interview | Namssor Daguerre and a (second) life of creating skins

Posted on February 6, 2010 by Gwyneth Llewelyn | 1 Comment

We’re so used to take things for granted in Second Life® that we often forget how crude and primitive the whole environment was, just a few years ago. It’s not only that Second Life was less stable and had less features and glitches; the whole content was more primitive, too.

These days, even newbies join SL with a moderately decent skin, and it’s only us veterans that remember the old “rubber skin” which was originally designed by Linden Lab, and plagued newbies for uncountable years. The reason that first skin was so badly designed was not really because LL’s own internal team were clueless; it was mostly because the “Linden skin” loaded very quickly, since it had so little information. Compressed, it merely took some 100 KBytes to transfer — and, to make it even faster, LL distributes the skin with the viewer.

But… well… it was simply too ugly, a sore for our more demanding eyes. It’s thus worth to turn the calendar back a few years and understand how it all started.

Six years ago, in early 2004, there were perhaps less than 10,000 users in Second Life — that’s registered users. Most were very creative and talented, but not all were experts in all areas. While most tinkered a bit with all kinds of things, not all were equally good at all areas. Thus, even though many designed their own clothes, very few survived the explosion of professional content starting in late 2006, which completely transformed the way we think and feel about Second Life. It’s not the “features” that excite us any more, but the creative content designed for experts, who raised the level of expectations overall — we will only buy from the best. Luckily for us, we have a lot of choices in 2010, as well as a plethora of external tools that allow the top designers to tinker with pixels on a virtual canvas and give us extraordinary quality for a very cheap price.

None of that existed in early 2004. All that designers had was the old clothes templates. A few of them, among them Chip Midnight and Namssor Daguerre, having a lot of experience with tools like Photoshop, started to think that it would be actually fun to change the default, ugly, Linden “rubber skin”. But there was a huge challenge doing that: if you don’t have a 3D model to work from, creating a realistic skin is hard work, since it means having the knowledge of how to map a 3D model on top of a 2D surface (Linden Lab released the 3D model of the SL avatar in late 2005, and so, the current generation of designers have it much easier!). If you have closed up on your avatar recently, you will have noticed that the mesh covering it is not regular. For instance, the face has a lot more polygons than, say, the hands or the feet (that’s why they’re so ugly!). The experts of today’s SL know all about those “stretched polygons” and adapt their designs accordingly, putting more detail where the mesh allows them to, and trying to disguise where the mesh is simply a mess.

Namssor Daguerre joined Second Life six years ago. He had never modelled in 3D before, but he certainly was an accomplished digital artist in 2D. Only a few weeks after entering SL for the first time, he started toying with the idea of replacing the rubber skin with something much more realistic. Under the brand Second Skins (later rebranded to Second Skin Labs, because Namssor wished to create a website for it and that name was already taken), he released his first generation of realistic skins for around L$6000 (when the competition easily charged L$12k-20k).

The first generation

But there was a twist. The first generation skins could be bought like the ones we had today, but… what about makeup and tatoos, which were already popular back then? You could only have either a tattoo over a horrible Linden skin, or a brand new hyper-realistic Second Skin from Namssor. Choices, choices… so Namssor sold, for a small extra fee, a TGA file, with instructions on how to replace the “system” skin. Goodbye rubber skin forever! This naturally was not the simplest feat to do (it involved replacing a handful of files on your SL viewer every time LL did an upgrade to it), but it had the huge advantage that you didn’t “lose” one layer — you could still use your tattoos and makeup on top of Namssor’s Second Skin. It worked like a charm

At that time, however, residents were already demanding more from their skins. They wanted to personalise their makeup, do their own tattoos, add scars, and whatnot. This was naturally possible for one additional layer, but not two — so if you wished to have, say, makeup plus tattoos, it simply didn’t work. And while pretty much everybody in early 2004 knew a little bit of Photoshop — enough to paint on a template — creating full skins was out of the question.

So Namssor sold for an extra fee a full Photoshop template for his skins You’d pay his vendor in-world, get a code, and a download link from his FTP site. Then you could download your own copy of the skin, load it on Photoshop, and add whatever details you wished. Some things were pre-defined, like a selection of nail colours, others you could add by just adding an extra layer. It was pure bliss toying with the template And it was still cheaper than buying a full skin…

This was an immediate success… until one day someone just grabbed that Photoshop file and put it for public download somewhere. Yes, I’m sure you saw this coming. All of a sudden, Second Life was suddenly drowning in skins. Most even had no idea on who the original designer had been. It was way worse than CopyBot, many years before CopyBot even appeared. There is, however, a slightly less darker side to it: it showed how popular the concept of “skins” was, and the market for them boomed — even though the number of skin creators was quite limited.

The second generation

Clearly Namssor had to revisit the business model. On one hand, there was a huge demand for personalisation; but on the other hand, it was foolishness to allow everybody to get a copy of the Photoshop file, since sooner or later it would be copied a billion times.

