For their third avatar, Pound Lunt has ventured into the world of mustelids; skunks and ferrets. As with their Dogs, one avatar has been made to cover two different species, both skunks and ferrets.
Out of the Box:
- Male and Female Shapes
- Muzzle-Talking Function
- Twitching Ears (2 states)
- blinking Eyes with 25 Colour Choices
- Flexible and Static Tail Options Included
- All tails are poseable
- Drool Particles
- Breath Particles
- Tintable Blush
- Tongue In/Out Toggle
- Different Face Styles (3 options for ferrets, 4 for skunks)
- Extras
- Hairs (Mohawk/Dredlocks)
- Viewer 2.0 compatible alpha textures + invisiprim disable
- Skunk Spray Featuring 2 styles of musk (hearts or green smoke) + HUD (Skunk Variety only)
| Measurement | Value |
|---|---|
| Script Time / Memory (With HUD) | ~0.1ms / TBD |
| Script Time / Memory (without HUD) | ~0.1ms / TBD |
| Avatar Rendering Cost (Scale Here) | ~740 |
| Modify? | Yes |
| Copy? | Yes |
| Transferable? | No |
Build and Skin Quality:
The skin for these avatars are of decent quality; whether one wears the ferret or the skunk varieties of avatar. The skunk is usually a single, uniform colour, with a lighter shade covering the tummy and the familiar markings across the back of the avatar. Fortunately, across the back of the avatar and in some areas, there is some highlighting and shading that gives detail to both the light and the darker areas of the body. The stripes themselves are nicely done with a fuzzy, zig-zag appearance that grants good quality.
The front of the avatar for both varieties (e.g. skunk and ferret) has a considerable amount of shading; all done nicely without looking grossly over- or under-shaded. However, while the skin is unisex, the skin leans towards heavy shading of the pectorals, making the avatar look somewhat womanly even if the male shape is worn. At the same time, however, the shading of the pecs looks good when the user wears the included female shape.
Ferret-wise, the colourations of the avatar are slightly less distinctive as the skunk’s, but a bit more complex, with a few more shades and tones of colour. The amount of shading and highlighting is higher here than it is for the skunks, meaning that the ferret skin has a bit more visual depth to it. In all, the sculpt quality for the avatar is good, without any wrinkling or overly noticeable creases between prims. All of the sculpts are clear-cut and crisp, whether we’re talking about the head or the attachments. Overall, the quality of the avatar matches what we’ve seen from this creator before, and shows some fine-tuning of their skills.
Attachments:
This avatar’s attachments are fairly simple for the most part, with most of the complexity resting with the skunk tail, as well as the head for both the skunk and ferret varieties. We’ll go over the other attachments briefly, then.
The feet are well made, taking their cue from human feet with flat, long soles. The construction of the foot was well done, from the pads to the claws on each of the 4 toes. These feet look neither too ferret or skunk-like, opting for a slightly more generic appearance. There’s nothing wrong with a generally generic paw, but the one criticism we would offer here is in regards to the prim fluff at the base of the toes and surrounding the pawpads. They appear very uniform and unfortunately degrade the look of the otherwise well made paws.
We’ll quickly mention the digitigrade legs, which, while they are well made in their own right, are not appropriate for skunks or ferrets, which are both plantigrade species. As such, we have a digitigrade leg and a plantigrade foot, which, when worn together look very odd. If the user takes off the digitigrade legs, the feet do just fine on their own. We hope that next time, the creator will make sure that leg and foot attachments are continuous in design.
Other than the head, the upper body has nothing entirely too special except the addition of accent fluff on the shoulders and the chest.
In regards to the tail, the ferret receives a simple flexible prim which has been textured to merge perfectly with the line of fur that runs from just above the buttocks to the back of the head. A sculpted ferret tail is included that looks more organically shaped, but less impressive as the flexible one.
However, the skunk tails receive far more emphasis. As you can see from pictures, the base is made up of many smaller, pointier sculpts for fluffiness, while the top surface uses a sculpt to give a nice amount of smooth curviness to the look. Whether one wears the sculpted tail down or up, the look is strongly floofy and well-made. A flexible version of the tail is also available, but doesn’t look as poofy as the sculpted one.
Head:
The head is exactly the same for both the ferret and the skunk except for the textures. As such, we’ll discuss the build of the head more than the textures themselves.
At first look, a criticism that could be offered to the head is that it appears very spherical. Because of that, the face itself loses some of the visual focus. This is rather unfortunate because the face itself has a lot of potential. The muzzle and the eyes are the perfect cartoon face, but end up looking flat because of the head’s overall dimensions. In the meantime, however, the facial features were well thought out. The muzzle is set in a seemingly enigmatic smile that suits the overall look well. There isn’t anything too special about the mouth, other than the muzzle talking function and the ability to stick the tongue out. The articulation between the jaw and the head has improved since the creator’s first avatar. Other notable features on the face are the cute nose textures and the thick whiskers lining the sides of the face.
The ears at the side of the head can be shifted into 2 different positions individually through the HUD. They rest at the sides of the head with their concave, round shape, leaving plenty of space for colour variations on the scalp.
To that end, for both the skunk and the ferret, there are different ‘alternate’ heads that one can employ. For the skunk, users can chose whether they want the majority of the muzzle to remain in the avatar’s base-colour or the secondary colour (e.g. white for a normal black skunk). Additionally, users are able to choose whether they want a stripe on the scalp, or a patch of white fur between the ears. Both options add a little extra customisation to the head. The ferret, on the other hand has three additional heads, which only affect whether the user would like to change the colour of the ‘mask’ fur around the eyes.
Finally, in terms of textures, the head follows through well with keeping the same theme that the body does. Both the skunk and ferret textures remain true to their inspiration species, and the eyes themselves remain bright and rather colourful. The eyes move through their attachment to the shape eyes under the head. Sometimes the eyes appear bright and lively, while at others, they may seem to be somewhat vacant. This all completely depends on where the avatar is looking, and from what angle you are looking at the avatar.
Features and Heads-Up Display:
Most of the features of the avatar are controlled by HUD (except for the invisiprim disabler for Viewer 2.0 compatible clients). The photos below show you what one is able to do with the HUDs. For the most part, the HUD is very self-explanatory.
Below is a photo of the ‘spray’ action for the skunk. You face your target, hit page-down, and then the avatar turns around and sprays. The system is really rather well put together, as well as is the animation and the particles. This was forgotten in the manual notecard, but if you point your avatar at someone and begin to spray them, the stream of particles starts to spread out to ‘envelop’ your target. In short, the spray becomes a handy little weapon that engulfs folks in a cloud of stink. This part of the avatar is fun and was well made.
Customisation:
This avatar comes with both modifiable and copiable permissions, so users are able to make whatever modifications they’d like. The head is very spherical, so third-party hairs may not fit very well. However, it is not impossible to do so.
Conclusion:
This combination of Ferret and Skunks through this one avatar surprisingly worked out to provide believable cartoon interpretations of each. At the same time, however, this avatar does have a few drawbacks that hindered it from reaching its full potential. The head dimensions and the feet were the big detractors for this avatar, but in most other areas, the avatar performed fairly strongly. We look forward to seeing more from this creator as they evolve their skills, and hope that with future avatars, these issues are addressed. At the same time, those wanting some rarely covered mustelids or mephits with a cartoon twist can easily consider this as an option.
