Second Life New Avatar Welcome Packs – It’s time to check your inventory library, folks!

ETA: Okay, it would seem that someone somewhere behind the scenes jumped the gun on this and made these items public before they should have been! The Avatar Welcome Pack has now been hidden/removed from the Library folder, at least for now. However, anything that you copied over to the main inventory folders (by wearing the items) is still there and able to be used. This is what I get for being quick off the bloody mark! I’ll keep this post up for now, but please note that these items are currently hidden/not available, although it looks like they do at least show a glimpse of something being planned for the future.

Well. This was an unexpected surprise! I logged in an alt very briefly, and immediately spotted that the Library folder was showing up in Recent Items, which means that new stuff has been added. I opened it up, thinking it was going to be some new additions for Senra, and… well, this was what greeted me.

My initial reaction was very much a WTF one, as yours might be, too. But then, I opened some of those folders, and the WTF turned into OMGWTF. Because, yeah.

I guess the next point on from OMGWTF might be OMGWTFBBQ, because of this:

Yes, I’m focusing on the male items because this is a male-focused blog. But ladies, you’re not left out either, so check out your inventory’s library folder for the goodies waiting therein for you.

Back to the guys, and a brief summary of what’s inside these folders on a brief glance through and try-on (because you didn’t think I could leave them just sitting there, right?)

The head options comprise three ‘lite’ versions of LeLUTKA’s male EvoX heads: Eon, Ford, and Gen, and accompanying shapes as well as full head-and-body skins by Velour & leLAPEAU to fit them. Eon (combined with the Saad skin) is the Caucasian avatar, Ford (combined with the Isaac skin) is the Black avatar, and Gen (combined with the Koa skin) is the Asian avatar. This is a quick composite shot of all three with their skins, base shapes (note that I did have to make one tweak to the shape for Eon – pushing the Forehead Angle slider to 100 – to prevent a minor glitch with the hair at the front), and the included hairstyles from Wings as well as the included suit from Gabriel. The middle avatar is wearing the included brown hairbase from the LeLUTKA pack:

The shapes are fully modifiable, so you can tweak them to your heart’s content, and I fully intend to do that at some point. For now, I just wanted to show you the defaults.

The included bodies are ‘basic’ versions of the Legacy body. (Note that this is a basic version of their ‘Special Edition’ body, which is the main Legacy body. It’s not the L$1 ‘Classic’ body, so clothing rigged for the main Legacy body should fit it.) The avatars come with a selection of complete avatar/outfit combinations (casual, club, and sport), comprising items from the following:

• Casual outfit: Jeans and sneakers from Arcback, plus a t-shirt from Cold Ash
• Club: Suit and shoes from Gabriel (partially shown above)
• Sport: Hoodie and sweatpants from NoMercy, plus sneakers from Phedora

The full avatar/outfit combinations come in single colours, but you also get additional folders containing some different colour options for a couple of the items. The avatar/outfit of the Gabriel club suit is black, but the additional options include both beige and blue, and the Phedora sneakers include both black and white versions.

As well as getting those items separately, there are also two hairstyles from Wings (one of which is shown above).

Some important notes about these Welcome Packs

• Neither the heads nor the bodies contain HUDs. This means that you won’t be able to use any applier items, such as eyes or makeup with them. They’re ‘Lite’/’Basic’ versions that are fully BoM only.
• The heads use LeLUTKA’s EvoX UV map. For newbies, this means you might look a little bit odd for a few seconds until the skin appears correctly. Give it a few moments, and you’ll no longer look like your mouth is on the back of your head ;-) Also if you’re a newbie to EvoX skins, don’t forget that you need to add the included ear textures, as these are separate items on EvoX skins.
• The fingernails and toenails on the bodies will only work with the included skins from Velour & leLAPEAU. Note that this is mentioned in the included notecard from Legacy, which states the following: “Please note that your fingernails and toenails can be hidden using the alpha layers included in your body folder! Also note that these nails are only compatible with VELOUR & LeLaPeau starter skins!” I did notice that using some of the alpha layers for the top half of the body hid the fingernails, which suggests that they’re included as part of the upper UV map somewhere. You can see this in the composite image above. While it’s not hugely noticeable, I’m hoping that this is something that may be fixed in a future iteration of these bodies. There are, however, a lot of third-party mesh nail add-ons both for male and female Legacy bodies, so it may be worth trying some demos of those to see if that will get around this issue. This might also enable you to wear other third party EvoX skins.
• The included skins have baked-on underwear. Yes, it’s light and vaguely skin-toned, but it is there. This is probably because some might want to resize them to use for child avatars, which must always have non-removable modesty patches.
• You will need to wear these items in order for them to show in your main Inventory. They don’t yet appear in the Avatar picker toolbar, and I’m not sure if these are planned to replace Senra at sign-up, or just to be additional items available from the inventory library. At the time of writing this post I’ve not seen any official announcement about them yet, so who knows where Linden Lab is going with them?

Remember: these are New Avatar Welcome Packs. They’re intended to be a starter for newbies to Second Life, and are not intended to be fully-featured heads and bodies with all the bells and whistles that experienced users expect. They’re a fantastic starter to get new residents acquainted with how mesh avatar customisation works, but they’re not going to be ‘as good as’ your main Legacy body or LeLUTKA head, so quitcher bitchin’ if you think about starting with that!

All-in-all, my first impression of these Avatar Welcome Packs is extremely positive. While the intent behind Senra was good, and many of the things included in the whole sign-up process fulfilled a lot of the items on my wishlist from a few years back, unfortunately the Senra avatars didn’t land well with many residents. I feel that these new welcome kits will – if properly promoted and offered to new users in an easy-to-access way – probably have a huge impact on new user retention, at least when it comes to how people feel about their appearance when they first rez inworld. I’ve yet to test how they handle third-party skins and the like (and, of course, the nails may be an issue if you’re not using add-on mesh nails) but this is a massive and useful step forward for new avatars (as well as for those poor neglected alts!)