Up until this point, we’ve seen Kinzart release their Eastern, Western, and then their Northern Dragon. It would only follow that they release a dragon for that last one direction, and such, here it is; the Southern Dragon. In this review, we get take a closer look at Kinzart’s first completely full-body sculpted avatar on the grid.

Out of the Box:

• 6 Horn Types
• Blinking Eyes with 5 states
• Muzzle Talking Function with Manual Override
• Toggable male/female torso (sculpted breasts for females)
• Wings fold/unfold during flight  with manual override
• Hands with 7 preset poses and pupeteering (custom finger pose) system
• Toggleable invisiprims with Viewer 2.0 capable transparent clothing layer (Optional)
• Feet curl/unculr in flight wit manual override
• HUD controlled colour, glow, and texture options for the Eyes, mouth, wings, claws, and crystals
• Decorative collectable Egg
• Limited Edition Bahamut Colouration

Build and Skin:

This avatar is the first we’ve seen from Kinzart creatures that uses prims to completely cover the body shape underneath. As such, this avatar is a full-prim avatar. None of the body shape shows through the avatar’s prims at all, and despite the unique shape of each attachment, it all fits together neatly. The shape of the avatar overall isn’t too different from the normal body underneath, so no special animation overrider was used. The only deform used is for shifting the shape head down into the body. This limits head movement a touch, but makes the neck look more realistically like a part of the body rather than an add-on. The sculpt quality is the best that we’ve ever seen from Kinzart; that goes in hand with the texture quality. While the colours are usually a single colour uniformly applied over the entirety of the avatar, the application was done so well with shading and highlights that more complex colour patterns are unecessary. The photos in the review themselves can speak to this. The way how the male and female genders are expressed will be covered later in the review.

Attachments:

Lower Body:

As mentioned before, the entire body is covered with prims, so the avatar comes with feet, digitigrade leg attachments, and thighs. The feet are 4-toed, but the real eye-catcher are the very larger, dinosaur-like talons that jut out in front. The feet have a large amount of sheen to them; something that we will see over the entirety of the avatar. We should mention that the foot follows avian lineage with a finger that points away from the back of the foot. When the user flies (or chooses with their HUD), the feet curl.

The digilegs form a seamless connection to the feet, but what makes them a point of interest is their decoration. There is a number of spikes included in the leg structure, but an interesting trait is the trail of cystals on the back of the leg. These are colour-adjustable, and will become a prominent theme over the avatar. In the continuing movement towards Viewer 2.0 friendly avatars, Kinzart decided to offer the alpha layers and attachments by allowing users to wear the alpha layer and turn off all the avatar invisiprims through the HUD or by text commands. The switch is very quick and effective.

The thigh prims are slim and not too attention-grabbing; being blunted in front, but in the back, there’s a good degree of scutes and ample shading to give them more definition. Size doesn’t present itself as an issue as the thighs are proportional to the body as a whole. The tail only comes in a static, sculpted variety, but that gave the creator the incentive to create a very detailed tail that flexible prims would not allow for. The tip of the tail has fluting and spikiness in the sculpt itself, but is decorated with more of the crystals we saw earlier on the back of the legs. As a whole, the tail is as long as the  body itself. While smooth for most of the length, the nearer you get to the base, the more fluting on the ventral surface and amount of crystals. The tail itself does not move nor comes with any other poses. This isn’t a major issue, but some users probably would be disappointed with only one tail state.

Upper Body:

Here, the amount of cyrstals increases and forms a dense trail up the back between the wings and atop the head. The flukes are large on the back andpoint upwards. This is a big difference from the front where the flukes are a big smaller and point downwards. The chest, by default is flat (Male), but with shading to define the contours of the pecs. A very neat addition to this avatar, is that while reptiles do not have mammaries, users can swap the chest sculpt with one with breasts for females. The breasts themselves are firm-looking and sculpted well enough to actually fit with the avatar as a whole.  Users should be able to derive enjoyment from the breasts, even if clothing layers cannot be used over them. That is not a huge issue as 1. The breasts are PG, and users could attempt to use sculpted clothing.

