Makara Yorimasa

In between farting around with various builds, I have been wasting time looking for a new skin, or at least a more Asian-looking one. Anyone who has ever gone looking for an Asian skin for a man on SL will know what a tough job it is: there are loads for women and hardly any for men.

The one I have now is a generic medium tan Caucasian; I wanted something with a yellower tint, preferably with eyebrows more like my own, and not too muscly. After a couple of hours of trying on demos (and accidentally buying the full version of one - aieee!) these were the best Asian skins I found (all skins are worn over my existing shape):

This is "Hiro" from Adam n Eve, and I really like it. The eyes are particularly good and the eyebrows are similar to my own, although they look a bit surprised. The colour of the lips is good too. The pubes are visibly crisp and curly, unlike the shaded patch I have on my existing skin ("Eric", from Cryogen), but the nipples are a bit flat and the muscles are a bit slapdash and don't sit well on my shape. Hiro was going to be my new skin until I found the one I ended up with (see end).


This is Takami from Issigonis. The creator (who is wearing this skin in his profile pic, and looks pretty hot) specializes in Asian skins, but as usual, that means Asian skins for women, not men. This had a very negative reaction from Gabe ("You look like you've just come out of a concentration camp!"), and I know what he means, however, the eyes were very good, despite the overshading of the mouth and arse, and the slightly too real musculature.



This is "Bryan" from Cryogen. It cost 1800L$, and is fairly close to my original skin ("Eric" by the same maker), but it has a better finish and looks great close up. It's a tan Caucasian skin again, though. I bought a paler version too, which is closer to my real skin tone (I'm only part Japanese in RL), and a darker one for a summer tan.

If Cryogen could come up with a paler, yellower version of this, with better eyebrows and Asian eyes, I would buy it but for now, this is pretty much perfect.

I meant to finish some work around Safe Harbor, but one way or another, I ended up spending a lot of the bank holiday weekend chatting to people. One of them was the lovely Linuxess, a member of Thinc, who was looking for a new skin. We went to Snowflake Skins, which have the most kawaii designs in SL, IMHO, and I'm delighted to say that she bought a very pretty anime-style pale skin with huge eyes and petal pink lips (you can see it on her blog which is listed on my links). She had been looking for a realistic skin, but I think I persuaded her that it is nice to be a little more cartoony sometimes, which brings me on to the subject of this post.

Aesthetics are a personal thing, of course, so what I'm going to give here is my personal opinion. SL is basically a cartoon environment at the moment - it's not sophisticated enough yet to handle "Final Fantasy" levels of detail - so when I'm designing, shopping or building in SL, I try to bear this fact in mind. For this reason, I avoid ultra-photorealistic textures at all times, prefering a more painterly effect. I don't mind how wiggy or off-the-wall buildings and clothes are - or how safe and boring they are - but I do think a photographic texture looks out of place in an animated cartoon world.

Particularly jarring are plants, but I also find textures representing bookcases, or cupboards full of food, etc. quite unpleasant to look at. I have been installing a kitchen in Gabe's refurbished house this morning, and have had a lot of trouble finding attractive fittings (I don't want him to have a kitchen that looks as if I've slapped a polaroid of a cooker over the top of a square block).

Of course the first thing I should do is to enrol on a building course and learn how to make my own textures. I'll look into this tonight.