Ever since Bakes on Mesh went live, Maitreya have been promising a new version of Lara to support it directly. They released a temporary BoM HUD that let you try it out, but now the new body has been released! If you missed it, there’s a notice in the Maitreya V.I.P. group (FREE to join) that contains an updater so the store is not swamped by people visiting for updates.
The first thing I did was strip down to Ruth and add the body HUD, and I ran into a problem straight away. You can imagine that as someone who puts together a new outfit every day, I spend a bit of time on the built-in pose stand in Firestorm. The collapsed HUD by default attaches to the top left, and is positioned right under the pose stand floater lol. I tried to edit the HUD to my normal position, but the HUD editing won’t let you move it. Fortunately, it’s easily fixed by attaching the HUD to the top position.
Next, I added the full body alpha and the body. There are twelve new skins from Glam Affair, now giving you a total of twenty two to chose from. There are new options on the skin section of the HUD too, that let you change the nipple textures, and options to change the nipple shape to allow you to select original, hard, or puffy styles. But horror, the four skin save slots are nowhere to be found! I use these all the time for different cleavage options to save me having to attach my skin HUD, change cleavage, and detach again.
As an alternative to the save slots on the HUD, there is a “save stick” with the new body. You can rez these and rename them and save skin and other presets to them. You can read more about them in the manual.
I applied my normal skin from Lumae using their Mairtreya applier without any issues.
And the other immediately noticeable thing about the body is that the hands are feet are attached, and you can’t remove them (although you can alpha them out, whew!) Also, there are two new foot positions, one between flat and mid and a shape on tiptoes (what Slink call Kitten and Pointe).
And speaking of hands and feet, a few more alpha cuts have been added around the wrists and ankles, which may be useful. But of course, you know what I did, right? I alphaed the hands and feet and attached my Slinks 🙂 Happily, they still seamlessly fit with the new body.
When the temporary relay came out, I speculated that Maitreya might do away with layers that support appliers. Instead, they’ve been very clever and made the layers separately wearable objects! There are three layers, clothing, underwear, and tattoo to match the standard system layers. These layers support your existing appliers. If you’re not using appliers in an outfit, no need to wear the layer, et voila, a marked reduction in avatar complexity! And you can wear one, two, or all three layers if you wish to use appliers.
And BoM is now supported directly. Just remove your full body alpha and enable the “Bakes on Mesh” button in the “Skin/Base” tab in the HUD, and wear system layers like you did in the good old days 🙂
I’m not going to take photos of all the HUD changes, you’ll surely see them for yourself soon enough. I’ll just add a photo with the included lingerie from Erratic, similar to the photos I did all those years ago when I first got Lara. Little in looks have changed, but lots in functionality has! Well done to the Maitreya team!