The hand and arms attachments are similar to the legs; but with crystals lining the entire back. The hands themselves are fairly large and feral looking, with very thick talons at the tips of the 4 fingers. Another huge part of the avatar are the wings. Users are treated to wings with both an open and a folded state. The open state is very wide which looks great when the user expands them, but do get in the way when they’re invisible. These are among the most complex-looking of wings that we have seen from Kinzart. Texture-wise, the wings are very graphically interesting with a semi-transparent wing membrane and a good amount of sheen to each of the wing ‘fingers.’ At the apex of the wing are two dangerous looking claws.

Head:

The head rests atop a slightly arched neck with the crystals ending their trail at the top of the head. To be sure, while the head has been well done, it’s fairly small compared to the rest of the body. All the while, the neck maintains the scute theme, with the armour-like plates working up towards the neck. They finish off a series of decorative chin-plates. The avatar comes with two sets of horns; one pair at the back of the jaw, while the other is perched on the back of the head. It is this pair that has the 6 horn types that users can choose from. Pictures of different horn-types are scattered through this review. The forehead itself has a bunch of ridge-spikes that work their way towards the horns. This avatar has a very triangle-shaped face, with the nose/chin-line as the apex. This is somewhat similar to the recently released Sergal avatar from Kinzart. However, the eyes point straight out to the sides with a steely gaze. Users would not see much of the eyes if looking directly at the face from straight-on. Most of the eye-whites are black, but the iris has an interesting, moon-like glow.

Different from what one would expect; the mouth has a large amount of small, but sharp looking teeth, and a slitted tongue. The quality of the textures and sculpts on the mouth interior are comparable to previous avatars in Kinzart’s catalogue. You are not able to stick the tongue out or user other positions.

Features and Heads-Up Display (HUD):

All of the options for the avatar are available through the HUD, and as usual, several are accessible through text commands found in the included notecard. Functions are as follows:

• Page 1: Horn Type, Wing State (Open/Close/Auto during flight), Gender (Male/Female Chest), Eyes Open/Calm/Tired/Squint/Closed, Feet (Open/Curled/Auto during flight), Invisis Toggle (Removes Invisiprims for Viewer 2.0 users), Crystal Textures (12 Choices)
• Page 2: Individual Finger State, Jaw Rotation Slider, Preset Hand Options
• Page 3: Eye Colour, Inside Wing Colour, Outer Wing Colour, Crystal Colour, Mouth Colour, Claw Colour, Glow Levels for all aforementioned settings

The avatar also comes with its own animation overrider for flight. This is a separate attachment that must be detached if one wishes to disable it. The flight AO includes hovering, falling, flying forward, landing, etc. As for the quality of the animations, they all do very well at their job, though the hover animation does look a little stiff.

Customisation:

This avatar is copiable and modifiable, so users are able to accessorise and modify parts of the avatar to their interest. However, as the avatar is fully prim-covered, wearing conventional clothing is out of the question. As such, users will have to be creative in using normal prims and sculpts to give themselves a little bit more of a unique look. At the same time, it would almost be a shame to cover up the solid prim-work on the body.

Conclusion:

The Kinzart Southern Dragon adds another unique dragon to Kinzart’s other three. Arguably, there may not be exactly much ‘Southern’ about this avatar compared to the other dragons. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the Southern Dragon is any less of a well done work. With this avatar, the creator has shown off their ability to create a fairly complex work with a high amount of details in the shapes, as well as provide the avatar with visual depth through some of their best texture-work.

One more thing…

For a limited time, there is a recolour of the Kinzart (Thanks for picking that mistake up, Carolzilla!) Southern Dragon avatar. The picture below shows that the avatar replicates the Bahamut colouration of the dragon-like character from the Final Fantasy series. They will go away at the time of writing  this reviewon June 1st, 2010. The price for the limited time offer is 1500L.