What’s Eating TMP 14

Thanks to their lack of communication it is difficult to keep track of what TMP is doing. Some weeks ago they shut down their sim and announced a new era was just around the corner. Now they have started up again. Things look very different and I do not care for their new setup at all. It’s a series of graphics on walls with clickable areas that work like transporters. Maybe I’m boring, but excuse me for preferring something as outlandish as a store I can walk around in! At least they got rid of that ridiculous system of having to buy their credits before you could pay for anything. Now you just pay them directly with Linden Dollars. Finally they’re doing something normal.

TMP released new male and female bodies which they are calling Legacy and they have also updated their previous body which now is referred to as Classic. I’m leaving the Legacy body for another post to take a look at the upgraded Classic body first. The full price is L$ 5000, but if you already own the body, you can get the upgrade for L$ 2500. So it doesn’t look like TMP will be coming down to more reasonable prices anytime soon.
This clarifies why TMP only added bento hands to the previous upgrade and made no other changes. When I bought the original TMP body it came with the promise of ONE free upgrade. By releasing the very limited upgrade first they technically fulfilled that promise, which now enables them to charge for this next upgrade. Meanwhile all the other mesh body creators offer free upgrades and sell at a lower price. I’m tutting at you TMP! tut.tut.tut.

With the previous body the hands and feet were separate, now it is one piece only. Where we used to have to content with two different huds for styling and hiding body parts, there is now one “Edit” hud that contains everything.

I don’t want to go through the entire hud, but there are a couple of tiny things that are worth noticing, because they are easy to miss. On the first page you’ll see a small icon that looks like a neck. This is where you toggle between two neck settings. If you are seeing a big gap between your body and head, give this button a click and your neck should snap into place (this reminds me of Dead Becomes Her). On the second page there’s a button that lets you filter the number of skins you get to see and gives you the choice to see “old content”. It is supposed to show you the skins that you installed in the old StyleMode hud. Mine weren’t there when I first put on the hud and now some of have arrived, but not all. I have been told by TMP’s support that only skins that were installed before October 2018 will be in the new hud. This is going to be cumbersome.

When I was buying the upgrade, I saw someone at The Shops with a TMP head on the classic body. There are no TMP heads available at the moment and obviously many people have moved on to bento heads. Still, the look of a TMP body AND head is the first one I wanted to revisit with this upgrade.

The neck seam was always great with this combination and while the skin still matches perfectly, there now seems to be a small gap between the head and body. I have notified TMP’s support, so maybe they’ll try and fix it.

I’ve always had a weakness for this particular skin on the old TMP head. I think it’s named Blue. Another thing I still like about the TMP body is it’s ability to have an ass you can rest a pint of beer on (or a cup of tea). It’s a shame the heads haven’t been upgraded to bento, but let’s face it: that wasn’t going to be a free upgrade either. The ripped jeans in this shot are by Cold Ash and the hair is Bailey by Modulus.

Another thing I (still) like about TMP is that each of their skin tones comes in various styles, so you can look very chiselled or a bit softer and smooth as a baby’s behind or quite hairy. The shorts, underwear and swimwear are by Noche.

Quite recently I put together a look with the TMP head, the Catwa Stanley bento mesh head and the Keith applier for Catwa heads by Bold & Beauty and their matching applier for the TMP body. Go take a look at that if you want, I’ll wait for you here… Great, you’re back! Let’s see if I can recreate this look with the upgraded body, even if I don’t have access to the Bold & Beauty applier for this upgraded body yet.

The first step was to choose a standard TMP skin close too the Bold & Beauty No.6 skin tone I’m using on the Catwa head. Annoyingly the skin tones in the TMP hud are not numbered, so I had to start counting from the palest skin to know which one I was going to use. No. 10 looked like a good match for me. Next I had to go in the second page of the skin tab and click the corresponding neck blender (No. 10) to apply it to the body. After that I had to apply a matching neck tattoo on the Catwa head. The TMP body comes with a folder that contains neck blenders for all the skin tones. I located the correct number and right-clicked the item to copy its Asset UUID. Then I opened the Catwa Master Hud, went into the tab that contains the neck tattoo, made sure I had the “lower” layer selected, clicked the button that says “Apply your own texture”, pasted the asset UUID in the box and clicked the submit button and hey presto, I had a less obvious neck seam. It’s far from perfect, but then again neck seams so very seldom are, but at least there is no gap with this combination of body and head.

Left is without the neck blenders, middle and right is with neck blenders. It’s that age old story again of “it depends what windlight you’re using”. While I have been working on this blog post spread over a couple of days, more of the appliers I had for the old TMP body have started to show up in the new hud. I don’t know what that means for appliers you can purchase from skin creators today. I imagine that either the skin creators or TMP will have to do some more work to make it so that you can easily install their appliers in the new hud.

Next I wanted to take a closer look at the alpha hud because that definitely is a big improvement on the previous version. Not good enough to warrant the L$ 2500 for the upgrade, but a lot nicer nonetheless.

I’ve put on some clothes to see where the body is poking through. The alpha hud shows a body shape divided into areas. You can click inside an area and drag to start filling it, or double click to flood the area. There are also buttons to quickly hide complete parts of your body. There are no alpha save slots, but there is an interesting export function. Once you’ve got your items of clothing to fit, you click the export button, a box will float in front of you and you will be given the opportunity to name it. You can then right-click and take this box. As soon as you add this box to your outfit, it will be attached as an invisible hud and it will automatically alpha-out the areas of your body as you defined it with the alpha hud. When you remove it, your body parts become visible again. Basically this is a do-it-yourself auto alpha function.
The shirt, jeans and sneakers used for this example are all by Deadwool and include a TMP size. I had to reduce the pectorals to make the shirt work, but it more or less has built-in pecs so the chest doesn’t look too flat.

Tattoo layers have been improved greatly compared to the previous body. They used to take ages to come into focus, if they ever did at all. Now they go on smoothly and are looking rather crisp. The tattoo I’ve used here is “Flawless Time” by Taox Tattoos.

In conclusion, this upgrade definitely is a notable improvement from the previous version of the TMP body, but I doubt many current users will be willing to cough up the L$ 2500 for it, unless they have a continuous love-hate relationship with this body. Many of them will have moved on to another mesh body. As for new users, they won’t be getting much from the Classic TMP body that they can’t get from the other male mesh bodies and at L$ 5000 it is the most expensive one by far. Belleza Jake is L$ 2999, Signature Gianni and Geralt both are L$ 3500, NX-Nardcotix David is a steal at L$ 1750 and that’s not even a full list of other bodies at lower prices. I guess you’ll have to really fall in love with the stylised look of the Classic TMP body to want to pay L$ 5000 for it.