See More Avatars from: Tokushi
31 Oct 09 | List Price: L$
Continuing their trend of avatars based on non-conventional creatures, Tokushi takes a shot at the Sugar Glider. People often mistake Sugar Gliders for Flying Squirrels, which are completely unrelated to these creatures. In this review, we discuss this rendition of the Marsupial Tree-hopper.
Out of the Box:
- Moving 3D Eyes
- 3 Eye States
- Independent color changeable eyes with 19 colour choices
- Glide/Fly AO
- 3 Ear positions with independent control and Twitch Toggle
- Away detection (Avatar’s eyes will close and ears will fold back while away)
- Talking Jaw function and hand animation for both typing and voice
- 7 Eyebrow and 4 Mouth Expressions
- 2 leg types- Plantigrade with haunches and Plantigrade without haunches
- 5 independent hand poses with the option to set to auto-cycle between poses (excluding flipping off)
- 4 Tail poses with glide/flight detect
- Both Male and Female shapes
- Scripted Aviator helmet and goggles
Measurement | Value |
Script Time with HUD | ~0.132 |
Script Time without HUD | ~0.091 |
Avatar Rendering Cost | ~1124-1156 |
Build and Skin:
Sugar Gliders are by no means elaborate in terms of fur patterning, with simple streaks of colours and stripes along their front and back surfaces. Tokushi utilizes their regular texture style to make the fur organic and lively. The entire body is well textured and easy on the eyes. Aside from artistic emulations of fur and adequate shading over the body, the head for this avatar is the most graphically articulate, as we’ll discuss later. The Tokushi Sugar Glider comes with both male and female shapes, so users can easily swap between the two; the skin is the same for both sexes.
As usual, we begin with the feet. The avatar features four-toed paws that are largely fur-less except for the heels. Other than the fur patterns that start at the heal and move seamlessly up the legs to the thighs, there is nothing too spectacular about the feet. However, what is interesting is the usage of attachments straight from the leg up to the hindquarters of the avatar. The result is a very smooth transition that produces a slightly more feral, realistic look to the thighs and the hips.
This presents a problem to some users however; if there are attachments that cover the feet, lower legs, and upper legs, users will not be able to wear any form of clothing on their lower body. Fortunately, in the Extras folder, Tokushi includes a version of the legs and feet that allow users to easily use ordinary clothing layers and attachments. People should have no issue playing with prim clothing layers and whatnot with this avatar; all the pieces one really needs are available in one way or another. That said, the full-prim legs do look more impressive as a whole than the more normal leg-foot attachments. The hands are somewhat similar to the feet, but definitely more hand-like. As usual, they come with pose-able fingers. (Whether you wear the full-prim thighs or not, the wing-flaps will form smoothly against the body.)
The tail is long and thick, with plenty of sculpted fluff. Here we see that Tokushi has continued to use a simplified design where instead of using transparent, invisible-prims for different tail locations, the prims shrink, grow, and re-arrange. This keeps the prim-count down, and gets rid of transparencies while not sacrificing any quality. Additionally, when flying/gliding, the tail will change to a default position before going back to the position you set before you began to fly.
This leads us to the next part of the avatar; the Patagium. This is the more technical name for the lightly-furred flaps of skin between the arms and legs that Sugar Gliders open in order to fly. When the user enters flight, the patagium forms in the same way as the tail, and the flight Animation override takes over. The shape of the wing-flaps are simple, but very effective, and matched with the body-shape for a seamless contour between body and wing-flaps. The textures here are simple as well, but suit the rest of the avatar. The avatar comes with a default patagium and an alternative one in the Extras folder.
The head, as mentioned before has a great detail of texture detail, whether it’s the eyes or the tip of the muzzle. A very prominent feature on sugar gliders is their eyes, and this avatar easily follows on that. Users have a choice of shiny black or red eyes befitting of sugar gliders, or more ‘common’ eyes with separate whites and irii. The muzzle is comparatively small in relation to the eyes, but well textured from the muzzle bridge down to the jaw. The muzzle, like the eyebrows comes with numerous facial expressions that users can mix and match from. Users can smile or wear a neutral expression, etc. A neat feature of the jaw is that whenever the avatar is speaking, you can see the tongue moving in the muzzle.
The ears perch atop the head with a hollowed shape, and remain moveable and twitchy despite now being attached to the head. This frees up the ear attachment points for other items. However, for those who wish to have separate ear attachments, Tokushi has included a head (without the ears), and two ear attachments. Finally, users of, for example, the Grey Sugar Glider are given the option of using an alternative head with a much whiter face than the default.
Heads-Up Display(HUD) and Features:
The avatar’s HUD comes designed well, though a little bit smaller than what we’ve seen from Tokushi in the past. All of the commands on the HUD are accessible through Text Commands as well. Follows is a small breakdown of the functions of each segment:
- Mouth: Toggle Smile/Neutral, Open/Close Muzzle, Toggle Muzzle-Talking Function
- Head: Eyebrow State/Expressions, Eyelid State, Toggle Blink, Toggle Eye Movement, Set Eye Position, Individual Eye Colour
- Patagium: Toggle Glide Animation Overrider, Edit Mode (for when you change shape and need to resize the Patagium to fit)
- Ears: Position of Ears, Twitch Toggle, Ear Reset
- Tail: Choose from a variety of tail positions (up, down, etc.)
- Hands: Choose poses from a variety of hand selections
The AO for the gliding of the avatar is well done, flying with the avatar is a pleasant experience, (even though Sugar Gliders cannot fly under their own ability in real life). To emphasise the special gliding quality of the species, Tokushi has included a Helmet with goggles for users to wear. The helmet is one of the notable points of the avatar as a whole and is fun to wear.
EDIT: I neglected to mention this before, but the avatar comes with a “Gliding Mode” where the user taps the Page-Up Button Twice and can glide and dive around script-enabled areas for good fun.
Customisation:
The avatar is amply customizable, such that despite the simplification of the avatar to utilise less prims and attachments, users can use provided attachments that use the more conventional methods of avatar building. Otherwise, as the avatar is modifiable and copiable, users should not have very many problems.
Conclusion:
The Tokushi Sugar Glider is a complete avaar with a full compliment of features that makes wearing it a positive experience. It is very interesting to see that creators are exploring features that minimise the amount of prims that need to be rezzed and freeing attachment points for users to employ a larger amount of customisation. Regardless, in flight or on the ground, the Sugar Glider remains an aesthetic, fun avatar.
Tagged gallery, sugar glider, Tokushi.
