Disclaimer: The screenshots and brand names shown in this article do not reflect in any manner, any preference that Fusion could have for specific stores. They show up merely as examples, coming from the inventory of the writer of this article.
Greetings everybody! With the advent of mesh body enhancements such as hands, feet, breasts and whatnot, our avatars, currently, may look smoother and more detailed than the default SL avatar. In order to use said body parts, fashion creators provide a variety of appliers and add-ons. Appliers are HUDs that load into the mesh part the corresponding texture: skins, tattoos, lingerie, tops, pants... Add-ons are (rigged mesh) objects that conform to specific body parts: rings for mesh hands (in specific poses), anklets for mesh feet (again, specific feet poses) and so on.
All these items have improved our appearance a lot, but in exchange, sorting our inventory in a way that makes sense has become more confusing. Also, some body parts require specific feet/hand sizes, while when not using them, our avatar better fits other sizes; dressing in itself has become more complicated.
We'll explore here some ideas I've been testing through time, that have helped me in performing these tasks faster, always finding everything I need with very few clicks. Hopefully, these ideas will help you develop your own strategy that works for you.
First of all: How do we go about having all of our body parts, controller HUDs, skin appliers, etc. accessible?
I have the body parts under the Body Parts system folder, and said folder in my inventory looks like follows, which works for me:
The body parts I use the most are accessible at the top, by using the [] characters to enclose the brand. All of the body parts that I barely use, are under a [Z] Parts - Not Used Often folder, so the Body Parts folder doesn't get too long a list of folders that would force me to scroll down in order to find things.
The hands pose I use the most is one click away under the [Slink] Hands folder, and then all the other hand poses under a subfolder (again, avoiding having to scroll down to find the hands pose I use the most.)
Then, mesh bodies require a different size of hands and feet than my own shape does, so I keep those sizes within the corresponding mesh body folder. Notice also how I do the same with the hands pose: The relaxed pose is accessible directly under the mesh body folder, while all the other poses in that size are stored under a subfolder.
Remember, this is just a suggestion! It may not work perfectly for you, so use it just as a starting point to develop your own system.
Once we have all the body parts organized, we can use a little tip to easily find of our clothes/shoes/etc. that work with said body parts.
Suppose you have a folder with lingerie that comes with appliers for both the Slink feet and Gos shoes. You could rename that folder this way:
Lingerie Folder {Slink}{Gos}
What do we achieve with that? If we now start typing the following in the Search bar of the inventory window:
{Gos}
every folder that was labeled with {Gos} will show up in the search, making very easy to choose something that will work with those shoes. If we have a dress that has appliers for Wowmeh, Physique and Lolas, by renaming it this way:
Dress Folder {Lolas}{Wowmeh}{Physique}
we are making it easy to find when we look for out items that work with either of the three. You can of course choose your own way of writing the body parts. If {Wowmeh} and {Physique} are too long, {Wowm} and {Phys} could work good enough.
A closing suggestion: create outfits with your most used body parts. For example, create an outfit where you would have a mesh body on with the corresponding hands and feet sizes for it, if you use mesh bodies. This would allow you to quickly switch to that body and the correctly sized hands and feet for it. Then all you have to do is dress over that mesh body. Outfits can be really useful. If you haven't used Outfits yet, don't worry: soon we'll talk about more uses for them, and how to create them. But for now, we're closing this Keep your inventory under control series.
I hope you found it useful! See you in the next issue. In the meantime... Enjoy your SL!
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