A Quick Look at the Normie Head

I've tried a pretty wide variety of MESH bodies, but I've not really stepped into the realm of MESH heads yet.  Partially because they all are pretty expensive.  Also, there's a pretty large variety of options and it's not quite as clear on which is "best for me".  The body part felt pretty easy, for the most part, they are a layer a MESH that lays over your standard avatar skeleton to sort of smooth things out.  There are nuances in there, but picking one and then adjusting it with the standard body sliders felt pretty straight forward.

Heads feel different.  Like, it would be easy to end up spending 2000+ L$ on something that I couldn't possibly make work for my "preferred style".  It's not clear to me how much these heads can be adjusted using the standard sliders.  The head and face are kind of a big deal, at least to me, as part of the identity of my Avatar.  It's what I look like.  I use it in SL, I have all of my values written down so I can slap them into any OpenSIM instance I need to.

Recently <UTILAZATOR> released a head called "Normie".  The name is a little odd but if you know anything about <UTI> it will feel kind of obvious.  Most of <UTI>'s stuff is anime themed, very stylized.  It's popular among people who fall into the "4chan crowd", for lack of a better description (this isn't meant to be any sort of insult).  "Normie" is sort of board vernacular for a "regular person".  The Normie head, unlike most of <UTI>'s offerings is more "normal" looking, instead of the stylized Anime look.

I decided to try this head for two reasons.  One, it's only 500L$, which is cheap.  Secondly, based on the ads, and other pictures I've seen, it has a bit of a softer roundish style, which is the sort of look I wanted in my avatar's face.

I think I may have a <UTILIZATOR> body, but I haven't tested the head yet against it, my preferred MESH body is the Maitreya Lara.  It still works out pretty well and I was able to make the neck fix bits work pretty smoothly, or at least as smoothly as it can get.  I also created a quick OMEGA applier for my skin so I could keep the same skin I've been using for ages (I really like it, and it's almost as important as my shape).

So, the head itself.

I... mostly think I like it.  I have a few issues but I think maybe I need to just tweak things a bit more to make everything better.  Most of my problem is with the mouth.  The lips look weird no matter how I adjust things.  There are several different Bento based face poses in the HUD as well, but it could really use a good closed mouth smile.  Every single post makes my avatar look grumpy except the smile face, which makes me look derpy.

I've tried adjusting things to give the mouth a natural up curl on the sides for the neutral pose with no luck.  I am not sure exactly how universal Bento is, so I have not yet tried looking into some sort of alternative face posing HUD.  I do know that the old smiler attachment (randomly smiles every so often) doesn't work with this head.

I'm not giving up on this head or anything, in fact I'm kind of confident things may get better in the future, I've seen comments that <UTILIZATOR> is pretty good about keeping their products updated.  This is essentially the 1.0 product.