QRatorJupiter's Ruth2 and Roth2 Wiki: The Ruth2 v4 and Roth2 v2 boxes
Ruth2 v4 and Roth2 v2 come with a variety of boxes that may be confusing. Names and cover art of the boxes aren't exactly self-explanatory, not to mention that these bodies are structured nothing like anything that has ever come in from Second Life. For example, while Athena also comes in petite and flat variants, the Ruth2 v4 variants all look largely the same, and they have "weird" names.
What all these boxes are, and what they contain, is described below.
Table of content
Body variants
Roth2 v2 comes in two variants, Ruth2 v4 even in three. They don't differ in greater body shape, so none of them is a "Ruth2 v4 Petite", but they're adapted to certain use-cases.
Interestingly, all boxes show the "BoM" variant on the cover. This is the most obvious on the Ruth2 v4 "Business" box where the body clearly has nipples.
BoM (Ruth2 v4, Roth2 v2)
This is the regular, fully-featured variant. The other variants had certain features removed for different reasons.
Business (Ruth2 v4 only)
The Ruth2 v4 "Business" variant is mostly the same as the "BoM" variant. It has all the same scripts. The key difference is that it is more geared towards "safe for work".
In comparison to the "BoM" and "0.8.2.1" variants, the body is slightly altered; it lacks nipples on the breasts. This was done so that they don't "poke" through layer clothes.
In fact, this can also help female avatars wear certain mesh clothes through which the nipples of the other two variants would clip otherwise, such as Damien Fate's strapless dress.
Besides, both the included classic skin and those built into the HUD were altered: While they did get to keep the breast details which the mesh lacks, the genital were removed from the textures.
Lastly, unlike the "BoM" and "0.8.2.1" variants of Ruth2 v4, the "Business" variant does not come with physics.
A Roth2 v2 "Business" doesn't exist for an obvious reason: There's nothing on Roth2 v2 "BoM" that would have to be removed for a "Business" variant.
0.8.2.1 (Ruth2 v4, Roth2 v2)
First of all: 0.8.2.1 is not the version number of the bodies! These are not older or newer versions!
Instead, "0.8.2.1" stands for the minimum OpenSim version these bodies are compatible with. The "0.8.2.1" variants are reduced in functionality to be fully compatible with OpenSim versions before 0.9.1.1.
Explanation
Ruth2 v4 and Roth2 v2 have the most advanced Bakes-on-Mesh implementation of all mesh bodies in OpenSim. This requires rather advanced scripts. How well they work, if at all, depends on the OpenSim version.
OpenSim introduced basic BoM support with version 0.8.2.1, but it wasn't before OpenSim 0.9.1.1 that scripting support for BoM was fully implemented.
When Roth2 v2 came out in May 2020, OpenSim 0.9.1.1 was still a development version. Many grids already ran it, but others were still on older versions, and OpenSim 0.8.2.1 was the stable version. Thus, there had to be a way to make Ruth2 v4 and Roth2 v2 compatible with these older versions.
In order to achieve that, special variants were made for older OpenSim versions to be on the safe side. These are the "0.8.2.1" variants.
Differences
The meshes of the "0.8.2.1" variants are identical to those of the "BoM" variants. Also, the "0.8.2.1" variants still support Bakes-on-Mesh.
The key difference is that they had most of their scripts removed, including all BoM scripts as well as everything else that can be controlled via the HUD on the other variants. On OpenSim versions from 0.8.2.1 up to and including 0.9.1.0, the HUD wouldn't work properly anyway.
So while the bodies do have BoM, it's permanently on for the body, the eyes and Ruth2 v4's feet, and it's replaced with generic textures on Ruth2 v4's nails. It cannot be deactivated. The "0.8.2.1" variants also come without a HUD entirely.
Changing the alpha mode requires the body or the attachment to be edited in-world. "Appliers" for skins, eyes and nail polish are not available.
The "0.8.2.1" boxes are the only body boxes that contain elf ears. For the other boxes, scripted BoM elf ears can be found in the Extras boxes. The elf ears in the "0.8.2.1" boxes are unscripted BoM ears.
Necessity in practice
Practical in-world experience has shown that grids or sims running OpenSim from 0.8.2.1 to 0.9.1.0 can be visited with fully-scripted bodies. They just have to be set up prior to visiting such places. The lack of compatibility only concerns the scripts, and as long as the scripts aren't tried to put to use, everything is fine.
In fact, some places showing lower version numbers actually require the regular "BoM" variants, namely when they run older OpenSim forks instead of vanilla OpenSim. Some forks, for example NextGen or ArribaSim, were created before the introduction of BoM, and full BoM capability has never been backported to them from vanilla. So on Arriba, BoM is wonky, and on NextGen, it doesn't work at all.
Before visiting such places, BoM has to be turned off entirely and replaced with the "appliers" built into the HUD. This is not possible with the "0.8.2.1" variants which lack a HUD and the necessary scripts and have BoM always on. Thus, the other variants have to be used.
The only actual use-case where the "0.8.2.1" variants are necessary is when an avatar's home grid runs on an OpenSim version older than 0.9.1.1. In this case, the BoM scripts cannot even be run at home.
Interestingly, there is no script-reduced Ruth2 v4 "0.8.2.1" variant with the Business mesh and skins.
