OMG, help plz....

Not to sound desperate or anything, but I've been trying to find some answers for over a week and havent gotten vary far. Let's cut to the chase: I just got involved with SL about a week ago. I want to design my own avatar. I want it to look like a wolf (more cartoony than real). I have been asking others in SL, but so far I haven't gotten much help. I have figured out that the "furry" heads you have to "attach" to your "skull." Before SL, I was on IMVU, and there they were called "bundles". Main Questions are:

How do you create these things (heads,ears, tails, fur?) and what are they called in SL?
Do you need other programs to create them?
Does anybody know of a good tutorial online dealing with this specifically?

I thought that if I wandered around enough that I would be able to figure it out, but so far, I am wrong. I don't mind following tutorials, but I can't even seem to find the right one's. I'm really not this dense, but it seems as though I've started out on the wrong foot. Thank you very much in advance for your help, it means alot!

Ummmmm.... If I were you, I would start with something simple before taking on a project like this. Learn to handle to standard SL building tools (visit the Ivory Tower of Prim) and work up to creating sculpties after you have the basics in hand. Not to be too discouraging, but I think you'll save yourself a LOT of frustration if you start at ground level before you try to fly.

Thanks. See, I didn't realize that there was that much involved. From what I gathered, it wasn't too difficult. I will go there later today and see what I can do. Thanks!

It's pretty ambitious... building, sculpted prims, texturing, scripting and animation are skills that would be involved in a project of this magnitude. Textures and sculpted prims need to be created using other programs and brought into SL.

It's a very worthy project, but it will probably take you quite some time to get it all figured.

However, if you want a wolf avatar to play with in the meantime, you can probably find a good and well priced one at Grendel's Children. You can inspect all the parts and see how it's made, that will give you some ideas too.

Talk to the folks at the Luskwood sims, too. They'll know where you can get pre-built avatars like that.

I learned a lot about making avatars out of attachments (I make tiny ones) by *dissecting* the free ones. Once you get a grasp of basic building, do a little of that, too.

I'll second that. The best way to understand how a Furry avatar is created is by examining a full-permissions one that you can take apart, examine the scripts, etc...

In short, to do a good job creating a Furry avatar, you need to learn the following areas:

1: Basic building skills. Start at the Ivory Tower of Primitives, and learn how different shapes of prims can be assembled, using the in-world building tools that are part of the Saeond Life Client. Also devour the Building Tips forum, which has a wealth of information available for free.

2: Basic texturing skills. Start at the Livingtree sim, and Robin Sojourner has a FANTASTIC free tutorial on how textures work in SL. You will need some sort of reasonably good extrernal 2D graphics application to make textures. Photoshop is what a lot of people use. Gimp is a free but more difficult to learn/use alternative. At a minimum, the program needs to be able to save jpeg and tga (targa) files. Also devour the Texture Tips forum, which has a wealth of information available for free.


3: Basic scripting skills. Go to the LSL Wiki and learn how to write programs in LSL, the scripting language that makes things do more than just sit there as static objects in SL. It's a fairly straight forward programming language. You use scripts to do things like make tails wag and eyes blink and ears twitch, and to change eye colors and fur colors and smiles and mouth positions, all by commands, or on-screen controls, or reactions to various conditions.

4: (Optional, but the good avatars use this) Learn to make Sculpted Prims. This takes an external 3D application like Wings3D or Blender. Start in the Building Tips forum, for tutorials and advice on software to use. Sculpted prims can give you shapes that are more organic and less harshly mechanical than normal prims.

5: (optional, depends on result needed) Learn to make animations that shape and deform an avatar's body. There are some forms, like a 4-legged normal-sized wolf, or a 10 foot tall ogre, or a 1 foot tall squirrel, or a small butterfly, that simply can not be done without warping the normal avatar body out of shape, and overriding the normal movement animations. This is advanced stuff, but makes some of the avatars possible that don't look like just a Human wearing a mask and tacked on tail and shaped legs.