In this review, we get to take a look at the newest offering from Chimaeric Creations (Not to be confused with Chimera Industries); a ferret avatar. Ferrets are some of the most notable pets that people may have; known in some circles affectionately as a ‘tube-rat.’ While there have been miniature ferrets (both quad and bipedal), there has not been a full bipedal ferret avatar for quite a while. It’s our pleasure to again cover another new player.

Out of the Box:

Measurement	Value
Script Time with HUD	~0.177
Script Time without HUD	~0.177
Avatar Rendering Cost	~1892-2291 (Due to Hair)

• Male and Female Body Shapes
  • Tintable Hair for each sex
  • Mature Skins
• Two-Tone Tintable Eyes
• 7 pupil textures
• 3 Sclera (Eye-White) Options
• 3 Eye Expressions
• Smile and Frown Expressions

Build and Skin:

To start, the skin on this avatar is not overly complex. A base colour covers most of the avatar’s body uniformly, though there’s variations in the different versions; such as a lightening or darkening of fur on the lower arms and legs. To avoid flatness, the creator has opted to use a variety of painting-like techniques to provide depth in the body patterns. These patterns show up better on the darker, or more ‘full’ coloured avatars than the lighter ones (e.g. brown vs. champagne) Where this is most noticeable is on the back between the shoulders where you see a slight darkening patch make its way towards the tail. Body tone (pecs, stomach, etc) are subtly placed in the fur so they look like they are buried underneath. In general, the creator has done a good job of conveying furriness and the fur patterns of the common ferret.

The avatar comes with mature skins alongside the body shapes, which you can view in the accompanying link. Females receives genitals and nipples, while males receive smaller, male-sized nipples.

Take Notice: The pictures under this link are rated Mature – Click here to view the Male and Female Adult Skins

The build quality of the avatar is sound; the sculpts have no wrinkling of any kind, and everything is within proportional limits and well sized. As we often do, we will start discussing the avatar from the feet upwards.

The feet are somewhat long; akin to the hind-paws of ferrets. They consist of 5 toes with well-textured and positioned claws. Also notable on the feet are the paw-pads; while they have been arranged and textured well to mimic ferret’s feet, they are made of stretched spheres with a bubble-like appearance which looks slightly out of place compared to the smooth, sculpted construction of the rest of the foot’s design. As ferrets are not digitigrade, there are no such legs included with this avatar. However, the addition of simple plantigrade attachments would have smoothed out the the shape to foot transition when users wished to wear short pants or shirts.

The hand-paw attachments are well constructed with articulate fingers with 3 poses in each finger. The same claws and paw-pads as were present on the feet are available here, keeping the theme that the feet had originally set. The finger-pose changes are very quick and functional as we’ve come to see with most of the new avatars with poseable fingers that have become mainstream. The size of the hand-paws are slightly large with big palms, but the articulation between attachment and the shape arm are very smooth. A nice touch is the ‘fluff’ prims that move down the length of the forearm to the base of the hand-paws.

The tail is the most simple attachment on this avatar. It comes in two states; bottlebrush, which is a much thicker, slightly brushier looking tail, and a default state which is thinner. For some people, the tail could be longer, but for this avatar, the tail suits the dimensions of the shape well enough. The textures on this appendage are well made and sleekly meld in with the rest of the body textures.

Finally, we’re on to the topic of the head. What stands out the most on the avatar is surprisingly not as much the eyes as much as the muzzle. This ferret has a large nose that sets itself as a landmark on the face. On all of the options, the nose is a bright pink that has been textured extremely well. The squarish muzzle gives way to a very visible pink bottom lip. In all the muzzle reflects ferret-ish qualities very well, in both shape and the textures. While the nose is very large, it does not take away from the personality that this avatar offers. The whiskers are well placed, and the interior of the mouth has an impressive display of teeth.

Deeper inside of the mouth, especially when the mouth is open *extra* wide, we see a slight oddity in how the bottom jaw articulates with the face. This leads to some ‘fur’ showing up on the inside of the mouth. However, this is pretty much a non-issue, especially since the only way to see this problem is if you open the muzzle to its maximum width manually with the ‘Custom Jaw Rotation’ HUD setting. When the mouth is moving during Muzzle-Talking (During Text-chatting), we do not see it swing so wide open. As well, the muzzle comes with a smile or frown facial expression.

The rest of the head fleshes out a ferrety-facial pattern with a mask that surrounds the eyes and the bridge of the muzzle. The top and the sides of the head themselves are made up of the avatar’s base-colour, using furry brush-strokes to make a good colour transition. In all, despite the different colours making up the head at different points, each transition was well done.

While on the topic of the face; we should not neglect to bring up the eyes. This avatar features a couple of eye states (open, closed, squint, etc.), and 3 eye expressions (sad, happy, neutral). The eyes themselves are large and feature brightly textured pupils. Users get to choose the two colours that make up the iris, and choose from different options the kind of pupil they wish to have. Something we have not seen before is the option to change the sclera; that is; the eye whites with different textures.

A criticism for the eyes could be that while they are textured strongly, there is a bit of an overlay which covers approximately half of the pupil with a lighter shade of colour. The result is then a slightly obscured pupil which should actually be atop the iris at any time. As well, the position of the eyeballs places them fairly deep inside the head. From different angles you can see black space between the eyeball and face, which, like in some other avatars we had reviewed, unfortunately does subtract a little bit of the personality of the head. For some people, the eyes may be a little off-setting, but for many others, the eyes will be just fine.

Finally, the ears atop the head are wider than they are tall; sitting close to the head. The shape and textures are indicative of ferret’s ears and nestles neatly with the included hairs.

Features and Heads-Up Display (HUD):

This avatar does not use commands for the operation of its features; but everything is controlled by the Heads-Up Display. The options are as follows:

Page 1:

• Ear Twitch On/Off
• Tail Default or Bottlebrush
• Eye State (Open, Squint, etc.)
• Eye Expressions (Angry, Sad, or Neutral)
• Facial Expression (Smile or Frown)

Page 2:

• Hands – Here, you choose 1 of 3 states for each finger to create custom hand poses.
• Custom Jaw Rotation
• The Dual-Eye Colours and Glow Level

Customisation:

This avatar is easy to customise as it is copiable and modifiable. The head is sized well, so fitting 3rd party hairs to the head will not require too much work. The head is decently made to allow users to opt to go ‘bald’ and still look presentable.

Conclusion:

For the SLARF premiere of Chimaeric Creations Ferret, we are pleased to see a new creator who has, with their second avatar, covered another rare species and made an aesthetic avatar. While some people have confused this avatar with badgers and otters (I don’t know where otter came from), it speaks to the potential of the avatar to not only reflect the slinky housepet, but also be creatively modified to create other less-covered species. People looking for a bipedal ferret avatar now have a new choice to play with. We look forward to reviewing what other new avatars that Chimaeric Creations produces in the coming months.