Shork Industries

Home of Shork products

“Shork!” Avatars & Equipment offer you an option to be the new “you”. You're a shark in an aquarium and want to meet humans without them freaking out?
You're a human and are fed up looking at the meeting of barely teen aged clones or roughly defined hyperbeefed chunkheads?
You're an Alien, AI or AC and want to meet humans but feel uneasy about trying to mimic one, because of “Uncanny Valley” and such? Don't want to hurt a humans feelings by telling them you're not gonna meet them in “Real Life”?

Go online, join OpenSim for free and get a “Shork!” avatar!

You can goof off, you can try to be very serious - and whatever fauxpas might happen, you'll always have the chance to point out that you're just learning about this “being somewhat human” thing.

Note: There are MANY alternative entry points to OpenSim, the Hypergrid/Metaverse of choice, aside of OSGrid.
Look around:

• OpenSimWorld - Sim / Location search engine for the Hypergrid
• OpenSimulator - The technology platform the Hypergrid is based on
• The Firestorm Viewer for OpenSimulator, it lists many commonly used OpenSim entry points such as OSGrid , Kitely and many, many more!

Once it was decided that the Shork Group would leave Second Life, our sole remaining core member Kaahupahau started tracking down avatar creators in Second Life.
And finding them not interested to either publish their avatars ( understandable ) or releasing their retired / abandoned / outdated avatars ( not really understandable for us ) on OpenSim/OSGrid.
After the Shork Team realized that they would neither be able to have their previous nor even related avatars in OpenSim, it was decided to commission a range of new avatars combining the best of Second Life with the best of OpenSim/OSGrid to solve this problem.

The differences in the design of our sharks to the most established Second Life shark avatar vendor, AVEntity, we list here.

• “Shork Industries” avatars and equipment are available as freebies in OSGrid.
• “Shork Industries” avatars and their textures and support files will be downloadable from the Shork homepage for modders and artists. For free.
• The “Shork!” avatars are available as full-perm freebies in Second Life at several locations, but only in very basic flavours as the Shork Group leaves SL out of frustration with SL for several reasons and doesn't plan on pushing still more money into it.

• Interested Second Life and OpenSim users are welcome to use the ressources from our website to implement additional variants. Ideally you contact those places distributing our avatars and offer them the additional skins or modpacks to be placed alongside our avatar packs. Refer the maintainers of the locations where our avatars are available to this section.
• Interested / able SL users are welcome to put their remixes of our avatars as full-perm freebies on the SL Marketplace for even more people to enjoy snarky sharkyness.
• When you make stuff using material from the Shork website in Second Life or OpenSim and want to distribute it, please add the notecard “Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported” to the package and at the very least a “README” notecard pointing to the CC-AS file and to the base URL of this website.
• When you design your own textures, new bodyparts or scripts, that's obviously your own stuff and you can distribute it however you wish. We'd obviously be happy when you'd go to the effort to send a notecard to Kaahupahau Sharpfang @ osgrid from within OpenSim to get into touch, and would allow us to distribute those addons here, too.

“Shork!” avatars are released once their package is finished, assembled and tested in OpenSim. The downloads from the Cafe will include the textures (and UV maps, if needed ) for users to individualize their skins and thus expand the “Shork!” avatar family as well as further goodies. Bugfixes, such as positional and rotational corrections, as well as other helpful information, are published on an avatar families subpage.

All Shork Products are distributed under the Creative Commons “Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported” license.

The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license allows you to:

• Share: You can copy, distribute, and transmit the work.
• Adapt: You can remix, transform, and build upon the work for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution: You must give appropriate credit to the original creator, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You can do this in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• ShareAlike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

There can be occasionally a limitation in regards to a functional script, which is, as an object, under the same license, but is not intended to be modifiable by others. Input if this means that it will not be covered by the above mentioned license or if that is functionally acceptable, are most welcome and we'll update this information here once we receive clarification.
For the time being, we avoid using such scripts in our avatars.

