08-14-2007 04:32
The quality of the character model in SL is so far behind state of the art that it's jarring when you compare human avatars to the user-created characters in SL. Even with expensive skins and attachments, there's little you can do about the primitive avatar skeleton and mesh.

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/13855

I don't expect to see this level of quality any time soon, but it really draws attention to the dated SL avatar. Linden Labs doesn't want to fix it, let residents do it... give us hooks to replace parts of the avatar mesh with sculpt textures, and to use the existing texture animation code on them...

face_scale_x = 1 / face_frames_x;

face_scale_y = 1/face_frames_y;

if(llGetPermissions() & PERMISSION_MODIFY_AVATAR) llSetAvatarParams([AVATAR_MESH,MESH_FACE,my_face_uuid,face_scale_x,face_scale_y,face_offset_x,face_offset_y]);

Then to grin:

llSetAvatarParams([AVATAR_MESH_ANIMATION,MESH_FACE,face_frames_x,face_frames_y,grin_start_frame,grin_end_frame,grin_speed]

...