Tokushi deviates a bit from their usual style with their Raccoon avatar. Such experiments are always welcome and are a great way for a creator to improve, but how do these changes impact this avatar?
Out of the Box:
| Features | Specifications |
|
|
Observations:
Skin and Textures
The texturing is definitely Tokushi’s style, with its vivid coloring and defined shading. On the whole, the avatar’s textures flow well with one another – the attachment textures match with the mesh textures, the prim textures match with each other, and so on.
Tokushi has opted to color this avatar similar to their Possat – the chosen color (red, blue, black, etc) covering the majority of the body, with a gray belly, black feet, and white/black coon face markings. The gray belly may look odd to some when choosing a brighter color, probably due to the contrast between saturation and desaturation.
The avatar includes male and female skins, but the only major difference between the two is the upper body texturing – the female texture has more shading underneath the breasts than the male skin does.
The belly seam is well hidden and is not normally visible unless looked for closely. It may become more visible depending on the lighting, however.
Overall Build
The sculpt quality and general building style is also very much Tokushi’s style. The sculpts are smooth – no wrinkling seen anywhere – and the prims fit together well.
To complement the long furred look given by the textures, there are several prim fluff attachments included – chest and upper arms, specifically. These can be taken off without harming the avatar’s fluffy look, so it’s all a matter of preference. The same can be said for the fluffy ‘hair’ – that can be removed without detracting from the avatar’s appearance.
The shape is a bit odd – for both genders, it’s rather curvy and stocky, with short arms and wide hips. This does follow with the species’ natural body shape, but it is rather awkward on an anthro. This is one of those things that, again, is a personal preference – you can keep the shape and grow used to it, or you can modify the shape to better suit your tastes.
In-Depth Body Summary
Raccoons are plantigrade, so it’s nice that the creator has honored that and made the avatar plantigrade as well. The feet make use of alpha layers, so they don’t require a shin prim and aren’t awkwardly large. They also don’t clip out around the ankles when the feet move, thanks to the sculpt shape around the ankles.
All colors of the Raccoon have half-black feet. The black on the feet is similar in design to slippers.
The undersides of the paws have a well-worn, furless foot texture. The wrinkles and dents in the feet are defined well.
There are three tail options – all flexible – included with this avatar. The only difference between the three is the pattern of the tail – black/white, grey/white, or chosen color/white. It’s all a matter of personal preference. That aside, the tail doesn’t have any special features other than on/off twitching.
The hands, like the feet, are also black, and the black extends up to the wrists. As with most of Tokushi’s avatars, the Raccoon has poseable hands, with ten default poses and individually poseable fingers. The palms of the hands and undersides of the fingers are textured similarly to the undersides of the feet – they show a leathery, furless skin, but noticeably less worn than the feet.
Both the hands and the feet have large, non-retractable claws.
In-Depth Head Summary
Let’s get one detail out of the way first: The Raccoon’s head is somewhat large. This is intentional. There may be an update in the future with a smaller head for those who dislike the larger one, but this isn’t confirmed at the time of this review’s writing. (Reference: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5483380/)
The Raccoon’s ears are small, somewhat rounded, and set back on the avatar’s head. When viewed head-on, the ears seem to be tilted down a little, giving the impression that the avatar is a bit scared or sad. These ears have three default poses and toggleable ear twitching, which is fairly standard.
To complement the avatar’s overall fuzzy appearance, a hair attachment is included with the avatar. This hair is made mostly of short fluff prims, similar to the ones on the arms and chest. This isn’t a required attachment, though, and can be removed without damaging the avatar’s looks.
The head, overall, matches its real-life counterpart very well. The shape is right and, with some artistic liberties taken, everything is in its correct place and sized proportionally.
The textures, as with the rest of the textures on the avatar, give off a medium-length fur look, suitable for fur on the face and head. The colors here match the colors on the rest of the avatar, and the textures line up with each other well aside from on the cheeks, where the cheek fluff clips with the textures on the head a little.
The eyes are somewhat different from the more recent Tokushi avatars’ eyes. Rather than being linked inside the skull and moving via a script, they’re separate attachments worn on the eyes that move with the avatar’s mesh eyes. For those who liked being able to pose their avatar’s eyes for, say, photo shoots, this may be frustrating, but for others, it might be a welcome alternative to the scripted eyes.
These eyeballs are dilating, with 33 colors to choose from.
The jaw is fairly standard. There are three jaw ‘emotions’ (idle, frown, smile), open/close jaw commands, tongue in/out commands, and an on/off jaw animation command. Tokushi continues to offer the fairly recent ability to change the textures via the HUD. There are four textures for both the jaw and tongue, eight total: spotted, not spotted, greyscale spotted, greyscale not spotted. The greyscale versions are so you can tint the texture to your liking.
On a final note, the avatar’s whiskers, as is with a lot of Tokushi avatars, are sculpted. While this does lend a bit of extra quality to them and allow them to bend more realistically than a simple torus could, this does drive up the avatar’s ARC a few points.
Features and Heads-Up Display (HUD)
The Raccoon comes with a bonus, custom-fitted Tokushi hoodie, as do most of the Tokushi avatars.
One more cute bonus with this avatar is the bonus trash can. Rez the trash can, sit on it, and you’re now officially a trash can raider! (See Photo Below!)
Finally, we come to the one part of the avatar that seems to have changed the most: the HUD.
Overall, it’s a standard Tokushi HUD, but with one change for specific users; the need to resize the HUD to read the text or see some of the buttons because it’s appears blurry. This happens, as is explained in the notecard, because antisotropic filtering needs to be enabled. This feature, however, can be really hard to turn on with lower-end PCs, so that means that users will have to resize the HUD a fair bit to be able to read the text.
For those of you who can’t enable antisotropic filtering, here are two images that demonstrate the problem, before and after enabling antisotropic filtering. (Click here to see them)
The creators have made note of this and supplied a fix (i.e. made the HUD modifiable), so while this is an annoyance, it’s not a dealbreaker.
Customization
The avatar is mod / copy, so you can customize it to your heart’s desire. Remember to keep a copy in case something breaks!
As for third-party hair, it’s probably not a good idea to try and use it with this avatar unless you know how to mod the hair – this avatar’s large head makes it difficult to for hair not specifically made for the avatar to fit. This isn’t saying it’s impossible – just difficult.
Conclusion
The Raccoon is a bit of a deviation from Tokushi’s usual style, but on the whole, the avatar’s experiments were a success, save for the HUD’s texturing. With its vibrant coloring and friendly feel, this avatar is sure to please most members of the Procyon family.
