Here's a very early preview of the first commercial Second Life avatar that I'm working on, a wolf. I'm on a quest for detailed fur effects with Second Life's rather primitive rendering capabilities and it gives me some major headaches to achieve this goal while still being very frame rate efficient (something I didn’t worry too much about with my own avatar).

This preview might be interesting for the technically minded out there, since it shows the 3D mesh layout I’m working with. Basically, I try to keep every polygon visible, so that nearly nothing is drawn that can’t be actually seen; which can be tricky with SL’s choice of available 3D objects.

Nothing here is final, expect much more detailed and tricked out textures in the final version. The eyes are missing, since I’ll probably use the SL avatar’s eyes to give the wolf easily customizable, moving eyes.

Maya screen grab.