See More Avatars from: Seawolf
19 Apr 09 | List Price: 1200L-2400L$
A special thank you to Seawolf for providing their dragon avatars for review. Seawolf Dragons are full of features and options that make it one of the most complex and advanced avatars in Second Life. We get the pleasure of reviewing the larger than life reptiles in this latest post.
Out of the Box
Textures and Colours
One of the most defining features of this avatar would have to be the level of available customisation. In a similar fashion to Nargus Asturias’ Dinosaur avatars, this full-bodied avatar features the ability for people to not only choose from a number of pre-made skins and colours, but to create their own. As such, 21 default options are featured with the avatar, with various degrees of colouring, patterning, shine, etc. Each ‘livery’ is unique and adjustable by the user through the HUD. The ways in which can customise the look of the avatar will be discussed under the Heads-Up Display Subheading.
Head
The avatars each come with 3 alternative heads with moving and talking jaws. Each of the heads are uniquely shaped which ups the quality of customisation of the face itself. Additionally, various headdresses that come with the head, letting users add an assortment of ears, earfins, cheekfins and horns. All of the options available to the “Adult” dragon are featured in the animation with the pink background.
Each head option comes with eyes that move around slightly, making the reptile look as if it is actively surveying its surroundings. Eyes can be set to be open, halfway open, or closed. There are many expressions included, such as toothy grins, malevolent snarls, or neutral expressions. Additionally, for posing or for looks, the mouth can be closed, partially open, or full open. The lower jaw of the muzzle moves when one types, not only opening and closing, but through the cycling of sculpts to give the impression of moving lips. Sometimes this may look slightly off, but usually that’s because the sculpts may not have fully rezzed.
Given how heads generally ‘make’ the personality of the avatar, there are many different options for the facial expressions. Using the HUD, users can change their mouth expressions, eye expression, and how open the mouth is among other things.
Neck, Body, and Tail
Using the HUD, the user can adjust their neck to stay up, or down close to the ground to give it a feral-ish look. However, the neck will adjust itself downwards whenever the dragon flies or swims. An extra tidbit is that when the avatar swims near the surface of the water, the neck will raise above the water line, to create what the designers have called the “Nessie” (Of Loch Ness Monster fame) effect.
The body itself is smoothly sculpted and designed in a way that the body shape underneath will not peek out from the interior of the avatar. A cute addition to the shape under the actual avatar that let you know that it hasn’t rezzed properly a pair of underpants with hearts printed on them, and a shirt with the message “If you’re reading this, I’m missing body parts. (Duh)”.
The body and neck come with options of their own to further add custom touches to the user’s look. Included are variants of the neck, body/chest and tail attachments, with the default choice of dorsal spikes, or alternatively having dorsal flaps, dorsal fins, or nothing at all.
Animations and Sounds
The avatar is fully animated in all regular Second Life motions, with a competent Animation Overrider that activates different animations for different situations. To this end, there are the usual walking and sitting animations, but also jumping, flying, and swimming.
For the Adult and Ancient Dragons, a fun option is the ability to have a rider. Clicking the appropriate button on the HUD will automatically rez a saddle that the dragon and up to two riders can sit on together. Operational only in flight, the HUD can be a treat for users who like the experience of being someone’s pack-animal.
When one flies, there is an accompanying flapping sound with the flight that can be toggled off by the HUD. Additionally, two growls are featured; toggled by the HUD as well.
Finally, a fun side feature is the ability to breath fire or ice streams of balls. In mouselook, when you tap the left mouse button, you get a ball of ice or fire, and if you hold down the left-mouse button, you can shoot a continuous stream. On a side note, fireballs and fire breath set a number of trees in the Seawolf home-sim (Aggro) on fire. For entertainment value, one type of these trees is included with the avatar, catering to users’ inner arsonist.
Differences Between Varieties of Dragons
The Bipedal Dragon (A Mini-Review)
The Bipedal version of the dragon needs a bit more attention due to the fact that it is almost a completely seperate avatar, but at the same time isn’t. Instead of walking on four legs, the avatar walks on two. However, it differs from other anthropomorphic bipedal avatars in that it is covered over entirely by sculpted prims. This makes for a specially sculpted body with smooth contours and lines at the price of the ability to wear clothing. However, the avatar pieces are modifiable, so one can try to create prim clothing if it is important to the user.
The heads that come with the Bipedal avatar are the same as the three that are offered with the full-form dragons. Head-dresses of different kinds are appropriately sized to fit the biped dragon heads. Relative to the full-form dragons, a difference lies in the neck; the dragon head is attached more closely to the shoulders. The wings rest in articulated joints on the shoulder and flap in a similar way as the full-form dragons.
Even though the avatar cannot wear conventional SL clothing, it is easy to modify with ones own accessories. With the HUD, colours and textures are changed without any issue. One only other issue is that anyone who wishes to use their own animation overrider may find that the avatar looks odd in certain positions, (it is a full-prim bipedal avatar after all).
(Quick note: No, there are no mammaries for female bipeds; but there are ways around this if you find it necessary. Edit: I say this not because I think that there should be mammaries. To the contrary, reptiles do not have mammaries, so it’d be impractical and wrong for biped dragons to have breasts.)
Heads Up Display (HUD) & Customisation
The HUD for this avatar is central to all features and capabilities that are accessible to the user. The Seawolf Dragon website features a full explanation of the capabilities of the HUD and its functions in greater depth, so I will not go into too much detail over what the HUD does. The Dragon Wiki is available here:
http://www.seawolf-monsters.com/wiki/Dragon/HUD
The HUD is seperated into two pages, ‘Page 1′ and ‘Page 2′. For ease of use, there is also a retractable state where the most needed functions can be accessed easily.
Page 1
This part of the HUD gives users access to the Seawolf wiki site, saddle rezzing, neck options, skin options, etc. Most of these functions have already been referred in previous sections.
Page 2
This page of the HUD is devoted entirely to the customisation of almost every part the avatar. For the beginner, this HUD may seem a little overwhelming, but the process yields results that users can be happy with.
Finally, at the bottom, one can “Save Custom Liveries”; whereby custom combinations of colours, textures, and visual effects can be saved and recalled on a whim of the creator. It should be noted that custom liveries can be used and applied to the Ancient, Adult, and Juvenile avatars, but also with the included Biped avatar.
Conclusion
In my experience, my peers have praised Seawolf Dragons for creating an avatar that fills a unique niche. As a reviewer, the avatar was overwhelming to write about since there was so many options to take note of. Regardless of tiny bugs that crop up every now and then because of the tricky dance between Second Life sims and the complexity of the avatar, Seawolf has made an extremely competent avatar. Indeed, they may have set a standard for non-bipedal avatars in Second Life by using a good balance of design, functionality, and user-customisation.
Tagged dragon, european, gallery, mythical, reptile, Seawolf.
It is a beautiful av, I myself have the Ancestor and the Juvenile. the Ancestor has some lag issues (don’t wear the hud and it cuts alot of lag out) but still fun. Friends and i have even modified the dragons to work on the SPD ships and combat systems.
The smaller Juvenile i use for smaller places and to reduce lag, and also for just the cuteness of it
Awesome! i LOVE dragons!!
how do i get this? i have looked on google everywhere and im waiting for a you tube reply and yahoo awnseres doesnt help
Go to the Aggro Sim!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Aggro/183/76/81