Released just yesterday, Gianni X 7.0 is the latest update from Signature for their flagship product: the Gianni body that so many of us already own, which – if you can believe it – is now 10 years old. Well, happy birthday, mate; you’re looking good for your age! ;-)
If you’ve already purchased Signature Gianni, no matter how long ago, head to the Signature store inworld and hit up the redelivery terminal to grab your update. When you add the unpacker, you’ll see three options:
The top one will give you Gianni X 7.0 – the newest body. The lower left will give you Gianni Classic X 7.0, and the lower right will give you the original Gianni 6.1.
Have a read of the notecards in the folder that unpacks, as they give you quite a bit of info, including links to the full manual on Signature’s website. Since this post is only a brief review of the body, I encourage you to check that link out if you have any detailed questions about the body or its HUD.
The important thing to know is the following from the Gianni X 7.0 body’s notecard:
By using the new Gianni X 7.0 Body, please note that older clothing may not fit perfectly due to the revamped body shape and updated mesh. Because the body shape and rigging have been refined for a smoother, more realistic look, some existing clothing items may no longer align as expected.
However, the built-in Auto Hide functionality used to hide body parts on previous versions will continue to work with this new update.
Visit https://www.signature-sl.fr/changelog to view what changed
I’ve tried several clothing items rigged to the original Gianni, and – while the new body does ‘poke through’ in places – the alpha cuts on the HUD have dealt with pretty much everything I’ve thrown at them, and I haven’t noticed any egregious gaping at the neck or upper arms. However, the rigging has changed, with different weighting, so you may find that clothing from some creators works better than others. Male avatars have always had to deal with poke-through far more than female avatars. If you’ve ever used a female body (Skell’s bishonen persona, Syd, has worn both Maitreya and Legacy F with flat chest mods) you’ll have noticed a world of difference with regard to how little you actually need to use alpha HUD cuts or alpha layers on those, compared to male bodies.
What I have found is that tighter, more fitted accessories – rings, cuffs, bracelets, bracers etc – that were rigged for the original Gianni body do not sit properly on the Gianni X 7.0 hands and wrists.
Visually, the body looks great, with new included body skins that truly hold their own among today’s high definition offerings. You’ll get two full packs of skins in 10 tones per pack, for both the toned body and the chubby body.
Note: Be aware that the included skins are on the system skin layer, so they’ll automatically go under any tattoo layers you’re wearing. They are also only for the body, not the head. In fact, the head section of the included skins is just tinted blue, so if you wear one and wonder why the hell your head turned blue, you need to re-wear your usual face skin!
Yep, this body contains a built-in chubby option for those of you who want to rock a bit of a dad bod in Second Life. With a simple click of the HUD and a switch of the body skin, you can go from a six pack to a softer look, as shown in this screenshot of the ad from the Signature store:
The HUD is nicely intuitive, with each tab accessed from the hamburger menu (three horizontal stripes) in the top right corner.
Both the Gianni X 7.0 and the Gianni Classic 7.0 body can be further adjusted using the new Shaper options in the HUD (above, right). This allows a great deal more customisation for your body shape, alongside the standard Second Life shape editor that you’re probably familiar with. However, do please note that the options for the chubby belly and the Gianni X buttocks on the Body tab of the HUD will only work on the Gianni X 7.0, not the Classic X or the 6.1, and – as with all HUD-based deformers – I would advise a relog once you’ve got your shape to your satisfaction, to ensure that your changes can be seen properly by those around you. (A point of note here: In general, for most deformers that alter your shape, Reset Skeleton will show the changes to you, but only a relog or a teleport – a relog is better – will guarantee that others see your changes and don’t see you looking odd or possibly even weirdly deformed.)
The alpha layer section now has a few more options – including sections for the hands and feet as opposed to simply hiding the entirety of them. And, as with older Signature bodies, you can switch easily from hiding by part (single alpha slice) to by section (whole block, such as entire left arm, etc). The additional tattoo layer has now been removed from the body and included as a separate wearable. This, and some other changes, have allowed the body’s complexity to be reduced, bringing it down from 8750 to 7150, and reducing the polygon count by 35%. In addition, the script count has also been reduced from 8 to 3. As before, you have multiple alpha save slots for all your favourite outfits, and most of the old auto-hide options in your existing clothing should still work.
The body also now has new HD nipple options, which you can choose to enable (or not; I ain’t the keeper of your tits!) and clicking on the settings cog at the top right will allow you to amend the materials shine on the body, or remove it (which is what I tend to do). Here is also where you can switch from the toned belly to the chubby belly and either keep the original flat Gianni butt or enable the booty.
Be aware that the UV mapping on the Gianni X 7.0 body (and only on that one; this doesn’t affect the Classic X body or the 6.1 body) might mean your old Gianni body skins may look just a little bit off in places. I noted that wearing an older BoM Gianni body skin from Not Found there was a small deviation in the shading at the outer pectorals. While this might be a deal-breaker if you have a favourite old Gianni body skin from a third-party creator and you like to go shirtless a great deal, it won’t make a difference if you wear any kind of shirt or t-shirt, etc. Hopefully, we’ll see some other body skin options released by creators for the Gianni X 7.0 body for those who don’t want either the six-pack or the dad bod.
Speaking of creators, if you are one and you want to request the Gianni X creator kit, you can do so at this link: Signature Content Creators.
