Yesterday Linden Lab released new starter avatars, the ones new residents get to choose when creating an account. Of course they are also available to existing residents, in your inventory under Library, Outfits.

The new avatars are mesh and I was curious on how this would look and how much one can edit them to your liking.
I am not going to post a whole story on the pro’s and cons of these new avatars, but I just wanted to show three I picked out last night and played with, just to show you how they (can) look when you use a nice windlight and a pose – other then on the formal LL pictures :).

I particularly liked the Werewolf, for its looks and I think I will use this one in future for some pictures!

The Wolfman looks good, I think?, not sure if I will ever use him, but who knows!

Then I tried Marissa, a ‘normal’ female. This is Marissa straight out of the folder. Looks okay-ish, not that special:

And finally, this is the same Marissa but with my hair, my dress, my jewelry and armour. Since this is a mesh body in one piece and it is no mod, I could not wear my demonhands, nor my shoes or boots (unless their is a way to make my precious shoes work on this body?) and the elf ears were also a no go (cannot hide the default ears), Also, I find her hands a bit…large!:

All in all, yes nice for a start, but limited the moment you want to change something on the body. Clothing, hair and jewelry is no problem, but ..shoes! Shoes are important in SL?

I’ve seen some other pics on flickr already, and the zombie is a lovely one for artistic pictures. So, yeah, I will not wear any of the avatars in my daily SL, but will surely use them for fun every now and then.

See here what Alles Klaar did with one of the Zombies, on Flickr!

And an amazing image by Kirsten Smith, also using one of the zombies:

For more in depth information and opinions I recommend the blogposts of Jo and Inara on the new mesh avatars:

* Jo Yardley on the new mesh avatars
* Inara Pey on the new mesh avatars

And okay, edit on 16th May, because I played with the Zombie Beast and he is really cool, one more pic