With the new mesh feature in Second Life, we’re seeing many more designers using it in their creations. Hair is no exception, and I’ve been excited to see what would be made as soon as I heard about mesh. :)

I’ll start off this post with a new mesh hair from Alice Project.

This hair is called Sohee, and I found it on the SL Marketplace.

At first glace, it looks just like a sculpted hair. It’s pulled into a side ponytail, with the longer strands sitting both in front and behind the avatar’s right shoulder. I decided to keep the lighter color on it, instead of wearing my normal dark brown/black. The texture work is lovely and AP offers many options for darker, lighter, or wild colored tips.

So what’s the big deal about mesh? I’ll be happy to show you:

I deliberately chose a pose that was impossible with sculpt or prim hair. However mesh hair moves with the avatar, so we can see that everything remains in place against my back and chest, no matter how I move my head! With sculpts, I would have spent a long time trying to find a pose that made sure the hair didn’t stick through me.

So this is very exciting to me! I am happy to try this new feature and use a new client, if it means no more stiff hair! Additionally, the mesh is ‘rigged’ to your skull, which means that it adjusts size depending on your head size. Hopefully this means that more varied avatars can wear mesh hair, including those who RP children or other small avatars.

The down-side is that you cannot manually resize a mesh hair. It moves with your skeleton, and is firmly locked to it. This will cause a problem if you need to adjust a strand or move the hair up/down a notch. It would be impossible. Designers are trying to work around some of these issues by offering different basic options, however it may be some time before we find mesh fitting everyone.

Hair – Alice Project – Sohee – Marketplace Link – L$1 for Demo, L$200-500 for color packs.

Skin – the body co – Chocolata – In-World Link

Dress – JANE – summer maxi dress.1975.berries – In-World Link