For maximum flexibility, “Shork!” avatars are using components to construct the avatar upon any existing body - system default, Matreiya, eBody or Persephone (OpenSim: hop://login.osgrid.org/Mistburry/177/50/24 )… - capable of using a default avatar type skin (BOM enabled). This feature is well known from Luskwood, AVentity and Kinzart type avatars.

Music calm chill beautiful from teodholina.

“Shork!” avatars use top-notch mesh components, which would make swishing or poseable tails possible - but at the moment we have no artist at hand able to implement such a feature, so it's just mesh components.
An example for what we dream of for is the JOMO dragon avatar tail in SL.
But for the time being we use whatever the commissioned Artists can produce.

The “Shork!” avatars also utilize the Bento skeletal system for mounting points and compatibility with planned future features of the Linden Labs derived technologies - such as gesture tracking. Again, we lack personnel capable of implementing such features, but the open design allows to have this added later on.

Designers, Riggers, Programmers: Contact us in OpenSim!

Also, the amount of scripts will be kept as small as possible to reduce the risk of future incompatibilities as well as to keep the server and client load of our avatars low. As of December 2023, Shork avatars are completely script free.
We're social sharks, you see?
And in January 2024, we added a blinkEye component with two scripts, a talkJaw script for the jaw and a tailSit script for better sitting down to the shark avatars.

By publishing the components, we invite modders and scripters to produce individualizations. Following the CreativeCommons Share-Alike idea, all we ask that you artists either honor the Shork Spirit, or get in touch with us in Second Life or OSGrid (preferred, Kaahupahau Sharpfang @ osgrid ), so that we can integrate your mods to the Shork Avatars in general.

We ask Second Life creators specifically that mod-kits and -files should be published freely when the creator retires from Second Life, so that customers will have a chance to have such components updated even after their creator retires. We offer our website as a location to publish such items.

For the design and development of the Shork avatars, various tools and ressources were used. The external artists used many different tools, and we know only a few of them, like Blender, Maya, Gimp and Photoshop. But we know what we of the Shork Group used:

• PPaint 7.1 (Amiga OS 3.x) for pixel precise work.
• KolourPaint for conversion and import/export testing.
• Gimp for full texture filter effects.
• Tinkercad for basic 3D objects.
• Meshlab for converting 3D .OBJ & .STL files from Tinkercad into Collada .DAE files for upload to OpenSim.
• Dokuwiki for both our internal and external website & information management tool.
• Debian GNU/Linux as the main operating system for our entire computer park.
• Outworldz OpenSource Scripts for learning basic scripting for future avatar functions.
  ⇒ Archive.org backup of the Outworldz main page
• Online BumpMap Generator, a good ressource to generate 3D depth effects.
• Avatar Workbench - SL/Opensimulator Reference Avatars+ Bento Skeleton and bodymodel for Blender
• Robinwood's SL Tutorials which were used to learn about how to paint the SL/Opensim avatar body textures. His UV Maps were also used to create our Alpha layers.
  ⇒ Robinwood's SL Tutorials on archive.org - as an emergency backup.
• Ruth 2 Mesh Avatars - Ruth and Roth Mesh Avatars for SL and OpenSimulator
• Online Converter as a simple tool to replace the soundtracks in videos.
• BVHPlay a simple offline BVH Anmation viewer
• MAX - OpenSource Mesh Avatar for SL & OpenSim
• OpenSim Scripting Tutorial; Session Chatlog
• "MiceOnABeam" Second Life & OpenSimulator Scripting tool
  ⇒Archive.org Backup of https://miceonabeam.com/
• Scriptastic! - a Scratch-like visual scripting tool for LSL for SL & OpenSim
• TTS Maker - A Webservice to create short audio sequences in multiple languages , from various voices, from text.
• Pixabay - Royalty Free Content
• Ollama LLM System - An easy-to-set-up framework to run stuff like ChatGPT locally. Ideal for coding, runs in a shell
• GPT4All LLM System - An easy to set-up GUI framework to run stuff like ChatGPT locally. Can integrate local documents, thus ideal for storywriting, writing documentation, creating digests and assisting with filling out forms. Has a nice UI.