Body HUD - Appearance

Body HUD Appearance

This somewhat daunting section of the HUD is for managing your appearance - how your body looks not the shape. There are four sections to this page of the HUD:

Visibility - Manage visibility of some areas of the body that commonly need it
Skin - Apply materials, erase, restore to BOM
Applier Layer - Configure how appliers will affect the one applier layer on the regular body (LITE has no applier layer)
Materials - Customize the materials for your body

Visibility

This small section of the HUD is used to hide or show some very specific portions of your body that are commonly needed. For example, you're wearing boots that fully cover your feet or maybe they stick out a bit - hide them :) Want more privacy? Hide your nipples or groin.

Skin

Here you can manage the skin portion of your Prima body.

Apply BOM Skin will restore your skin to the BOM defaults. This will replace the textures used on the upper body and lower body but will not affect the HD portions nor the Neck Fix.

Apply Left Arm and Apply Left Leg are used to use the BOM Universals for the left arm and the misnamed (yay lindens!) left leg which really means the left foot. These buttons are used when you are also wearing a BOM Universal layer provided by your skin creator for asymmetry between the arms/feet. And that will allow you to wear other BOM asymmetric items (e.g. tattoos). If you change your mind, you can always use the "Apply BOM Skin" button to restore the left arm and left foot to the default settings.

The Skin Materials section lets you quickly apply some materials to your skin. Applying materials only affect the upper body and lower body and rarely used neck fix, not the HD Nipple nor the HD Vulva.

The image on the left shows the options available for Prima Femme Busty and Prima Femme Petite. The image on the right shows the additional options available only for Prima Femme Elite.

There are several ways to restore materials to your Skin and HD Nipple and HD Vulva should you wish. The easiest way to do this is to first get your skin correct - apply skin materials from the HUD or by using a 3rd party applier. Then you can use your HUD to re-apply your HD Nipple or HD Vulva texture and that will carefully copy over your gloss settings for you automatically. Alternatively, you can adjust your Skin settings using the Materials section (read below for more info) and then use Copy and Paste to transfer those settings to other parts of your body.

Appliers

Reminder - if you're wearing the LITE body then there is no applier layer - you must wear the regular body instead.

Prima bodies come with a single applier layer to reduce lag and reduce alpha clashes that are rampant in SecondLife. However, to make the most of the applier layer we've implemented a way to restrict where appliers can apply so that you can "mix and match" from various appliers to combine them. By selecting different portions of the body shape you can enable or disable application to that area. A few Quick Select buttons are provided to make that easier.

Once you've done that any applier that is used will be restricted to those areas that a highlighted. However, a lower body applier will not impact the upper body and vice-versa. In addition to controlling appliers the body selection can also be used to affect the applier layer using the second column of buttons.

Show / Hide layer affect visibility of the applier layer. Blend / Mask layer adjust whether the layer is using blend mode (can cause alpha clashes) or mask mode (safe from alpha clashes). Erase layer can be used to erase those portions of the applier layer after confirming from you that this is what you want to do.

Finally, Erase materials can be used to revert the materials for the applier layer to defaults (identical to how erasing materials works for the skin).

Materials

Your Prima body supports a complete set of material options for your skin and applier layer. In SecondLife terms that means that the body supports diffuse textures, diffuse tint, specular textures, normal textures, specular shine with gloss, environment and gloss color, plus transparency, glow and full bright.

At the top of the materials panel are two switches to quickly disable or enable materials. Below that is where the customization can happen.

Customizing

Before you can customize anything first you need to choose what to customize. There are five areas you can choose from: Skin, HD Nipple, HD Vulva and the Applier Layer. Copy and paste are provided so you can copy from one of those to another one.

For example - you adjust your skin gloss and so on to your liking and then Copy those settings and switch to HD Nipple and Paste them so that your HD Nipples will have the same settings.

Another common example is color matching your neck with your head - after you get your upper body matched you can Copy that from your Skin to your Neck Fix.

Below that are the scroll bars used to adjust some values like gloss (specular shine intensity), environment, transparency and glow. A switch for disabling/enabling Full Bright is also in this area. The scroll bars have end pieces that you can click to quickly get to all off (left side) or all on (right side).

Erase materials can be used to erase materials associated with the material you've selected to edit. When you poke that button a dialog will come up asking you what parts of the material you would like to erase.

Editing colors

Every material has two colors you can edit - the tint which affects the diffuse texture and gloss which affects the specular shine color. Before changing a color choose which to edit by clicking on the Tint or Gloss word.

Within the standard SecondLife HSL color gradient is a cross-hair cursor that you can drag around to choose the hue and saturation. Hue runs from left to right across the gradient while saturation runs from bottom (low) to top (high). The brightness scroll bar will let you fine tune the colors brightness.

As you make changes to the color the HSL and RGB numeric displays will update as will the body area being changed. The large box to the left of those displays can be clicked if you wish to enter an RGB value for the color. A dialog will appear with instructions on how to enter the value.

After you have a color, you can save it away for later by clicking on one of the 16 swatches along the bottom. A dialog will appear asking you what to do - use the color or save the color for later.