Boogie Trains and Template Complaints

When I first saw the Liv Glam "Yes sir, I can Boogie" (white/black) and Trains and Winter Rains (multiple color hud) suits, I desired them as a classic suit loving SL fashionista should.

Classic military style belted jacket, slim pencil skirt, what's not to love?

 

What's not to love?  The skirt slit and rigging that's what.  The jacket is fine, the jacket is worth acquiring...the skirt not so much.  Look at the slit placement.  Yes, I know, I should be cheering that it actually HAS a realistic slit, but it would be better if it was centered and not quite so wide.  But the real issue is the rigging, notice  how the skirt clips into the leg.  That effect is worse, the more the legs bend.

Here's a close look at the issue.  It's just simply a problem with the rigging...of the template.   This outfit is a template so I can't blame the Liv-Glam's designer (SamanthaSJones) for this...other than her choice to use a template that really needed some more tweaks and polish.  If the rigging was fixed...I would be recommending this outfit.  But as it is, I can't.  It's not horrible, and I've worn it out and about, but it does need more work.  It's an "almost, but not quite" sort of thing.   Which is what I say about Liv-Glam as a design house...with some reluctance:  "Almost, but not quite a first tier designer...the work is hit or miss, could  use more tweaks/polish/better texture choices, and a second critical eye would do the designer some good.  Not horrible, but not spectacular either, especially since it's probably all templates."

For an example of how this skirt SHOULD be rigged, we have to go no further than the classic Maitreya Nolita.  THAT is how you rig a slightly below the knee skirt.

I've got a couple of other issues with the  Liv-Glam "Boogie/Trains" ensembles.  The HUD colors on the multicolor "Trains and winter rains" version don't match the actual on suit colors closely enough.  And some of those colors aren't very good choices at all, basically making those colors unusable.  Why put unattractive unflattering colors in a HUD?  Put colors that ARE attractive in it.

Theres also the fact that the template origin of the Liv-Glam suits are not mentioned and/or credited.  A customer might not be aware that they're templates, and thusly not know who else besides Liv-Glam to send suggestions/complaints to.  Here's a link to the template on marketplace

Dolphin Designs "The Lady"

It also means that there are most likely other designers using this template that needs more work that I don't know about.  I am absolutely of the opinion that Templates need to be credited in the interest of transparency and honesty to one's customers.  Use templates all you want, but for goodness sake, credit them.

SLURLS:

Belleza Betty Pale skin

Truth Colbie hair

Hucci Glynco pumps

Liv Glam

Maitreya

Deja Vu Dresses, or one of the downsides of mesh templates.

We all know what the concept of Deja Vu is don't we, from Wikipedia:


Déjà vu, (/ˌdeɪʒɑː ˈvuː/) from French, literally "already seen", is the phenomenon of having the strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has been experienced in the past, whether it has actually happened or not.

Let me show you two dresses that gave me that experience, though they are not the only dresses that have given me "Deja Vu"  I kept the hair (Wasabi Pills "Claire") and shoes (Hucci "Glynco") minimalistic, and didn't wear jewellery to show off the dresses without distraction

This one is the Roksanda Bodycon dress from Liv-Glam

This one is the Suede draped dress from Cynful.

While the textures are different it's obvious they're from the same sourced template.  These two are not the only versions of this template I've seen, it's everywhere.  It's a nice dress, but not everyone needs to be making their own version of it.

Let me be blunt.  Designers, if you don't do your own mesh, try to use templates that aren't being used by  every "Art School Girl" with competent photoshop texture skills out there.  Becuase otherwise, we get dozens of variants of the same dress to sort through.  Not only that, even though there's a glut of this "slap some nice textures on templates" stuff, it doesn't seem to keep some designers from charging premium prices.  If there's a dozen versions of a template dress..you might not want to charge something like  L$500 for a single color, perhaps not even L$300.

[UPDATE} For the edification of readers I decided to add the actual prices of each of the dresses:

The Liv-Glam version is L$ 375, and includes six color variants.  There is also a floral print-pattern version that also has six variants included for L$375

The Cynful version is L$265 for each individual color.

There's nothing inherently wrong with using templates....the problem is when the same ones are used by a large amount of people, then we get a glut of sameness and lookalikes.



SLURLS:

Wasabi Pills hair

Hucci Main Store

Belleza skin