a couple of posts ago sian was talking about having acquired a new body. well, she thought, she’s got a legacy body, she’s got a maitreya body. all she’d have to do to be able to wear any clothing item currently on sale (and to have an option to wear pretty much everything in her inventory) would be to buy the ebody reborn body.
so sian now has the three most commonly supported mesh bodies. all of them have variant bodies or add-ons for different body shapes, but sian has not purchased any of the variants, and can’t speak to their value. they do seem to get a reasonable amount of support.
there are others, but these are the big three. the inithium kupra/khara bodies do get enough support to justify still including them in a rundown of secondlife bodies, but they’re not really competitors anymore. slink and belleza used to be the undisputed queens of the line, but slink closed in january 2023 when the much-missed creator had to leave sl, and although belleza is still in business, it is barely supported by the inworld fashion market.
(oh yeah, they do mesh bodies for the mens too, but who cares about those?)
sian thought it would be fun to perform a direct comparison. it isn’t a completely one-on-one, it can’t be, because the bodies require some tweaking of body shape to look comparable. sian has tried to get each body to look as much like her ideal as she can. she has taken to keeping a baseline setup for each body in her outfits list. it is just easier to start that way. updating them basically inspired this post.
because the uv models on the extremities of the bodies are ever so slightly different, you have to buy a new bake-on skin for each one. sian is using a variant of the same skin for each of them, which is the picasso babe modelesque skin by itgirls in the velour icy tone, coupled with the lelutka raven head on which is applied pumec’s tetya olya skin. sian wishes her avatar to reflect that she is a little older than she was and also that she is trans, and as a result has various additions to reflect cellulite, wrinkles, veins and other imperfections (we will list them at the end).
note that bodies and heads are still among the priciest items you will buy in secondlife. a body inworld costs more than most houses or cars, in fact.
the maitreya lara body, which was the unquestioned industry standard from 2017 until it was superseded in october 2023, is deprecated and no longer on sale. everyone who owned a lara when the lara x was released got a free lara x body and might still be able to, we’re not sure (edit: sian has been informed that you now get the lara 5.3 in the lara x package as a freebie so technically everyone with a lara x has the old lara too). if you want to buy a new lara x, it will cost l$2750 (as of 2025/07/19, this is us$10.50, or £7.82).
the lara x was absolutely the worst thing that ever happened to maitreya. yes, it has smoother, better weighting on its joints, particularly the wrists, pelvis, knees and shoulders. but the cost of that legitimate upgrade was an avatar that had really different joints, and hence it was a body that none of the old maitreya clothes fit. it took a while for clothing creators to take up a whole new body with a new developer kit, and with the release schedule churn being what it is, many creators had six months, nine months, sometimes even a year’s worth of clothes to release for the old maitreya body in the queue, meaning that the incentive to start wearing the new one was already reduced. many of those creators just stopped supporting maitreya after the change. the maitreya developer kit is quite difficult to get your hands on, and the process of getting one expects you to jump through a bunch of hoops, so the incentive to create for it isn’t really there anyway. creators created for maitreya because everyone wore it; everyone wore it because everyone created for it. the break in that cycle allowed creators to throw their collective hands up and go, “fuck it, i never liked designing for maitreya anyway.” as a result, maitreya has very much taken third place in the last couple of years. sian has included pictures of the old maitreya body as part of the comparison because, well, it’s useful, especially given that more than half of her inventory still fits it. it was virtually (pun intended) the only show in town for ages, and sian got a solid six years out of her lara. she is in a lara 5.1 here, because it is the last one she got before upgrading to the lara x.
the meshbody bodies have always been a lot pricier. while everyone in sl now gets very basic, cut down legacy bodies for free in the avatar welcome pack, if you want one that has all the options, poseable feet and all the materials stuff, you need to pony up a whopping l$5000 (us$19.09/£14.23). the makers of legacy — formerly tmp/the shops — brought out their first bodies in 2013, and sian was an early adopter, in fact. but meshbody have long had a fractious relationship with the inworld community, receiving a great deal of criticism for pricing, overcomplexity and poor customer service. the shops shopping hud and the stylemode styling hud were legendarily rubbish and depended on a media server talking to them remotely. even so, although it’s been around since early 2019, the main legacy body has remained pretty much stable. however many updates it has had, the shape has never changed. this stability kept legacy a common option for clothing creators, and now everyone gets one. the literal easiest way to change up and keep your wardrobe is to buy legacy. we cannot stress this enough. market dominance achieved.
coming in somewhere in the middle at l$3500 (us$13.36/£9.96) is the reborn body by ebody, which has been around since late 2021. the reborn body seems to be becoming increasingly popular, especially among second life’s alternative and roleplaying communities — sian especially noticed that many vendors at the last couple of cyber fairs only supported reborn and its waifu boobs extension (which is a very popular addon you can buy if you want enormous boobies). reborn also do addons to support realistically plus-sized (if still inhumanly beautiful) bodies too, going a small way to alleviate the baked-in (ahem) fatphobia of the virtual world’s bodies. reborn’s fans are often evangelical about the body and even apart from her cyber fair observations, the recommendations of sian’s friends have been as fulsome as this mesh body’s ample curves.
sian isn’t kidding about the curves. even with the leg muscles slider dialled right back, there’s just more meat here. this is really the one thing stopping it from taking over: you can make a lovely chunky avatar with it, but you cannot make a skinny one. the shape sian settled on here is the thinnest you can get with it without it looking awful.
