See More Avatars from: Lost Furest Creatures

12 Oct 08 | List Price: L$

Lost Furest Creatures also continues its sculpted avatar trend with a recently released otter. Seeing commercially available otters largely ignored until the past several months, this reviewer was eager to take this avatar for a test spin. The head is particularly notable for its prim-eyes, a fairly new trend that may well become standard.

Out of the Box

• Individual Eye Colours
• 3D Prim Eyes
• Jaw Expressions
• Voice Activated Jaw
• Swim Animation
• Additional Accessories
• 2 Heads Up Displays (HUDs)
  • Face Control
  • Swimming Animation Overrider Control
    • This Animation Overrider allows one to leap through the ground as if they were swimming through the water in an otter-like fashion. The swimming is accompanied by a splashing affect.

Build and Skin

From right out of the box, the avatar’s skin is well done; detailed and giving a sleek, yet fuzzy appearance to the body right from the box down to the tip of the tail. The creator no doubt spent a long time getting the textures all over the avatar to be detailed and realistic. The avatar comes in a huge variety of colours; stemming from natural to the overly colourful.

While the avatar lacks any prim otter paws for the hands, it doesn’t neglect the feet with its offer of webbed foot paws. While the feet could be smaller, the tail could stand to be longer in its stead. The tail makes up for lack of length by being made of flexi prims.

Finally, the head. The otter’s head is well sculpted, though a stumbling block would be the size of the avatar’s eyes, which lessen the strength of similarities of this avatar to its real world counterpart. The eyes were not only too big, but a slight bit too far apart. Otters have broad muzzles, which the sculpts on the muzzle reproduce well, complete with long non-flexible whiskers on the sides of the muzzle and above the eyes.

While too large, the eyeprims are textured equally as well as the rest of the body. The Otter Head HUD allows the user to customise the positions of the jaw relative to the face, even an option to stick one’s tongue out in combination with lower jaw positions. An additional aspect of the jaw allows it to move in time with voice chatting. However the mouth does not move in combination with text chatting, only voice chatting; something that should definitely be added in, given the potential of this avatar.

Animation Override

The animations in the override are decent, but my main issue were with the implementation and the number of them. Rather than having the swimming animations programmed for swimming in actual water, they were designated only for when the avatar sits on the ground, is walking, or running. While it’s fun to swim through the ground and bring up splashes, the novelty runs out quickly, especially when the fantastic swimming animation isn’t active when one actually swims in water. Second, there could have been more animations, but considering how adding animations to avatars isn’t widely practice, it is excusable. This is no issue for an experienced user to remove the animations from the HUD and placing it in another, or re-assigning the animation to different motions, but it would most definitely be too much trouble for a newcomer to edit by themselves.

Customisability

The avatar really allows for customisability with its modifiable and copyable permissions. The avatar comes with a cute necklace and a ‘Survival Stick’ that has no function save for decoration. However, some modification will be needed; the Stick isn’t fitted to the avatar’s torso, so it will look a bit loose around you if you choose to walk around with it.

Conclusion

As a whole, the avatar has its plusses and minuses. The sculpt work and texture work is nothing short of solid and above average. The head is solidly built, but the question of how well it carries over the likeness of a real world otter is questionable given the eye size. As well, while the animations were superably well done, they could have been programmed into the override better.

This review was written by Forepawz - Contributor and Senior Editor | Filed under Avatar Reviews, Lost Furest Creatures
Tagged lfc, lost furest creatures, otter, river otter.