Vero Moderno Kaleidoscope V-Neck Dress

Our virtual extremities have gone through some extreme changes in recent years. Shoemakers responded to the deficiencies of the avatar mesh by creating sculpted feet with shoes that we could match to our skins. The tinting methods designers employed were varied and highly idiosyncratic and tinting a pair of shoes to match could take anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes, depending on our skill and the sophistication of the HUD interface. This year, with mesh rigged to fit perfectly, a few designers have taken steps to ease our pain and make our desperate clicking about in color selection boxes and frantic sliding of RGB numbers a thing of the past. Because the path of innovation is never straight, two different routes were chosen, but whichever one you take, you end up with gorgeous shoes and skin that matches.

In exploring the pros and cons of these two paths, I am going to look at Gos shoes and SLink Bare Feet with add-on shoes from another vendor. However, N-Core is also following the same path as Gos and I am sure some other shoe-makers will as well. The thing is, these are fundamentally different approaches to how to match the foot to your skins. Gospel Voom of Gos has chosen to provide the foot and shoes as one piece, the traditional way. His innovation is creating a skin color database and a scripted hud that accesses that data and applies it directly to the foot. Siddean Munro of Slink has taken another road, creating a foot that can be tinted and a free developer’s kit for skinners to customize for their skins and allowing shoemakers to use to make their own shoes to her form.

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