We’ve all been waiting for it, my sartorial darlings, and it’s almost here. Belleza’s 4.0 update to their Jake body will be landing on Saturday 5th September 2026, and oh boy is this one hell of an update!
First up, the basics. If you’ve purchased Jake in the past, all you need to do is redeliver on or after 5th September to get the update. If you’ve not bought it before, then pick up a free demo from the Belleza store after the 5th (SLurl and other links will be at the end of this post) and give it a try. Currently, and until further notice, the body is half price at just L$1,500 at the Belleza mainstore only. (Note: if you’re going to make a purchase, ensure that you visit the mainstore to do so. Vendors rezzed elsewhere may not have the current sale price.)
Once you have your unpacker, add it and now you might be able to see why I’m a little bit excited for this update:
Your options are:
- Jake body
- Jake body skins
- Female neck
- GenX feet
- Jake complete set
At the very minimum, you’ll want to unpack the body and – if you don’t already have a Jake body skin – the skins. We’ll get to the female neck and GenX feet later in this post. I’d suggest initially unpacking all of the body skins so you can try each one of them with your preferred head skin. Once you’ve found the best match, using the neck fades if needed, you can delete the rest of the body skins and just keep the unpacker in case you change skintones at a later date.
Inside the skin folder, you’ll see that you have BoM (Bakes on Mesh) system skin options for the body, as well as neck blenders, nipple textures (the base skin has no nipple texture, allowing you to choose between the BoM and HD mesh nipples), and a left arm texture. So, get that body on, choose a skin, and dive in to take a look.
Initial impressions
Clothing and accessories
The first, and most important thing: will clothing and accessories rigged for Jake 3.0 work? And the answer to that is (mostly) yes. I’ve tried clothing, necklaces, bracelets/cuffs/bracers, full sets of rings, sandals, and flipflops. Almost everything rigged to the last release of Jake fits the 4.0 update extremely well, so you won’t need to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe. You may find that some very tightly- or closely-rigged items may have a little bit of poke-through, especially at the back of the waistband or around the crease of the armpit, but either the alpha options on the HUD or BoM alpha layers should take care of most slivers of visible skin that you find.
Skins
There’s a wide range of included body skins, and they include EvoX neck fades, so you should be able to match them to your mesh head’s skintones. In the image at the top of this post I’m wearing Stray Dog’s ‘Shep’ head skin with Velour’s ‘Picasso Homme’ body skin (fit version) for Jake, both in the ‘peach’ tone. Yes, your existing Jake body skins will still work just fine on this update, even the older ones. To show that, here’s another: the same head skin with the Stray Dog body skin for Jake (from 2020) – both in ‘tone 03’. Body hair is by Hype.
The HUD
The HUD has two colour options: light mode and dark mode. So, if you’re someone who doesn’t like being flash-banged by light mode, first of all… I’m sorry about my blog’s theme ;-) But you can enable dark mode on your Jake HUD if you want it. I’m going to stick with the light mode for this blog post, as it’s a little clearer and is probably easier to read for those who may have visual issues.
Your HUD has four tabs:
- Style: toggles for BoM (enabled by default) and asymmetric left arm, as well as HD nipple tone options, nail colour options (fingers and toes), and the three layer options of body, gloves, and socks.
- Shape: toggle for hand animations (static or cycle), nail shapes (5 included), feet types (5 included), ankle lock, toe cap, and HD mesh nipple toggle and style (3 types)
- Alpha: body alpha options (by individual segment or whole region), alpha save slots, alpha save export, alpha reset button, auto-hide on/off toggle, and toggles to hide fingernails and/or toenails
- More: refresh addons, remove scripts (always ensure you keep a scripted copy as backup), redeliver, help, and light/dark mode toggle for the HUD
The final tab is actually a ‘pose in place’ button at the bottom, which will put your avatar in a T-pose while you try everything out.
We’ll look at the Style tab first.