Contents of the body boxes
The body boxes generally contain these items:
- body including head
- pair of eyeballs
- eyelashes
- flat, medium and high feet (Ruth2 v4 only)
- fingernails in five different shapes (Ruth2 v4 only)
- toenails for flat, medium and high feet (Ruth2 v4 only)
- HUD for everything (except "0.8.2.1" variants)
- one skin
- one shape
- one bald hairbase
- one style of dark-brown unisex flexi hair
- one set of basic, untextured, grey layer underwear
- one physics setting (Ruth2 v4 "BoM" and "0.8.2.1" only)
- unscripted BoM elf ears ("0.8.2.1" variants only)
- three notecards (readme, licenses, change log)
The grey boxes
Extras
For Roth2 v2, the Extras box is recommended; for Ruth2 v4, it's essential. Unfortunately, the Ruth2 v4 "Extras" box is the one that's missing from reselling freebie shops the most often.
The most essential extras in the Ruth2 v4 "Extras" box are two pairs of classic layer "shoes" that change the avatar height for medium and high heels.
While the Ruth2 v4 body boxes all contain three pairs of feet and three pairs of toenails for three different heel heights, these require you to either adjust the hover height or keep three copies of the same shape with different hover heights, especially if you want to make outfits with footwear with different heels.
With these classic "shoes", this is no longer necessary. They're also easy to save with outfits with no extra hassles. By the way, these "shoes" also work with other bodies, just in case you're tired of raising and lowering your Athena-based avatar whenever you switch your footwear between flat and high.
The Ruth2 v4 "Extras" box also contains the same three pairs of BoM-scripted feet as Ruth2 v4 "BoM" and "Business", just in case.
Another two Ruth2 v4-specific extras are universal wearables that provide Ruth2 v4 with nail polish. One is the same grey as the box and the R2 logo, and it has the R2 logo on it, the other one is a city skyline. They also demonstrate how nail polish works on Ruth2 v4, in case you want to make your own.
Both "Extras" boxes contain additional underwear. But while Roth2 v2 only gets the same undershirt as the bodies defined as a jacket, Ruth2 v4 gets a set of classic white Linda Kellie underwear, a bra and a pair of bikini panties. It gets you started with better-looking underwear until you manage to obtain the full Women's Assorted Underwear box.
Both boxes also include alternative shapes. The Roth2 v2 "Extras" box comes with that from Roth 2.0 RC#1, the Ruth2 v4 box comes with a custom-made shape with more natural dimensions and a height of 1.75m.
The flexi hair in both "Extras" boxes can also be found in the body boxes, but the "Extras" boxes include another hair colour, and the Ruth2 v4 "Extras" box includes hairbase tattoos in four different colours.
The "Extras" boxes also contains the scripted bodies, both the "BoM" and the "Business" body in Ruth2 v4's case, with and without a head as well as a separate head with and without a prolonged, V-shaped neck and separate hands.
In order not to be so underwhelming in comparison to the Ruth2 v4 "Extras" box, that for Roth2 v2 comes with the standard skin from the body boxes plus ten extra skins on top. On the other hand, the male "R2 Skins" box doesn't contain ready-to-wear skins.
The same Bento animation for relaxing the hands built into the bodies can be found separately in the "Extras" boxes, along with a loose script to trigger the animation.
When BoM is on, certain parts of the avatar can be blanked out with four alpha masks that come with each body, one for the eyes, one for the body without the head, one for the whole body, one for the whole body plus eyes. The Ruth2 v4 "Extras" box has three additional alpha masks that were made to reduce clipping through mesh clothes where it's the most likely with this body.
Last but not least, both "Extras" boxes contain the legendary elf ears made by Ferd Frederix, but scripted with BoM. In turn, the ears on the heads (except 0.8.2.1) are scripted in such a way that they automatically disappear when the elf ears are attached.
Skins
The "Skins" boxes are optional.
As the name indicates, the "R2 Skins" boxes contain free, open-source skins as ready-to-wear classic skins. They include the same skin that come with the bodies, but they expand on them and contain additional skin families.
These skins may help you get started. But chances are that classic skins found on older freebie sims on the Hypergrid suit you better. If you have a Ruth2 v4, and you don't mind a "flatter" look with reduced highlights and shadings, you may also want to check my Starlight Remix skins.
Useful additions are Chip Midnight's UV map templates, both as skins and loose textures that even include the skirt. These can be used not only to make skin-tight layer clothes, but especially custom alpha masks. And as they are full-perm, the textures can be exported and used as templates in graphics applications like Photoshop or GIMP.
Otherwise, it's worth looking at the skin resources in the official RuthAndRoth GitHub repository, including the archives for Ruth 2.0 RC#2 and RC#3. For some skins, Photoshop or GIMP files structured in layers are available which facilitates making custom skins.
There is one difference between the male and female "R2 Skins" boxes, however: The male box contains boxes with skins and textures, grouped by creator and type, which have to be unpacked separately to be able to use the content. The additional skins are also included in the Roth2 v2 "Extras" box with the exception of Chip Midnight's template skin. The female box contains everything unboxed and readily accessible.
Resources
The "Resources" boxes are only interesting for tinkerers.
The "Resources" boxes contain raw materials used in the final products in the boxes above. Mostly, these are the skins from the body boxes, the HUDs and the "Skins" boxes, but as loose textures.
That said, most of the times, they're more useful outside OpenSim than in OpenSim, so one would rather get them from the RuthAndRoth GitHub repository.
Mesh Uploads
The "Mesh Uploads" boxes are only interested for advanced tinkerers and useless for general users.
The content of the "Mesh Uploads" boxes consists of raw meshes that may be useful for experimental and testing purposes.
There's nothing in these boxes that makes sense attaching to an everyday avatar.