I’m not someone who’s usually highly-muscled in SL. I prefer a leaner look, so what you see in this blog post isn’t the only way you can look. I encourage you to redeliver (if you already own the body) or try a demo (if you’re thinking of a purchase – always, always demo first!) and see for yourself.
Oh, and if you’re wondering what the hell that post title is all about, here ya go. (C’mon, everything is X-this and X-that these days. There was no way I could resist using that iconic little earworm for this!)
It’s horrible, the new body, None of the clothing fits it, sticking to the older body. What a waste of time, there are NO creators out there with clothes for this new X body, so what’s the point
This is going to be one hell of a long-arsed response to a single-line comment, but I feel that it’s merited.
This free update is only one day old, so of course there will not be a ton of content available for it right now. Give it time. Even when Legacy first released their male body I found it difficult to source more than a few items of clothing for it, but now it’s the most rigged-for male body out there. Dev kits are easily available on Signature’s website, and Signature encourage those who want creators to rig for the body to share the link to the dev kit form, which is what I did in this post.
I’m not sure what clothing you’ve been trying with it, but I have an extensive wardrobe (inventory count almost at 300,000 items) and I tried clothing from several ‘big name’ creators. Apart from the usual ‘bits of body poking through’ that most male bodies have always tended to suffer from – which I noted in the post; for some reason, the male avatars of SL have had to rely far more on alpha layers or the alpha cuts in their body HUDs than the female avatars – only items that were very fitted or tightly rigged to sections of the body displayed major problems that would cause me to regard them as unwearable.
It also depends on the creator you purchase from, and how they rig their clothing. The original Gianni body required – for want of a better phrase – ‘double rigging’. This meant that creators needed to rig both for bone (which adjusts the item when you move shape sliders for things like leg and arm length) and volume (which adjusts the item when you move shape sliders for things like muscle and fat). But some creators only rigged for bone, and that could cause problems for those who didn’t stick with the regular ‘pronounced deltoids’ of the original Gianni body and shape.
When I was a regular Gianni wearer I had slimmed down my torso and arm muscles because – as mentioned in the post – I prefer a leaner look. And I did notice that this occasionally caused the following problems with some clothing items:
– from those who rigged only for bone (length) but not for volume (muscle and fat) the arms of t-shirts would sometimes gape widely around my arms, because those particular creators very likely rigged their clothing to fit the included default shape with its pronounced deltoid muscles, so it was like wearing rigid bulky armour rather than cloth
– from those who correctly rigged for both bone (length) as well as volume (muscle and fat) my slimmed-down shape sometimes meant my arms looked stick-thin in long-sleeved items such as suit jackets, which meant I needed to wear an adjusted shape with much more muscle than I would normally have, just for those particular clothes
As a point of note, at least one of the creators most often recommended to those wanting to buy male clothing in SL fell into that second bracket, because they correctly rigged for both bone and volume, leading me to need a different shape for their items.
At that time, I was not even super-skinny. I prefer to have a broad-shouldered but lean swimmer’s torso. It’s just that – with the older Gianni bodies, pre Gianni X – you had to do some arcane magic with the shape sliders in order to reduce those bulky deltoids in a way that didn’t end up with you having ‘bracketed arms’ that curved out and away from your body. Just reducing muscle would result in a large gap at the armpit area. The fix for this, to slim the delts but prevent that gaping upper arm, was to zero the torso muscle, shoulder, and pec sliders (which, yes, looks terrible at first) and then slowly increment each one up in balance with each other to bring the arms closer to the body. This does result in ‘shoulder slope’ but then you begin to increase the shoulder width by small increments, all the time pulling back to check your proportions (and, of course, checking that your arm length isn’t at “T-Rex and couldn’t take a piss if he needed to”) and after a little while I had a shape that I was happy with. And I’m a fussy shit, so my shape is important to me and I took that time to get it right.
One might think, “Who the fuck can be bothered to do all that shit, just to get dressed?” And my answer would be, “A man who is dedicated to looking good, no matter what.” Outfits are easy to save, so switching between body shapes is no issue; just hit ‘replace entire outfit’ and you’ve got everything there. Signature bodies have always offered save slots for various alpha cut combinations, and most creators these days use auto-hide in their clothing to help with that. But sometimes it takes a bit of effort to look good, and male clothing has always tended to be more in need of alphas than female clothing.
As a CSR for a major mesh head brand, and as someone who – for close to 15 years now – has been passionate about helping guys to look good in SL, I have personally worked with hundreds (possibly thousands, if you count this blog and the help I’ve given inworld and on the SL forums when I was active there) of guys to get them kitted out. Some of them were willing to put in that work, and some just couldn’t be arsed. They got frustrated at the way SL can sometimes work, and that’s understandable. It’s often not just a case of “chuck something on and it’s guaranteed to fit” that people might be used to from studio-made games, because of how SL has evolved with user-created content and hobbyist creators (some of whom do, yes, now make a living from SL, but the vast majority don’t). Looking good requires a bit of effort, both in SL and in RL, but it’s fine to be frustrated and to not want to bother with all that crap.
The Gianni Classic X 7.0 update – available in the redelivery HUD – was confirmed in the included notecard to work with existing clothing, so you can still have most of the benefits of the update (the only thing you’ll be missing out on is the dad bod belly and the bigger butt options) but with the classic Gianni shape. I encourage you to give that a try if you havent already.