Today Linden Lab has introduced ten new fantasy starter avatars in Second Life and they are available right now to try out. They look really nice and rather cool. The good news is that everyone can personalise these new starter avatars. Yay! 🙂
“These new avatars have normal “system” bodies with mesh wearables, which makes it easy to change their hair, clothes, accessories, and more!”. The new addition includes a “diverse range of “genre” styles including steampunk, vampires, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic… and beyond!”.
Me menu > choose an avatar > select them to wear
New residents joining Second Life will be able to select any of these new starter avatars during the signup process and that’s great to hear. New starter avatars today look more realistic and they are simple to customise.
Linden Lab uploaded this internal video today introducing the 10 new starter avatars. Watch the video below and please spread the word. 🙂
Back in late 2006 when I joined Second Life there were so few avatars to choose from and they were pretty basic back then. I found this historical photo of what the early avatars in Second Life used to look like back in 2002 onwards. It’s just incredible how far Second Life has come since then for avatars.
In the blog post the lab talks about the history of the long-term starter avatar collections…
Back in May 2014, we introduced a round of mesh-body starter avatars to replace even older starter avatars (that you can still find in your inventory’s Library > Clothing > Initial Outfits folder).
Then in November 2015, we superceded all of those with a new batch of “Classic” avatars using “system” bodies that are easier to customize, partially in response to Resident requests pointing out the inflexibility of the all-mesh bodies.
The blog post goes on to say that with the introduction of Avatar Complexity (ARC) project it’s made creators more aware of balanced content in Second Life. The lab talked about how recently with the roll out of JellyDolls has again helped raise awareness of ARC and how it’s helping to control the resources the viewer spends rendering other avatars.
Daniel Voyager 