See More Avatars from: Dark Spot Designs
21 Mar 09 | List Price: L$
In recent months, Dark Spot Designs has begun their entrance in the avatar creation market. Their second commercially available avatar, this cheetah represents the artistic style of its creators and shows they approach avatar building.
Out of the Box:
- Talking Jaw
- Moving Ears and Tail
- Different Eye Colours
- Blinking Eyes
- Dilating Pupils
- PG & Mature Skins
- Male Genitals for both Male and Female Avatars
- Legwarmers
- Head and Ear Piercings
- Tail and Ear Touch Action Dialog Box
- (e.g. “<Someone> grabs <Your Name>’s tail… maybe time to worry…”)
Build and Skin
One of the most noticeable parts to this avatars textures must be the spots. They are placed uniformly on the avatar; symmetrical from left to right on the avatar. Detailed patterns are difficult on avatars, and fortunately Dark Spot Designs rose to meet the challenge. Perhaps the only major issue with the skin textures could be where the spots on the center of the back will begin to merge, creating what appears as a flip-horizon affect. The skin textures give the impression of soft fur, with appropriate shading to ensure the skin has definition. This quality level is maintained throughout both the avatar’s skin and its attachments.
As usual, we work on discussing the avatar’s attachments from the feet and then work our way up to talk about the head. The avatar comes with footpaws and digitigrade leg attachments. The foot paws are decently done, with retractable claws (which do actually slide into the toe-digits). The digitigrade legs are shaped well, with a neat little detail that I admit I haven’t noticed before on other avatars; a dewclaw. You can see these on the sides of the digitigrade legs that face each other. Both the paws and the digitigrade legs feature small amounts of ‘fluff’ in strategically placed locations.
The tail is made of flexible prims that are textured with the same detail as the rest of the body. The creator has added the dialog menu function whereby a user of this avatar can allow people to click the tail and receive a dialog box that allows them to do an action, such as “Casey takes Forepawz’s tail and slowly stroke its soft fur…” The tail can also swish at different speed settings, and be set to ‘stiff’ or ‘flexible’ or ‘antigravity’. The settings for all of these can be done by way of the HUD or through text commands. The hand-paw attachments look like hands more than they do feet, so the fingers are longer and also have the option to sheath and un-sheath the claws. The hand attachments do not use any invisiprims to hide the avatar hands underneath, so the handpaws will seem slightly large to some people.
The eyes of the avatar are particularly interesting. They offer the fairly common eye expressions, (sad, angry, sleepy, etc.), eye colour changes, and the less-common option of pupil size changes. I have only seen this implemented in Uchi Desmoulin’s (Limited Time Freebie) Ringtailed Cat avatar so far. In short, the cheetah avatar’s pupil size can be set by the user, or can change size according to the location of the Sun (i.e. light changes, just like real life eyes). Two issues may surround the eyes, however. First of all, the rotation of the eyes may seem slightly off, leading to a kind of lazy-eye expression. This is easily remedied, however through adjusting the rotations of the eyes or waiting for a possible update from the creator. Additionally, the eyes have a decent amount of glossy shine built into the textures which gives the appearance of contact lens. Both of these issues can be easily remedied by the user themselves if they present a problem. That aside, the creator has created an avatar with many flexible expressions. In particular, using the sad-face expression really makes the face look out depressed.
The muzzle is smoothly sculpted, and the jaw merges near-seamlessly with the face. Of particular note must be that the textures that are used on face are well-defined and clear, with good usage of colour tones. The ears are well sculpted, and come with ‘ear expressions’ (i.e. sad, happy, angry, alert) of their own.
Features
Take Notice: The pictures under this Features Section are rated Mature.
The avatar comes stacked with options and features of which have been included under the “Out of the Box” Heading earlier in the review. The different options will be included in photos . The avatar features an entire assortment of attachments with piercings, (in particular, the ears, head, and male genitilia). For females, there is also two additional hairs with different colours that have been included. Also included are the leg-warmers, Mature Skins for the females, and male genitilia for both the male and female versions of the avatar. As SLARF is a review site, we will not go too in-depth into these features other than offer pictures and rudimentary information
On a quick note in regards to the avatar’s genitilia, they are uniquely designed and likely useable for whatever anatomically correct interests users may have. The HUD may be somewhat difficult to get used to at the start, however, as there is no words on the buttons or a guide to show you how to use it. With some practice however, dedicated users may achieve their goals. (To see accompanying male genitals and HUD, click here.)
Heads Up Display (HUD)
The HUD that is included is versatile and offers some settings that are often neglected by other HUDs. Alongside the options to change settings on some avatar options (tail settings, etc.) there are some of the most basic options such as whether the jaw or ears move during typing and/or voice, to turning off blink. The only issue that could really be had with the HUD could be the missing ability to use a slider to choose eye colour; but like all functions of the avatar, one can change this using chat commands, all of which are listed in a notecard.
To summarize, the following are controllable by the HUD:
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Customiseability
The avatar is easily customiseable, with all of the attachments modifiable and copyable. The head comes at a near-human sized head, so any hairs that anyone would like to apply to this avatar’s head can easily be applied without resizing. One can easily modify and play around with the piercings to add more of a personalized touch.
Conclusion
For Dark Spot Design’s sophomore avatar avatar, they have shown that they are prepared to enter the mainstream market with competitive avatars. The Cheetah avatar is versatile and easily customised using either your own modifications, or those options that the avatar comes with.
Tagged cat, cheetah, darkspot, feline, gallery.
DarkSpots really outdid themselves with the cheetah. She looks like an actual cheetah, and I’m very impressed with how easy it was to swap out shins and edit the tail. The big beef I have with cats in general on SL is their tails always look just… flat with a single cylinder for a tail; not this avatar. It looks very VERY much like a cat’s tail.