From Human to Dragon and Back Again
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So you are a resident of Second Life and might be aware that you can customize the basic shape of your avatar using the Edit Appearance pie menu option. You're probably aware that you can wear attachments such as prim hair and jewelry too. You may have even seen "furry" avatars, the anthropomorphic characterizations of animals, and wondered how those kinds of avatars ended up looking that way.
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Advanced Avatars
The answer is that they use big attachments that cover the underlying basic avatar model completely, in much the same way as wearing a suit of armour or theatre costume in the real world. While some of the human-like forms of this kind of avatar can be applied over your fundamental body shape, some of them need to use the basic avatar form as a kind of skeleton to base their prims around. The Daryth Kennedy Dragon avatars fall into this category.
Backing Yourself Up
What that means is, if you transform into one of her dragon avatars, your original avatar shape will be unattached and the special dragon skeleton shape will take over. Your original form is not completely lost in the sense that it's still in your inventory. But if you don't know what it was called to begin with or have various body parts cluttering up your inventory, it can be difficult or time-consuming to switch back to your regular human form. The solution to this is making a copy of your avatar before donning the dragon one.
The simplest way to make this copy is to right-click on yourself and choose Edit Appearance from the pie menu, then down the bottom of the Appearance window click on the little Make Outfit button. This will take you to a window similar to the one in the "Backing Up Your Avatar" screenshot to the right.
- The most important thing to do here is to put a tick in the four boxes under the "Body Parts" heading. They are not ticked by default, but need to be so that we have a copy of our basic shape.
- The next important thing to note is the "Clothes" and "Attachments" tick boxes. If you tick these and the clothing and attachments you are wearing are no copy, they will be moved into the folder you are creating. If you like to have your inventory organised in folders, this could be annoying. On the other hand, if you do not tick the "Clothes" boxes, you will end up with a naked backup of your avatar. The solution then is to wear clothes that can be copied, or ones that you don't mind stuffing into this new folder.
- Give your backup a name, in the "Folder name" text box. This is the name of the folder that will appear in your inventory.
Once you are happy with these settings, click on the Save button at the bottom of the "Make New Outfit" window. A folder will appear in your inventory, and if you did everything correctly it will have a copy of your basic avatar shape, along with anything else you chose to include.
Switching Back and Forth
Once you purchase and hatch your dragon, you will end up with a folder containing the entire dragon skeleton and prim shapes that make up the particular avatar you chose. Dragging this folder from you inventory and dropping it onto your avatar will make it morph into a dragon. To go back to human form from that point, simply find the folder you created earlier in this guide and drag it from inventory and drop it onto your avatar and you will revert back to your human form, hopefully wearing some tasteful clothes!
Disclaimer
This is a method of avatar backup and dragon/human form shifting which works well for me and I share it here for Second Life educational purposes only. I will not be held responsible for any loss of avatar styles, parts, clothing, attachments or any other inventory items, or any form of avatar damage or inventory item damage that may result as a direct or indirect consequence of any of the information contained in this article. You should be aware that you practice avatar modification wholly at your own risk.
