So with the news of meshes coming to SL I decided that I'd make myself an avatar in Blender (because I'm a masochist, and I like to torture myself with character modeling). If you know me on SL you know I've been saying I'd make my next avatar a cougar again (being a fox right now). However when the news hit the blogs that "soon" we'd be getting a public beta of meshes, and my prayers for something not sculpties was answered, I found myself completely uninspired when it came time to draw a model sheet. D<

So to get some inspiration I decided to look through some of my art books, and lo I came upon one of Brett Booth's characters looking all muscular and awesome. I then couldn't really think about a lean and mean looking cougar guy, and the hyper realism Mr. Muscles got stuck, so I decided to make him instead. Having no model sheet to work from it's... difficult at best. But you know, if I rig him up and pose him the same way, I can figure out how close I am. Also I decided to go with plantigrade rather than digitigrade legs.

He's more or less done and clocks in just under 8k polys, which I consider a little high for an avatar. But when you realize that a head of hair, or even a single ornate ring wrought of prims is more costly than this guy by a lot (hair ranges anywhere from 50-300 torii and/or flexi-prims, and at 1024 polys each...), 8k doesn't seem so bad. I'll still do my best to trim him down, I've got detail where I don't NEED it (like the underside of the claws), but I've got a little more to add as well, and some more definition to work in (he needs buns o' steel still, among other things) and probably some scaling vertically and/or horizontally, so we'll see how it goes.

For all would be modelers making avatars for sale, keep in mind that unless you give a template of your avatar's dimensions to build around, people will be adding clothing to wear over top of your mesh. So please, please, be thoughtful of others and keep your poly count lower than 8k. I can get away with this because 1) I'm not selling him, and 2) If I make clothing at all I'll be replacing parts of his body with those clothed portions, so there will be no hidden polys, and he likely will never go above 10k polys, ever.

P.S. For those curious, his back has some thick muscles too, and his feet even have pads. I'll be adding claws there too.

P.P.S. He looks sweet with subsurf by the way, but a single level boots his poly count over 30k. >D
Needless to say, I'll only be baking shadows with subsurf.

P.P.P.S. For the record, I'm making this avatar as a single, whole mesh because once it looks good that way, I can cut it up and make rounded joints like an action figure so it works the way all avatars do right now. I'll probably need to do some BVH hacking though.