A helpful little guide to Loud Mouth’s mesh lips

Please note that this tutorial is outdated, the Loud Mouth has been updated. To update your loud mouth, go to the mainstore and touch the redelivery terminal. I will update this tutorial with the new information very soon

The other day I decided I was going to try on a demo for the mesh lips that Loud Mouth had created. I was a little dubious and wasn’t sure what I was expecting. I’d only heard talk of it on Plurk and never really saw any photos of the product. My friend Harmony showed me the lips she bought and whilst I was impressed by the shape, she’d told me she’d been having trouble getting a good colour match using the HUD. Off I went to the Loud Mouth mainstore and picked up a demo for the Alli parted lips. I did find the HUD a little fiddly at first but after a bit of experimenting, I cracked it.

On the wall of the store are several landmarks to skin shops that are making appliers for the mesh lips. So when I saw Glam Affair and Essences were up there I bought the lips without a moment’s hesitation.

I should mention before I start this little tutorial that I’m not an expert at all. I’m only making this because I found I had an easier time getting a perfect colour match than others did. So I hope that by reading this you’ll be able to master the art of the Loud Mouth HUD and that it might change your mind about buying the full product!

Step 1: Preparation

So you’ve just bought a pair of lips/bought the Demo. Well done! I know you’re eager to slap them on right away and see how they look but there are a couple things we need to take care of before that. Firstly, you’re going to want to choose a Windlight that does not have any shadows, weird coloured lighting, fog etc. For this tutorial, I used the AnaLu *Studio*5 preset in the default Firestorm Environment editor (but any ‘optimal avatar’ Windlight should work just as well) . This will make it easier for us to match the skin almost perfectly without the use of an applier. Also make sure that you have basic shaders and ambient shaders checked in your graphics settings.

The next thing we’re going to do is edit our shape. If you read the notecard included in the box, it will give you the recommended shape values to prevent the default avatar lips clipping through the mesh. They are as follows:

Lip Width – 6
Lip Fullness – 54
Lip Thickness – 0
Lip Ratio – 0
Mouth Position – 25
Mouth Corner – 27
Lip Cleft Depth – 45
Lip Cleft – 55
Shift Mouth – 50

Of course, some values may be changed later on when we get to the more advanced resizing and stuff.

The final thing we need to do before we start doing the tricky stuff is make a copy of your lips! This is extremely important, especially if you bought the full version already. The last thing we want to do is flub up our lips beyond repair!

Got all that done? Good, let’s move on then!

Step 2:  Do not fear the HUD

Okay, you can start putting your stuff on now.

In the pack you should have; the lips, an alpha, an instructional notecard, a developer’s kit, 1 set of teeth and a HUD (the DEMO only contains the lips, alpha and HUD). Start by Adding the components onto your avatar (right click -> Add). If you’ve done that, you should look like you have a milk-mustache!

This is what the lips look like fresh out of the box. We haven’t tinted them or resized them yet so don’t be discouraged just yet!

Now look at the HUD. It does look a bit scary right? I know you’re probably thinking “Oh my gosh, what are all these squares!? I’ve never seen a tinting HUD like this before!”

Don’t panic! I’ll show you which part does what and how you can switch between the modes you might be more familiar with!

 This is the Loud Mouth HUD as it comes. I’ve broken it down into 7 sections. Some parts might be easier to recognise than others.

1- These three buttons switch between different sections of your lips. For this tutorial, we’ll only be using the first two buttons which will tint the skin and the actual lips themselves.

2- This is the colour chart as it comes. I won’t lie, I was a little confused by the layout too but don’t worry about it for now. We can change how the chart looks in step 3!

3- The magnifying glasses either side of the two bottom bars allow you to switch up how the chart is displayed. There are 3 different displays to choose from. The bars at the bottom will also control saturation and luminosity in the different modes.

4- Pretty self explanatory. Click to get a copy of the instruction notecard/a Landmark to the Loud mouth store.

5- Also self-explanatory. Use the + and – to resize your lips. The arrow will revert your changes back to the ‘factory settings’

6- In this walkthrough, we’ll mostly be relying on these colour sliders to get a perfect match. They’re exactly the same as any other RGB slider.

7- Here you can save the colour for future reference and pick preset colours. Again, the arrow will restore all the presets back to normal.

Now that we know our way around the HUD, we can move on to tinting our new lips!

Step 3: Making colours happen

You have two options in this section. A) You can use an applier if you have one for your skin B) You can tint your lips manually. If you have a skin applier, you can skip this step.

 First thing’s first, we need to find out the RGB values of our skin. So open any colour-reading application you have (on Mac you can use ‘Digital colour meter’). if you don’t have an application. Just take a screenshot, open it in any paint/photo editing program and use the colour dropper to pick the colour. You’re going to want to get as close to the loud mouth as possible to pick a colour so it helps a lot if you zoom right in.

Once you have your RGB values, make a note of them because you’ll be needing them in a second. For reference, I am using Essences Whisper skin in tone Geisha and the values are as follows;

R: 232

G: 202

B: 188

Next, we want to click the magnifying glass that has a blue centre. This will display a different colour chart and will enable us to use the RGB sliders for accurate tinting. Clicking the brown centered glass will bring up a different display but it’s not the one we want for this tutorial. 

On the right are the two other modes the HUD can be viewed in. You’re going to want to click the  right magnifying glass to bring up the chart seen on the bottom.

Now this looks a little more friendly right? Also, see how we can use the RGB sliders now?

