Lara 5 Clothing Layers

 This post has almost nothing to do with the CHAOS range, or indeed any Clean Sweep Designs product, other than hopefully being useful to Mesmerizer wearers who also use the Maitreya Lara mesh body.  While there is strong competition between makers of mesh bodies (especially female ones), as of this writing Lara still seems to be the most popular, at least judging from the support of clothing makers.

Lara 5.x introduced a novel and very powerful change from the previous versions:  the tattoo, underwear and clothing layers are now individual objects, rather than being part of the body.  When you first see this, it seems like complexity for no benefit, not to mention the additional attachment points that are needed to wear those new extra layer objects.   But the hands and feet are now part of the main Lara body, so you're saving attachment points there.  And you don't always need to wear all three layers anyway, so the change can actually be a net saving of attachments.  However, why didn't Maitreya just bring the hands and feet into the body and leave the layers part of it too, so that the whole thing would use just a single attachment point?

One reason is that making the clothing layers be individual objects allows you to dispense with appliers, or rather to let you create applier-based clothing that works like "real" clothes - that you can wear and remove through inventory (or RLV) and they work as expected, without you needing to play with appliers or save slots as part of changing clothes.  Separate layer objects allow you to turn any applier clothing item into a piece of rigged mesh clothing, which you can then wear (and take off) like any other piece of clothing.  This is particularly useful if you're an RLV user, and you want to allow other people to change your clothes for you.  Previously, RLV couldn't affect applier clothing; with Lara 5 you can expose your applier-based clothing via the #RLV folder in the same way that you do with mesh clothing.

I'll illustrate the basic concept first, and then go through how to set up an applier-based catsuit that has zippers over the breasts and crotch, and show one way of setting things up so that those zippers can be pulled open or closed through RLV.

Appliers as objects

Applier clothing and mesh clothing behave very differently from one another.  Mesh clothing can be included in outfits, so that when you wear the outfit, the clothing item is worn, and when you remove or replace the outfit, the mesh clothing item is removed, as expected.   Appliers, on the other hand, don't behave like this at all.  Prior to Lara 5, applier layers were part of the body, so the only way to have your applier clothing change automatically when you change outfits was to have a different copy of the entire body in each outfit, with the correct applier clothing "pre-applied".  While this is possible, it means that each outfit has its own skin too (since the skin is also part of the body), so if you decide to update your skin, then you have to update every copy of the body individually.  And when you come to update to a new version of the body, every copy of the body has to be updated separately.   What the new separate layers gives you is the ability to turn applier clothing into regular mesh clothing, and once you've done that, you can use the applier-based clothing item within an outfit, and have it just work the way you expect clothing to work.

There are three distinct clothing layers in Lara 5 - Tattoo, Underwear and Clothing.  Let's assume you have a simple catsuit that comes as an applier, and you want to create an outfit that includes that catsuit.  The first step, once you've chosen which layer you want to wear the catsuit on, is to make a copy of that layer.  I'll assume you're going to wear the catsuit on the underwear layer, so make a copy in inventory of the Lara underwear layer.  Ideally, you'd want to rename this copy something like "catsuit", but unfortunately Maitreya ships it no-modify, so you can't change its name.  What you can do though, is to create a folder called something like "Catsuit on Underwear" and put the copy of the underwear layer into that folder.  This way you'll know what it is when you want to add it to outfits.

Next, wear the copy you just made.  Make sure you're not wearing any other underwear layers, or ideally any other layers at all.  Use the catsuit applier to apply the catsuit, and check everything looks ok.  Once you're happy, take off the underwear layer, and ideally wait a few seconds to ensure that it gets updated on the SL servers before wearing it again to check that it still works.

Assuming everything looks good, you now have the catsuit, but as a piece of mesh clothing that can be included in an outfit, just like any other clothing item.  You won't need to use the appliers when you wear the outfit, as the catsuit is "pre-applied" to the underwear layer copy.

Appliers with variants

Now let's assume that the appliers for the catsuit we just created have "variants", for example versions with exposed breasts and/or exposed crotch.  Several catsuits come like this, typically with separate appliers for top and bottom half, so that you can mix and match the various versions.  Clothing layers can be used the same way - with separate layer copies for upper and lower halves, but that gets messy, and wastes attachment points.  I'll describe a method that I like, which is suitable for using in your #RLV folder, to allow someone else to "unzip" and expose those areas.

I'll assume you created the "normal" version of the catsuit as described above.  Since this is a regular piece of mesh clothing, you can put it in a folder under #RLV to allow someone else to have you wear the catsuit (or strip it, if you're already wearing it).  I would strongly recommend keeping a single copy of the "Catsuit Underwear Layer", and just putting a link to it under #RLV, rather than making more copies of it.

So you might make a "Catsuit" folder under #RLV (or maybe a hierarchy of folders like "Clothing/Catsuits/Black"), and put the link to the full catsuit underwear object into that.  This will let someone make you wear the catsuit, or remove it via RLV commands.

To allow them to expose your breasts, go through the process above to make a copy of the underwear layer, and apply the catsuit, but this time use the "breasts exposed" version of the applier.  Then make a "Breasts Open" subfolder of the #RLV folder that holds the regular catsuit, and use copy/paste-as-link to put a link to the new "breasts exposed" underwear layer into that folder.

Do the same with the open crotch version, and finally with both open breasts and open crotch, giving you four copies of the underwear layer, each with a different variant of the catsuit pre-applied.  Paste links to all variants into appropriately named subfolders of the regular catsuit folder.  This might result in a folder hierarchy like the following:

/#RLV

  |
  |-- /Clothing

       |
       |--/Catsuits

           |
           |-- /Black

                |
                |- (link to Closed Catsuit underwear layer)

                |

                |--  /BreastsOpen

                |     |
                |     |- (link to BreastsOpen underwear layer)
                |
                |--  /CrotchOpen
                |     |
                |     |- (link to CrotchOpen underwear layer)
                |
                |
                |--  /BothOpen

                      |
                      |- (link to BothOpen underwear layer)

                

Folders are indicated in the above diagram by being in bold font, and prefixed with a forward-slash character.

Someone using RLV to force-wear the #RLV/Clothing/Catsuits/Black folder would result in you wearing the regular, closed version of the catsuit, but they could then force-wear #RLV/Clothing/Catsuits/Black/BreastsOpen to expose your breasts.  Since the underwear layers are all worn on the same attachment point, wearing the BreastsOpen version will displace the regular version.

An alternative would be to put all four variants, including the default "Closed" version, in four parallel subfolders.  Either scheme works, and with the Mesmerizer at least, it's fairly obvious which layout you've chosen.

The one "gotcha" is the statement above that the various underwear layer copies are all worn on the same attachment point.  This is true, if you followed the instructions so far.  As shipped by Maitreya, the Lara Underwear Layer attaches to the Right Shoulder attachment point, so all your copies should also attach there, and so the different variants will knock each other off (as desired) when "worn" (rather than "added").  However, the Maitreya Tattoo and Clothing layers also attach to the Right Shoulder, which means that wearing an underwear layer will knock off any clothing or tattoo layers you happen to be wearing, not just other underwear layers.

To avoid this, I would recommend changing the default attachment points for the three layers so that each layer is worn on its own point.  It would also make sense to move them to locations that are unlikely to be accidentally knocked off by wearing another piece of clothing.  If your avatar is human, then there are several bento attachment points that you are unlikely to want for anything else, for instance Left Wing, Right Wing and Tail Tip.  You can use "Attach To..." to wear each of the original Lara layers on a different point, and then future copies will inherit this new location, and from then on your copies will only interfere with other copies of that same layer.