is everywhere, second to the bubble dress one.

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Lil Hapmouche

Ever checked the "Building Components" on the Marketplace for certain mesh kits? And sort by best selling, for example?
That'll explain a bit.

Beebo Brink

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Aliselia Aeon

Yeah, I think it's bound to happen at first.


ETA: I hate the damn drop crotch harem pants, but they have been all over the RL fashion scene for this spring

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Eclectic Wingtips

pancake most of those you are seeing over and over are mesh templates. unlike clothing layer templates where you could get all the psd layers in a file. most mesh templates dont include the mesh file so they cant easily change the shape of the clothing.

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Adeon Writer

Damien Fate was one of the first people to sell blank white mesh templates, and most people who buy his stuff simply texture them and resell them without doing any actual modeling work to customize them.

Allowed, but kind of lame.

A lot of what you see over and over is probably one of his or someone similar's templates textured on the second-hand market.

Misty Harley

it's so MC Hammer days and I swear to the almighty 80's God that I know existed because she also brought us two toned acid washed high rise jeans....

If they lived it...they sure as hell would NOT be wearing it. Not even on an Avi.

Also....just to give a heads up....Fashion trend 2012 real life for college kids: Stone washed Acid High Waisted Jeans.

Hold me now.

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Eclectic Wingtips

you axtually CANT remodelled them. its not that people wont its that most mesh templates come without the files to mod the mesh

Adeon Writer

Yikes - It would be better to provide the files; people will stop buying your templates if they are already sick of seeing it. I assumed the collada files were provided.

Eclectic Wingtips

no they arent and theres some good reasons for not. especially around the weighting and people just copying the weighting. and the weighting ending up fucked when they try to make the dress longer or whatever, then all the uv maps are also fucked and the original seller gets constant ims about how to do x on y program

people who are buying these templates though usually wouldnt know the first thing about modelling and would still sell it with no changes even if they did have the file. thats ehat happens with clothing layer templates all the time. maybe 10% of buyers do more than slap a texture on.

right now theres only like 3 or 4 template sellers for mesh so very little choices, which means we notice the same ones over and over

Nephilaine Protagonist

yeah its templates. there are very few people producing original mesh clothing.
besides the damien fate templates, im seeing this one everywhere, and the source for many of the others is this seller.

i'd advise anyone considering making items based on template meshes to be extremely discriminating in choosing their templates. if the template item has any issues at all, you're stuck with them forever and you cant fix them, and you'll have to explain that to your customers. be sure to give everything a thorough pose testing before putting it out for sale.

on the consumer end, it means that if you find a flaw you cant live with in one item based on a template, that eliminates everything made on that template from being a purchase option for you. frustrating. the pool of things-to-buy starts getting really small once you start choosing stuff on that basis.

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pancake

So let me see if I understand this, as I have zero building or creating skills myself.

It's like when you take a ceramics class, and we all get the same blank. We can paint it and glaze it however we like, but in the end we all have the same toothbrush holder.

As opposed to say taking a pottery class and getting a lump of clay and a wheel?

If so, that would explain why I'm seeing the same mesh shapes everywhere, and though some of well done and I buy them, there are only so many straples dresses I need or even want.

ETA: Is this because Mesh is new and people are still developing their skills? Should we expect to see a lot more new and different styles, non template creations, in the future?

Nephilaine Protagonist

yep thats pretty much it pancake

theres nothing wrong with using templates for someone who likes to texture but doesnt have the specific skill set to model/rig, but it comes with some issues and this is one of them.

Vaelissa Cortes

Mesh: Now the people who don't know anything about how humans are shaped can force their terrible shapes on you!

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Orc

I wish most of the templates were Damien's, at least his stuff is well made. A lot of those mesh templates are rigged poorly and even big shops with talented creators are using them. I recently bought a dress from a shop I love, there was no demo but I've worn mesh (original mesh I thought, now I dunno) from the shop before and have always been happy? Plus the textures were quite pretty. Turns out the dress looks terrible when you aren't standing up straight.

And pancake I dunno, there have always been a ton of template clothes all over. I expect there will be more and more mesh shops in the future but I doubt the templates will ever go away either.

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Aliselia Aeon

I've seen that one button blazer in many different textures. I'm getting pretty tired of it-and some of the others-but I'm sure that will change as time goes on.

I see no problem with using the templates, but I think that if anyone wants to create a following in the mesh market they need to really step it up on the texturing and detailing in order to make the items stand out from the crowd.

Eclectic Wingtips

yes. there are some mesh templates that are great but others are riggied horribly. and some are being taken off turbosquid too, so I agree with neph people need to be careful

Eclectic Wingtips

I do think its cos it is new. the full perm guys are still learning but so are those who sell fashion. it is a very hard medium to learn... which is why I gave up and teamed up with someone

Maggiedoll Alter

I'm not sure it's fair to say that it's lame or anything that people are buying and texturing meshes. That's what system clothing is anyway. Granted, they won't be doing the same things with transparencies, but still.
I make my own mesh, but I'm also just barely a business and reeeaally slow about getting new stuff out. No way would I be able to do a faster production cycle like so many people do. Doesn't seem fair to compare my every-so-often releases to the way people put out new stuff on a regular basis. If everybody worked like me, there'd be no SL fashion world.

What Ec said about newness, too. Partly that people are scrambling to get out more mesh, I think. And partly that they're not thinking in the same ways about how to make things more unique because they're partially relying on the mesh to do that for them even when it's from a template. People are used to thinking about how to build things onto the avatars. When they're starting with something built onto the avatar, it take times to shift thinking around it.

Myf

The whole template clothes thing isn't exactly new though is it? I'm not exactly what you'd call a fashionista, but even I do enough clothes shopping to be able to identify the more popular psd template sets by sight.

Mesh templates just strike me as a logicical extension on a trend that's been going on for a few years.

Maggiedoll Alter

Yea, that.

I think for a lot of people there's a discrepancy between technical skill and design ability.
There's so much that I see that doesn't have nearly the detail of some of my stuff, and yet still looks better.

A lot of people have an eye for aesthetics and want to focus on that rather than spending so much time on intricate technical stuff. They can look at a pre-made model and come up with ideas about how to do something with it that looks really great.
I can't visualize in that way, or look at something and have those ideas. Most of my creating is kinda just trial-and-error -- I model something based on what I know about the object, and fiddle with various aspects until I feel like I like the look. I don't think that's really a great way to go about a creative endeavor. It's certainly a particularly time-consuming way of doing it.
For a person who is more of a designer than I am, for most things it just wouldn't make sense to start from scratch. In some ways the modeling is a crutch for me, like a way to get by without a true sense of style. Even more so because I partially do it in order to be able to use the models as virtual mockups.

ETA: a lot of the silhouette thing is just because those are things that couldn't really be done before, though. Really well-done mesh can look much better than system layer equivalents, but it's stuff that couldn't be done at all (or that wouldn't look right in most poses) that most designers are really paying attention to now. Everything that used to be "oh, that'd be so cool, but how could I possibly get it to look right with the available tools?" So there's a flood of quirky styles just because they couldn't be done before.

Jackal Ennui

That, and I think a lot of people resort to templates because rigged mesh has quite the learning curve, and it can be a very technical and intimidating topic.

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Aliselia Aeon

I think your corsets are gorgeous. I love the detailing.

Quite frankly, I'm waiting for quirky. Most of the things I have seen so fat have seemed pretty mundane. It's early in the scheme of things, but I have been hoping for more really creative clothing and jewelry. I'm sure it will come, though-with time.