So Namssor came up with another clever idea, which to this date is still not popular. He partnered with Cierrah Blair, whom he totally trusted with his templates. His shop was redesigned for version 2.0 of the Second Skin, launched by the end of 2005. Now you’d had a selection of skin tones as a “standard” package, but the shop also had a huge catalogue of personalisation options. You could select from among dozens of different eye colours, nail colours, more or less freckles, even the colour (and size!) of your hair in those most intimate parts. I have no idea how many possible combinations there were, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t millions! So you’d select your choices, buy a “standard” skin, buy a few vouchers to pay for the extra personalisation options, and send your choices to Cierrah. She would open up Namssor’s templates, look up the reference numbers, and “bake” your own fully-customised solution, which would be unique. This would take 48 hours and be well worth the cost! Namssor told me that his customers tended to come back for 5, 10, or even twenty different customisation jobs! (I just had 2!) And he used to sell thousands of skins per month (Cierrah would earn the whole cost of the customisation); Second Skin Labs became their full-time income source for many years: “I was making enough $$ in RL to pay all the bills with just SL income alone,” he admitted.

Needless to say, the second generation Second Skins were a huge improvement over the first generation, in terms of detail and realism, the work of many months in front of Photoshop; add to that the incredible personalisation system, and you can imagine the success. The competition, which by 2005 were slowly catching up, just used the model popular today: showing several options for the same skin, but with a limited range of choices. Even the most talented and bestselling skin designers today offer, at most, a few thousands of choices; compare that to the millions you could get from Second Skin Labs, plus the feeling that you, the customer, were able to order something unique for your skin — and it’s no wonder this caught on.

During those early days, fashion was not the established business it is today. Namssor never advertised outside the classifieds. While Second Life had “leader boards” (more popular residents; residents with more money; and so on), Namssor was always among the top 10. Like all old SL veterans, he was active on the SL forums (soon to be closed), and his products were spread by word-of-mouth, either in-world from happy customers (that’s how I heard about his skins, in October 2004, when I bought the first one and was amazed at the quality!), or through forum discussions.

Starting in 2006, however, SL started entering its “hype cycle” and all of a sudden its population grew exponentially — and, at the same time, dozens of thousands of very talented content creators entered Second Life for the first time, and found out an almost unexplored market. Things started to become serious.

It was time to go back to the drawing board and come out with some more innovation to catch up with the competition…

Second Skins 3.0

In late 2007, Namssor, after taking almost 18 months to deliver the “perfect” skin, launched his third generation product — using, as he says, “a new skinning technique I won’t get into”. By then, Second Life was at the peak of its hype cycle (since then, I should say that SL overall grew more than three times, in number of residents, in landmass, or in monetary transactions — hype is just hype, but SL definitely grew much more after the hype cycle!), and business became mature. What Namssor found out is that the generation of residents that liked to tweak with their own templates suddenly became a very small minority. The “amateur content creator” slowly disappeared — they’re still around, but they’re not many. Most of SL’s residents are pure consumers, and wish to have the highest quality products for the least money and the least fuss, too.

This forced Namssor to re-evaluate his “millions of choices”. Instead, he offered his hyper-realistic skin — which had no match in 2007 — with a similar model as what we’re used to expect from skin designers: a choice of skin tones and colours, a choice of makeup types, and some “packs” where you get a specific combination of tone/freckles/eye colour/hair colour which Namssor figured out to be exceptionably sellable.

On the customisation part of the business, instead of offering a catalogue of solutions, he did much more than that: if you’d send in pictures of yourself, he’d put your own face on his skin templates This was naturally a solution that was appealing to the real life businesses that started to enter Second Life during the hype days; but some SL residents were also willing to pay for that level of personalisation as well.

Namssor also had some lovely bikinis, which were always amazingly well done. His idea was simple, his customers would definitely want to show off their new skins, and what could enhance them better than a nice bikini?…

What comes next?

It’s been a bit over two years since Namssor released his third-generation skin. In the mean time, the number of new skin creators has swamped the market with their talent and innovative design. What ought to come next? “I think there will be [a new generation of skins] at some point,” says Namssor. “But it will need some sort of added functionality that pushes the realism even further… I don’t quite know where that will come from, software, resolution, innovative idea, etc.” So what this means is that the current avatar mesh and rendering engine cannot go further, and that has prevented Namssor for spending some time in tweaking his masterpieces. But we have some news on that front, too. Next week, if all goes well, Linden Lab will allow an open preview the new Second Life 2.0 viewer, still in beta. The few things that have leaked out so far was the ability to add alpha channels to skin textures, and more avatar layers — I have no idea how these work, but they might allow, for instance, having separate layers for makeup, tattoos, freckles, and so on. This would definitely encourage Namssor and other designers to offer more customisable solutions once more, where residents wouldn’t need to wait to get a personalised skin “baked” specifically for them, but just buy a standard, base skin, and add all those features, one by one, by simply buying them off a vendor. This is just speculation, of course; we’ll have to see what LL comes up with. Changing the avatar mesh is probably way too radical (think of all the broken content!) but I’m sure that sooner or later this will figure on LL’s plans, too!

In the mean time, it’s time for Namssor Daguerre to catch the attention of the wide consumer market once more, and for this reason, he has launched his new shop on the Beta Business Park on February 5, 2010 — almost six years since he logged in to Second Life for the first time!

[UPDATE: Thanks to Lisa Fossett for pointing out that the SLURL above was pointing to nowhere! Whoops — Gwyn]

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