Tokushi Griffin

Out of the Box

• Freben version pictured other species/colors available
• Available in either Male or Female Versions
• Twitching ears with 3 changeable ear types
• 3 tail poses
• Sculpted eyelids including 4 optional states of open
• 3D moving eyes with changeable colors.
• Random and set finger positions
• Open and closed, flight functional sculpted wings with built in flight AO
• Moving jaw with typing and speech detection
• 7 eyebrow expression options
• Custom Heads Up Display offering:
  • Positioning controls for the wings, hands, mouth, and tail.
  • Recoloring controls for eye color selection
  • Selection controls for the ears.
  • Expression controls for the face.
    
• Rune necklace, and informational card for each species

Build and Skin

The Tokushi Griffin is offered in 9 different subspecies/colors:

Astren/Black    Freben/Brown    Niqx/Green    Tean/Gold

Rhyle/White    Lyren/Pink    Phobos/Red    Mythos/Purple    Xantl/Blue

This avatar is made almost entirely out of sculpted prims. The textures look good, are detailed, and align properly. Some of the most notable Included scripts are those that change the sculpt maps of individual prims in the head to create facial expressions and to animate the blinking of the eyes. This eliminates the need to use transparent animated textures. In doing that the creators eliminated the difficulties with using animated textures such as limited usable resolution and transparency layer glitches.

The eyes can be recolored using the HUD and attach to the eye attachment points. This allows them to move with the base avatar eyes and allows a more realistic appearance and movement.

The wings have both an open and closed position that can either be manually controlled using commands in the HUD or will automatically open in flight.

The tail Comes with three different positions also controlled by the HUD while on the ground, switching to the upper position while rotating for flight.

The hand objects in typical griffin style are modeled to look like talons and also have 5 positions settable via the HUD individually for each hand: Spread, Relaxed, Fist, Point, and Flip.

One aspect of all the positioning options that did disappoint me though was that to achieve the repositioning of the wings, tail, and hands. The creators decided to use the older method of modeling multiple tails, wings and talons in each required position and then just having a script switch the transparency to show one at a time instead of a newer method of having the prims move and rotate into the new positions. Admittedly the latter method would have required more work and customization of those parts other then changing the textures would be harder. However would have greatly reduced the lag the avatar causes.

Three different ear styles are also provided, all are part of the same ear objects and can be selected using the HUD as well. A ear twitch option is also available and can be turned on and off with the HUD. Again though these use the model all in place and switch transparency method that the wings and tail use. In this case a simpler approach of just providing 3 separate sets of ear objects would have been preferred as it would have also helped reduce the lag caused by the avatar.

Lastly, I found it a bit odd to discover the male avatar came by default with a female body shape. I had heard about avatar makers doing this in preference to some extra versatility in the female body shape. Unfortunately since none of the included AOs modified the walk animation this made the avatar use the default female walk animations. Fortunately an avatar shape is one of the easiest things to change on an avatar.

Animation Override

There are actually four animation overrides provided in this avatar, one in each of the hands, another in the right wing and lastly one in the lower beak. The AO’s in the hands are used to pose the avatar for the point and flip hand positions. And the AO in the right wing is used to override the default flight animations to enable the avatar to flap while flying level and upwards and to dive when flying straight down. The AO in the beak detects typing and replaces the standard animation with one that looks closer to the “talking” animations. All except for the flight AO can be turned off using the HUD.

While the multiple AO’s do confuse things a bit they all work well and I have yet to see a lag in the application of an animation. I did find a few other problems though. The dive animation ends up being activated too often at times causing the avatar to appear to face plant into the ground at times and can also interfere with other AO devices. Also one person was confused if I was talking or typing due to the typeing animation being replaced. Aside from those minor problems, the animations were enjoyable.

HUD

The HUD in the closed position looks like an ornate stone. When clicked opens to an initial menue that lets you select controls for 4 different aspects of the avatar, the Head, Hands, Tail/Wings, and Mouth. When one of those sections is clicked it opens to display a feather with the various options that are available for that area on it. Various options such as selecting a new eye color are quite intuitive, all you have to do is click the color and click the eye on the head picture in the HUD you want it applied to. Clicking the stone brings you back to the previous menu level eventually returning to the closed position. After being idle for a time the HUD will also automatically close itself.

Over all the HUD is works well, and the textures look great. However I didn’t like how the various menus seemed to open in varying positions, that some times the options seemed to be unorganized, and that no alternate gesture or typed commands are provided.

Customisability

In the avatar’s default configuration pants and shirts aren’t that usable due to the digitgrade legs and wings but the avatar can easily ware shorts. However all parts of the avatar are modifiable and thus can be reshaped and rebuilt by the user to their choice and thus can be modified to be able to ware anything. Also extra scripts are provided for users to add accessories to the wings.

Conclusion

Despite it’s Few shortcomings, I really enjoyed this avatar.  Each avatar also comes with a few extras that while not part of the avatar add some extra uniqueness. They include: a texture talking about the lesser griffins with a few lines talking about the particular subspecies, and a necklace with a stone with a unique pattern and color for each subspecies.  It’s is a neat bonus that almost makes me want to buy them all to see what each one says.  I also loved the expression controls, and while it would have been nice to have gestures be able to activate them in addition to the HUD it doesn’t detract from the fact that they exist. This avatar is definitely a great buy, and I’m interested to see what Tokushi avatars comes up with next.