Making a furry without raising a furball

Hello SLers,

Im Nic...some call me Old Nic and Im new to SL but not 3D Design and Modeling.

I just have a simple question which I hope can be answered by a link to a tutorial.

How do I go about customizing my avatar into a"furry"?

As an easy example.. build a head for your furry av.. 'take' it, and right click on it in inventory and 'attach to -> skull'. Works if you want a detailed body part. Otherwise you'll have to download the skin template and paint a new on in photoshop or paintshop pro (etc), upload it and add it to your av via the 'appearance' control panel.

btw, using the first example, you'll need a posing stand (free in most places) to move it around and fine tune (move, resize and rotate) the placement at the attach point.

Welcome to Second Life, and to the furry community here!

In the simplest case, just make a prim 'head mask' and wear it over your head. Like the 'mascot costumes' that real-world furries sometimes wear. You can use the slider controls on your Avatar to shrink your head, so it doesn't poke through and you can have a smaller furry head. Use textures on the 'Tattoo layer' to add fur to your body.

Go to furry sims, like The Forest, and look for free Furry Avatar sets. They will give you a good look at how such things are made.

Contact me in-world, and I should be able to pass on to you a nice tutorial on making furry Avatars, written by one of the Avatar makers. I'm usually in-world from 7 to 8 AM, Central time US, most weekdays, and often around lunch time and in the evenings for my time zone. I can also give you referrals to vendors who sell better looking furry Avatar sets.

Go to Luskwood, buy an avatar that comes close then make a copy of everything then tear it apart to see how it is done. Take up all the broken pieces and delete them. You discover its a pain in the butt and you realize you probably couldn't do much better so you put on the Luskwood av and you tweek it some. You then find that you are so adorable and cute you are constantly wanted as a sex partner. Soon the novelty wears off and the sex is lackluster and you become snarky and bitter, you stop wearing the cute av and instead you become an asexual toaster just so people will leave you alone, you haunt the forum making occasional smart-alek posts.... oh wait..

LOL! Funnier than monkeys flinging poo!

I want to know how they make the furry heads blink, like specifically the script and texture placement (theres like 4 animations). But so far everyone i've asked hasnt given me any decent answers.

The blinking eyes on a prim head is done with an animated texture. I have a tutorial (from Kithylin Perth, I think?) in my inventory that explains it. IM me in-world.

I have provided Nic with a few good notecards on making Avatar stuff, and a freebie furry avatar to examine.

You can do it with textures, as Ceera mentioned, or you can get more elaborate and do it with prim eyeballs, eye sockets and eyelids. I've been experimenting with the later and find it more realistic, albeit more cartoony.

There's a thread in the scripting Q/A section with code I was working on if you wanted to try making your own. While I was working on mine, I was showing someone else what I was working on and enlarged them to about 6M.. So there were these two huge free floating blinking eyes which freaked the heck outta some people. *laughs*

The idea behind it was to make them blink randomly, wink one eye and do squinting when required.

I saw Beatfox's blinking furhead on display near his launch primcluster. Looks nice.

Wha huh? Oh, yeah... "on display"...

(that's actually my work platform -- I'm in the midst of an av redesign)

yeah two basic approaches:

The first uses texture animation to have the texture on the eye prim move through "frames" like a movie projector. llSetTextureAnim is the function for that. IM me for a tutorial and example.

the other method is to create eyeball and eyelid prims. The eyelid prim essentially uses texture animation and a texture that has an alpha channel (think of it like a transparent window that opens and closes to show the eye behind). You can use llMessageLinked to keep your two eyes in sync.

Question: With those scripted eyes that have eyelids, can it respond to gestures that affect a Human Avatar's facial expressions? For example, I have several modeling poses that seem to include, as part of the pose, having the eyes partially closed. My primary furry avvie still uses the Human eyes, so that's OK. But I have some others that have a full-head mask, and it would be neat if I could make a similar avvie that could respond to eye position info in gestures and animations.

Failing that, I presume your scripting idea could get some sort of direction from the wearer, so they could intentionally wink at someone, or close their eyes?

You could script the head to respond to chat commands on some channel, and create gestures that send those commands. Is that what you're asking about, Ceera?