Basically, the torso and leg textures are combined to a 2048x2048 (max) field with the components re-arranged and scaled up to fill the extra space. TWO arms and feet are supported.
Existing clothing/skin meshes would still be supported and mapped to their existing UV. The new 'whole body' clothing/skin mesh has a UV mapping to the avatar mesh which is far better optimised for even mapping without stretching artifacts -- such as is very evident on shoulders, armpits and gusset in existing clothing-item texture mappings. (This improved mapping is not illustrated below because I am not a UV expert! one should be hired to do the job properly!)
NOTE: image above is a hacked-together example, based on the SL templates for illustrative purposes only.
This is an equivalent of the existing Skirt mesh which fits over the AV mesh - always on top. The inside of the mesh, when it can be seen, is textured as a creator-defined solid colour. The 'front' and 'back' sliders allow the dress top to be lowered right down to a skirt. The skirt hem can be raised right up to just below the bust-line (with checking so that you can't lower the top below the hem line and cause the universe to collapse in on itself). Unlike the clothing/skin mesh which is for (relatively) form-fitting stuff (skin, underwear, T-shirts, trousers), this mesh is intended to be much more 'flowy', particularly around the skirt part. At maximum tightness, it is still quite form-fitting and as such can even be used for, as an example, T-shirts that don't hug down the middle of the cleavage. If the front of the mesh is open (ie, a coat, a dinner jacket with tails, an apron, or a cape), they can fly around with wind and/or AV movement. The AV-tail is not included in the mesh - tails are assumed to poke through, or point strait down so the tail hangs out the bottom. Hands and feet are also not included to simplify the mesh - gloves and shoes are by nature form-fitting, so don't belong in this mesh. Again, this image is a rough hack for illustrative purposes only.
Extra attributes for:
For above two items (and existing clothing types if it can be done without breakage).
As you likely noticed on the reformed textures above, I have added a tail as a standard part of the mesh (since tail-less humans can simply set the slider down to zero). Also have skeleton parts to the tail that can be added to animations (again, if the tail length is set to zero, this would be ignored as a matter-of-course, and old animations lacking tail 'bones' would simply leave the tail to flop about according to its 'springiness' value). I can think of a good number of tail-related sliders:
For example:
Also, alterations that simply involve greater distortions of the standard human mesh. For example, sliders to pull the jaw out into a muzzle, enlarge and blunten the hands and feet into paws.
Ears might be a problem, though having human and furrie ears in the mesh and humans turn down the furrie ones to zero and vice-versa would likely do well enough (need to add triangular ears to some free space on the head mesh). Adjust ears from zero to rabbit-sized/shaped via short and pointy. Being able to make really thin pointy ears as antenna might be good for stereotype-alien AVs too - may as well make this as versatile as possible!
Should furrie ears be mobile and how to do this? Extra 'bones' in the animation system (ignored if Fur-ears are zero, as per tails and remaining compatible with Fur-ear-free animations)???
While this was inspired by Furries, other AV types that might use all or parts of the feature include:
*As far as forward-between-the-legs tails goes, it also can have legit uses -- in Sherri S. Tepper's book "Gibbons Decline and Fall" there is a Saurian species who's short, flat tails curve between the legs and up the front to cover and protect their genitals.
With the ability to have multiple (up to 5 last time I checked) clothing items per layer now, some of the existing layers become redundant, so with the above meshes, the following slightly simplified layering is proposed:
The skin and form-fit layers are texture-identical: anything wearable on one is wearable on the other. The differences are that the skin layer is always beneath, is protected from 'remove all clothing' and lacks controls for loosening the clothing slightly that the Form-fit layer has.
With the reduction in layers, bumping the maximum textures-per-layer to 8 is likely sensible.
Like flexi-hair but part of the avatar rather than an attachment. Using the existing hair attributes (not intended to be able to completely replace flexi hair, but likely could cover a lot). Would allow finer client-side LOD control of how finely hair is rendered. Bonus points if hair strands lie across the avatar (and possibly physical objects) rather than falling through them.
Hair texture might be defined as the X-coord is the placement around the head clockwise, while the Y-coord is colour along each strand. Textures defined for colour, shiny and brite.