do take a note of how the light plays on the skin. sian set the materials sliders on each of the huds to match the slight shine sian habitually gives to her lelutka head as seamlessly as she can, but that expresses itself on each of these bodies very differently. you can see it’s more glossy on the maitreya bodies, while having a more naturalistic texture on legacy, and something almost silky on the reborn body. the seam between the neck and head is most noticeable on the maitreya bodies, with a little crease there where the two meet. all of the bodies have a neck fix option, which is really a little fuzzy area that hovers over the skin join. it is generally not great, especially if you have tattoos.
it’s worth mentioning the render weight of these bodies. render weight isn’t the be-all and end-all, you understand; there’s all sorts of things that affect it, and a lot of people actually think it is complete nonsense. but the fact is that an avatar with a higher render weight does take up more processing power, and it does have a performance impact on other people’s experiences. sian tries to keep her render weight under 100,000 if at all she can. her goal used to be 30k, but honestly with the development of hd texturing, that is a pipe dream these days. if you are doing it right, the heaviest item your avatar is likely to wear is a mesh head. sian’s lelutka raven head, including the inner mouth parts and the eyes, totals 10530 (these numbers do vary, based on what viewer you use, what textures are applied, and some other contingencies that sian doesn’t understand, apart from keeping her aware that the numbers are not static. yours may be different).
now, this is a lot more than (most of) the bodies. the old lara 5.1has a render weight of 4322. This was more in earlier versions, but extra clothing layers are separated from the body and made optional attachments. having said this, even with the extra layers separated out, sian’s lara x clocks in at an eyewatering 8892. this is probably because of how much more complex the geometry of the joints is. smoother here means more tiny triangles.
the legacy body has its hands and feet separate. the old tmp body did this before, which is silly, because the legacy skeleton requires you to wear the hands and feet, even if they are invisible. sian’s legacy body clocks in at 11304 for the body, 3816 for the hands and 3468 for the feet, a total of 18588. Ouch. Partly this is to do with the fact that the legacy body has four transparent layers as part of the mesh. this isn’t idle geometry: it enables a really spiffy customisation system. the creators learned their lesson from the weird, locked down tmp body of old, and created a body that genuinely allows for all sorts of skin jiggery pokery. sian has been able to make glowy tattoos in different colours, and you can add all sorts of material effects. of all the bodies, the legacy one is the one you can customise the most, but the cost is in avatar weight and also in the complexity of its hud, which requires you to have media working, and, like we said last time, has to communicate with the shops asset server. sian’s maitreya body is going to work forever. if the shops go out of business or they stop supporting legacy, the legacy hud will stop working at a stroke, just as the hud has for the old bodies.
what about the reborn body? to our surprise its avatar weight was 2954. this is especially wild considering that it has more options for feet than some of the others (the ballerina feet on the legacy body are in fact completely separate — you have to take off the other feet and replace them with a whole new attachment), plenty of options for fingernails and toenails and one more set of nipples than the others. also, the reborn is the only one that allows you to hide the toenails, and you will understand why this matters if you have ever had a set of disembodied toenails floating over your avatar’s shoes.
the actual shape of these bodies is interesting enough. the old tmp body was, for all its hud fuckery and crazy complex geometry, one of the better proportioned mesh bodies, and you can see that the breasts and bum of the legacy body are nicely proportioned, at least as good as the maitreya bodies. the reborn body also has marvellously curved breasts, which sit bigger than the other bodies (sian actually reduced the breast size slider on the reborn: it’s 38 on the others, but it’s 28 on the reborn and they still look bigger). the backside is huge and even with deformers, it doesn’t get much smaller. honestly, this isn’t a bad thing, reflecting somewhat more realistic human proportions, but if you want a flat butt you are out of luck.
the other interesting thing here is that the reborn body has the nicest, best-defined hands. the legacy body’s hands are a little spidery, in sian’s opinion. the lara and lara x hands are so similar that mesh nail attachments fit both identically. the wrists are very different, though, and you can see in the pose above that the old lara’s wrist has that telltale dip in it that speaks to slightly shonky rigging.
the reborn has the straightest shoulders, and the elbows look pretty good, although no mesh body looks good if you put its arms straight up.
finally, the naughty bits. it should be fairly apparent here that the joint between the thigh and crotch is a bit off in the maitreya bodies. on the other hand, the legacy one is perfectly competent and the reborn, as you might expect by now, has much more going on down there.
note also that the legacy body has a more pronounced innie than the other bodies (sian just did a search on marketplace for “outie”, and is pleased to tell you that you can indeed give your av an outie if your heart desires it. rl!sian is an innie, though, so she is fine, thanks).
the weirdest thing about this exercise is that sian wasn’t expecting how it was going to turn out. a maitreya partisan since 2017, who stuck with the lara x, she absolutely wasn’t expecting to find that the reborn body was going to be the one that she found herself liking the most.
going forward though, for the time being, sian is pretty sure she is going to be moving back and forth between the three currently supported ones, for the simple reason that she’s now able to cover all the available options for new clothes. it expands her horizons. there’s a value in that for her, even if no one else reads this.
other body parts
• lelutka evox head raven
• itgirls picasso babe modelesque skin with contour cleavage addon (velour icy tone), body-specific versions
• girlfriend bom plastic boobs veins addon
• used abused bom cellulite + stretch marks + acne
• pumec tetya olya face (velour icy tone)
• lelutka evox mature 001 addon
• adoness shaveme hairbase