What we’re going to do now is use the RGB sliders to input the values we took note of just a second ago. The sliders are a little fussy so don’t worry about it too much if your values are 1 or 2 digits off, just slide the bars up and down until you get numbers that are as close to your skin as possible. It’s going to need a little more tweaking in order to match your skin exactly so just do that now even if it looks a little odd. We’ll fix it in just a minute.

You’ve input your values into the sliders but the skin around the mouth is still way off? This is were our Luminosity slider comes to the rescue. Click the slider beneath the chart until you have a perfect match to the surrounding skin. It helps if you make very tiny adjustments so that you get the most accurate result.

Now look at that! Perfect colour matching if I do say so myself. Now if you like you can change the actual lip colour by clicking the centre button and using the colour chart and luminosity slider to get a colour that you like.

I’ve found that the HUD works best for tinting natural lip colours. If you want it to appear as if you have lipstick on, you’ll get a much better result by using a lipstick applier.

So you’ve tinted your nice new lips, they match your skintone flawlessly and you have lips that rival even the finest glamour models! What now? Well in the next steps I’ll be talking about skin and lipstick appliers as well as advanced modding the lips. But if that doesn’t sound like something you need to know then feel free to skip ahead to my final thoughts on the product!

Step 4: Appliers and how they make your life 1,000,000x easier

You’re not having any of that tinting riff-raff malarkey above, you’ve gone and bought yourself appliers that match your skintone! They work the same way as any other appliers for any other product. Just add it, click it, detach it!

Unfortunately, I haven’t got a skin applier to show you all, but I did buy these great lipstick appliers from A.e.meth to show you how you can use those instead.

A.e.meth’s loud mouth lipstick appliers come in 7 colours and include one colour that is designed for tinting! I suggest that if you want that lipstick look then get these appliers as the shade made for tinting looks much better than just tinting the lips themselves.

These appliers work by colouring the actual lips, leaving the skin around them alone. But (correct me if I’m wrong) you can use a skin applier first to get an exact colour match and then use a lipstick applier on top to get a nice…well… lipstick!

Ooh look at those juicy lips!

Since the Loud Mouth is a very new product, a lot of the designers on the wall (at the time of posting) haven’t released their appliers yet but they are making them don’t worry! I recommend you check back regularly or join their respective groups to get notified of when the appliers will be released. Also, there currently is no way of removing an applier from the lips so it’s important to make regular copies. You can replace appliers with other ones, but there isn’t a way to remove the applier and revert it back to it’s original state.

Step 5: Advanced resizing for Dummies

Important! Before doing this step you must must must make a copy of your lips. Because it’s extremely easy to mess them up at this stage.

The resizing tool on the HUD is all well and good if your lips are too big or too small, but what do you do if your lips are too wide or too high? There’s no way to control height or width using the HUD! Well this is where you’ll need a little bit of basic modifying experience. I know some people dislike the shape of the lips but with this method you can very easily make powerful changes to them. Also note that this cannot be done in the Demo as the Demo is no modify.

Right click your lips and select ‘edit’. Once you have the editing window up, click ‘select face’ and then ‘edit linked’. Now you’re going to want to click the outside of your lips where the skin is. Don’t click the lips themselves or nothing will change. Now tick the ‘stretch’ box and you should get the bounding box seen in the image. Now it’s just a case of using the X,Y and Z markers to make detailed changes such as  changing the width, height and even the depth and how far the lips protrude outwards.

Also important: Do not under any circumstances unlink any part of the mesh. Just don’t do it. Don’t.

Once you’ve done this, you can click the lips themselves and line that up too. I’m not sure what that does as it seems it doesn’t make a difference to how the appliers sit but I lined it back up anyway, just in case.

Just close the window when you’re done and boom! Your lips now fit your face better! You might need to change your shape so that the cleft lines up or whatever but other than that, you’re done!

I hope this tutorial helped you. If I’ve messed up on any information then please let me know nicely in the comments. Bear in mind this was all figured out through personal experimentation so some facts maybe inaccurate. But this is what worked for me so I’m sure it will work for others too!

Final thoughts

All in all I think that the Loud Mouth has potential to be a very good product. The default avatar mesh has many areas that need improving and products like these help enhance our avatars to make them more realistic and true to life. I really love the shape of these lips and after a little bit of tinkering I managed to get them to a stage that I thought best suited my face. I felt that the instruction notecard could be a little more detailed such as outlining what each part of the HUD did instead of me having to experiment with what did what.

But I cannot wait to see how this product evolves in the future. With top skin designers like The Sugar Garden, Essences and Glam Affair creating appliers for it, it’s sure to become a big hit as the mesh breasts and butts did. Of course it has it’s flaws but for a brand new product, I’d say it’s ticking all the right boxes.

*X*

All the photos (except the header image) in this post are raw. They have not been touched up at all. I simply added text and cropped them.

Also, no skin appliers were used to create a perfect match, all of the skin tinting in this tutorial (and in the header and throughout the rest of my blog) was achieved using the method above.

If you have any enquiries about stores making appliers please contact the creators themselves as I cannot help you. This is merely a guide to help those who struggled with tinting, I cannot tell you when appliers will be released (if ever).

Thank you

Outfit credits

Hair: Truth – Felicity

Skin: Essences – Whisper

Eyes: Ikon – Perspective

Coat: Zenith – Fur madam coat (TCF)

Glasses: Sleepy Eddy – Boston glasses (TCF)