BoM is enabled by default, and unless you have an old Belleza applier skin that you really can’t let go of, you should honestly stick with BoM skins. They’re far more detailed, especially since the 2K texture update, and you’re more likely to get a perfect match with your head skins. Note that BoM neck fades will not work over appliers, so I’m going to reiterate this: if you’re still using body appliers, switch to BoM. Try some demos and see what’s out there. Off the top of my head I can tell you that Velour, Vendetta, and Stray Dog all have BoM body skins for Jake, so that’s three stores to get you started on your search.
The left arm toggle is next, and this enables the asymmetric left arm for compatible BOM skins and tattoos.
To access the panel on the right, click the settings cog on the right of whichever section you want to edit. The panel showing here is the one for the Skin. This is where you can change from Blinn (the default) to PBR, set your body to fullbright glow (if you really fancy being a little glowbug, although this can give rise to some interesting effects with materials tattoos when used on the body and gloves layers, etc), change the tint of the skin layer and materials layers, and set the alpha mode to one of the following:
- Blend: Best suited for textures containing transparency. Example: body hair.
- Mask: Best suited for textures with more defined alpha edges. Example: BoM tank top.
- None: Disables the alpha mode.
Another important section on this Style tab is the Normal On/Off toggle and the two buttons to the right of it. With Normal on (slider is blue) the button on the left will give skin details such as defined creases in places such as the palms and backs of the fingers, and the button on the right gives lighter creases. To disable this and remove those details, toggle the Normal to Off. Examples of these details below, from left to right on each row: normal toggled off, normal on and left button, normal on and right button.
Sidebar: PBR or Blinn? What are those, Skell?
I’m not going to go into details here, because that would require a whole post or two. Blinn is short for Blinn Phong, which is the lighting and shading system that’s been in use since the beginning of Second Life. PBR stands for Physically Based Rendering, which is a more photorealistic lighting and shading system. Among other things, PBR allows for realistic materials such as shine and gloss.
It’s strongly recommended to use one or the other on both your mesh head and mesh body. Either a PBR head and your body set to PBR, or a Blinn head and your body set to Blinn.
Note that, as of the time of writing this post (29th August 2026), there are currently no PBR heads on the grid, so for the Skin section of this tab, for now, keep it set to Blinn.
Moving down, we have colour selections for the HD nipples (these are toggled on the Shape tab) and the nails. Clicking the arrows to the right (or left) of those two selection bars allows you to select from different tones. For the nails, this also includes natural and polished variants.
Note: for guys like me who enjoy a polished nail, this Jake 4.0 update has made the nails compatible with GenX (Belleza’s female body range) nail appliers. So, if you want something different from the appliers the HUD offers, hit up some nail applier stores such as Cazimi and Eventyra, and pick up some GenX appliers. The ones I’m wearing in this post are the Chrome Nail Appliers from Cazimi.
Below that are the three main layers: Body, Gloves, and Socks. These can be further customised by hitting the settings cog, in the same way as the Skin at the top of this tab. These layers will be useful when customising things like materials for tattoos, latex gloves, etc., especially if the materials are PBR.
Next up, the Shape tab.
There are no settings cogs on this one, but here is where you can play hand animations, clicking L or R on each to specify which hand should be in which animation (ideal for photography), or cycle through them all, or turn them off if you’re using an AO with Bento hand animations.
Here, too, you can set your nail shapes. From left to right they look like this:
Below that are the foot heights. Most dudes will probably keep these to flat, but – as with the hand poses – these can be set individually by foot, which is great for photography. However, those of us guys who occasionally wear heels will now be keeping our fingers crossed for heeled footwear for Jake! Below are the five foot shapes, shown only on the left foot:
There’s also an ankle lock (enabled by default) which will stop weird ‘broken ankle’ animations, and a toggle for a ‘toe cap’. While this looks freaky when enabled, it’s intended for use with BoM socks, to make them look more realistic rather than a sock texture being painted over each toe. When enabled, the toe cap will hide the toenails by default. And speaking of hiding nails, the next option on this tab is to hide or show either or both the fingernails (for wearing with third party mesh nails, or under mesh gloves etc) and the toenails (for certain footwear).
