What a Mesh!

 I've made no secret in the past about my enthusiasm for mesh in SL. The way mesh hair and clothes can move with your avatar looks great, and the technology is on the way to looking even better with the latest developments with Quarl's Mesh Deformer

For those that don't know, the deformer is a piece of software that will allow the viewer to resize a suitable mesh object to fit your avatar. Existing mesh sort of does that, changing certain sliders on the shape will make some changes to mesh clothes, but most things have no effect, and if you don't want your skin showing you need to change your shape or wear an alpha. The deformer will also let physics layers work with mesh clothing.

The deformer project has been ticking away in the background for a while now, and the version 0.3 alpha just made it into the LL beta viewer which can be found HERE

If you want to try it you now need specificaly deformable mesh (early test versions deformed anything). Geometry have kindly produced a free deformable mesh dress for testing purposes HERE.

From little...

To large.

Playing with this new tech alerted me to another problem with mesh, one totaly unrelated to how well  it fits, and one that i realised is kind of a big deal. Did you know that on the lowest graphics settings, mesh objects don't appear? They don't look bad or wierd or anything, they just don't exist. Which is kind of a problem when its your clothing!

I had to nip out while testing, and since the test dress is rather nice, and i knew i wasn't sticking out of it on a 'non deformer' viewer, i didn't bother changing into another outfit.
On my screen, I looked like this:

Loveley

The first I realised there was a problem is when someone asked me why I was almost naked. She had a laptop that could only run SL on its lowest settings and was seeing me in nothing but boots and briefs!
Like so:

EEEK!

Yes I should have been wearing a bra, but I don't have one that wouldn't have visible straps, and like the physics layer issue, you can't control other peoples settings, you have no way of knowing if your clothes have vanished. My advice, if your outfit doesn't include an alpha, invest in a good set of underwear!

*Edit* Apparently it's just v1 based mesh viewers that have this problem. Doesn't help that v1 based Phoenix is still the biggest viewer on the grid.