Today, we take a look at DERP’s newest offering, the Krauk. This avatar is seemingly a blend of crocodile and alligator features (they’re separate species, you know) done in a fun, semi-cartoony style.
Out of the Box:
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Observations
Build and Skin
This avatar comes well-textured, easily giving the visual impression of scales. The front of the avatar is rather simple with chest and belly scutes, leaving the back, sides, and limbs with the visually interesting textured scales. The patterns vary among the versions of crocodile purchased, but each is suitably detailed and colourful. In fact, if one looks close to the body, they will see that across the body mesh skins and the attachments, each scale has seemingly been hand-drawn. Despite having so many of these all over the body and attachments there’s no visual clutter of any real kind.
The avatar comes with both a female and a male skin, the main difference being adjustments in shading on the chest (i.e. Male pecs vs. Female breasts). In terms of build and construction, this is sound. Each piece of the avatar is put together well, and as such, creases between prims are minimized or non-existent. As far as wrinkles go, there won’t be any of them visible anywhere on the avatar.
Attachments
This avatar’s attachments are simple in their construction, leaving the textures a lot of room to fully shine and make the avatar what it is. The Krauk is a digitigrade creature, which suggests that there’s a little bit of artistic expression in play. This doesn’t work against the avatar though, it merely signifies that while heavily influenced by Crocodiles and Alligators, this is going to be a somewhat unique creature. For the lower limbs we’ve got 3-toed paws and a digitigrade leg with extremely well done scales. The feet seem to be a bit of a blend between digitigrade and plantigrade, so to some people, the leg-foot structure will seem slightly ‘off.’
On the back of the avatar, we’ve got a ridge of dull-looking spikes that going from the top of the head down towards the tip of the tail. These are attached in reasonable positions so that regardless of most animations and poses, the dorsal spikes should still look proper.
The tail itself is well sculpted, thick at the base, but tapering at the tip. In sum, the tail is very well crafted and fits the avatar perfectly. There are no options or features available to users for the tail; it’s static and has no alternative poses. If you want flexi-prim tails or extra poses or animations (i.e. wagging), users may have to consider some heavy modding of their own.
The hand attachments are a 50-50 cross between a reptilian ‘paw’ and a human hand. There’s four fingers, but each are tipped with a claw like the toe-digits. The arrangement of the fingers is very relaxed and generic, therefore matching with the avatar reasonably well, regardless of type of clothing worn or whatever pose/situation the avatar is in.
Head
That leaves us with the head to discuss. From first glance, the avatar’s head is a bit closer to an alligator than a crocodile, since only the teeth in the top jaw jut out over the bottom jaw. The muzzle itself is fairly long and distinctively shaped, giving this reptile an unmistakably “Croc-ish” face, complete with an enigmatic grin. In fact, despite all the sharp points and jutting teeth, the head has a somewhat friendly facial expression.
The interior of the mouth is lined with a good number of teeth of varying sizes, and the user is able to toggle the tongue from either staying inside of the muzzle, or hanging out of the muzzle idly.
A focus point of this avatar is the eyes. As with most of DERP avatars, users are able to adjust the colour of the irises with the Tri-Colour setting of the HUD, as well as a more recent option of changing the saturation of colours used in the colour-picker. Users are again able to shift the dilation of the pupils for a little more customisation.
Finally, we’ll make a quick point or two about the brows. The eyebrows themselves have a few spikes just above the snout base and continue to the back of the head. Do keep in mind that there are no hair hair attachments available for this avatar. As usual, users can rotate among eyebrow expressions; with “Surprise” giving the user a ‘giddy’ kind of expression, and others like “Sad” and “Mad” providing equally strong emotes (See Above Photo for examples).
Features and Heads-Up Display (HUD)
The HUD for this avatar is completely self-explanatory, using DERP’s standard, relatively new and user-friendly HUD menu. Everything is very functional and very responsive to the click of the user. All of the avatar’s features are controlled through this HUD, though there are no text commands available. There are a few less features with this avatar than in some of the prior avatars from DERP, such as ear movement control or tail-movement control; but neither of these would make sense on such an avatar.
Customisation
This avatar comes as both modifiable and copiable, so users should be able to change the avatar to their heart’s content. Again, there is no hair attachments included with this avatar. But if users wish to use some, a mohawk-style of haircut would work well with the spikes along the back of the head. If users wish, they can try to use a third-party hair, but this will prove difficult because the head is not shaped like most avatar heads at all. Users would be advised to remove the head ‘spikes’ before using these other options, either way.
Conclusion
DERP has upheld its standards in terms of the avatar construction, and perhaps even exceeded their standards with regards to the textures. The Krauk comes together as a unique-looking blend of Crocodile and Alligator, with plenty of personality and expression. It’s always great to see creators add more reptiles that expand beyond dragons.