Lastly, the nipples section. This will enable or disable the HD mesh nipples and you have three options for them: flat, normal, or hard. If you decide to use these, make sure that you remove the BoM nipples from the skin folder (if you’re wearing those) and be aware that these mesh nipples may poke through clothing. Also, if you’re wearing a different skin from another creator you might find that the skin’s nipple texture shows a little around the edge of the mesh nipples. Trial and error is the way to go here. And I guess I should give you examples of those, too, so behold: my tits!
Next, the Alpha tab.
You’re probably familiar with this. Here is where you can alpha out sections of your body, either by clicking individual segments or by clicking the regions on the right. You have save slots on the left that allow you to save alpha cuts for favourite clothing (I suggest that you use these for clothing that doesn’t include autohide, unless you disable the autohide option, which we’ll get to in a second). You can export a set of alpha cuts using Belleza’s alpha hide kit, which will be available for free beside the body at the mainstore. Currently, the dev kit for the 3.0 body (including the old alpha export options) is freely available at the store, but this will be updated once the update is released so I suggest waiting until then before you pick it up.
On this tab you can also disable the auto hide option. This is incredibly useful if, like me, you’ve been frustrated in the past by a pair of boots sold as part of an outfit, where the creator has set up each part of the outfit – including the boots – to auto-alpha for the entire outfit, even if you’re only wearing the boots! (They were such an awesome pair of boots, too. I had to stop wearing them, because every time I logged on I had to reset all the alphas on my body. That miiight be a bit of a sore point for me, so thank you to Belleza for giving the option to disable that easily when needed!)
And, lastly, here is where you can hide the fingernails and/or toenails.
Finally, the More tab.
Looks different, doesn’t it? That’s because this is the tab where you can enable Dark Mode for the HUD, so I’ve enabled it just for this screenshot so you can see what it looks like. If you don’t enable Dark Mode, it’ll look like all the other tabs I’ve shown you thus far.
On this tab you can refresh any supported Jake V4 add-ons when required, you can remove scripts from the body (always keep a backup, or your original unpacker whenever you remove scripts from an item), you can redeliver, and you also have the Help button. This will give you a link to the Belleza Discord server, where you can access not only help but also see galleries of new releases and chat with other Belleza users, show off your Belleza Jake looks, etc.
Never used Discord before, or a bit uncertain about what to do with it? Click here for a post that explains the basics of how to use it.
GenX Feet Addon
Now you’re talking my language! My fellow heel-loving dudes, you don’t even need to wait for creators to rig to the Jake 4.0 feet if you really want heels now. The update includes a GenX feet addon, which will hide your Jake feet and replace them with feet that fit all female GenX shoes. And they will size up with your body’s sliders, so you’re not left with a masculine body and teeny-tiny feet. The foot positions on the Jake HUD will work to change the positions of the GenX feet. I picked up these ‘Roxy Sky-High Platforms’ at Gos, who have plenty of GenX-rigged shoes:
Female Neck Addon
I had less time to put this together, mostly because this blog post has taken a couple of days to write, on and off, but the final item I want to showcase is the female neck addon. Below is the female version of LeLUTKA’s ‘River’ head on the Jake 4.0 body, with the female neck addon and some shape tweaks. I would have liked to have more time to get the shape more to my liking, but it’s nice to see Syd (Skell’s bishonen persona) again. He’s been shoved in the back of my inventory for too long ;-)
And, given that this post has taken me hours to put together, it’s time I brought it to a close. This is a fantastic update to the Jake body, bringing some interesting new options and the very welcome news that almost all existing content will continue to work on the updated body. As mentioned toward the start of the post, there may be a few minor issues with fit here and there with some close-fitting items, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that everything else, from skins to rings, fitted extremely well.
Mark your calendars for September 5th ;-)
Links
- Belleza Discord
- Wardrobe listing of Belleza items (read the first page for how to filter!)
- Belleza inworld store