Cross-Reference: OpenSim Avatar Design Guide

“Shork!” Avatars 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 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 at the Cafe?

Go online, get a “Shork!” avatar and join Second Life or OSGrid for free!

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.

The “Shork!” avatar series was initiated once the Shork Team realized that, in their future home of OSGrid, there weren't their preferred avatars available. After a month of 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finding them not interested to either publish their avatars ( understandable ) or releasing their retired / abandoned / outdated avatars ( not really understandable for us ) on OSGrid, the Shork Team decided to commission a range of avatars combining the best of Second Life with the best of OSGrid.

• “Shork!” avatars will be available as freebies on OSGrid.
• “Shork!” avatars and their textures will be downloadable from the Shork Cafe homepage.
• If compatible with the rules of LindenLabs for Second Life, the “Shork!” avatars will also be made available for a low price on the SL Marketplace for those not able to import them from OSGrid or the Cafes homepage.

“Shork!” avatars will be released once the first package - Fukushima Sharks - is finished and tested. The downloads from the Cafe will include the textures needed for users to individualize their skins and thus expand the “Shork!” family as well as further goodies.

For maximum flexibility, “Shork!” avatars will be using components to construct the avatar upon any existing body - system default, Inithium, Belleza, Matreiya, … - capable of using a default avatar type skin (BOM enabled). This feature is well known from Luskwood, AVentity and Kinzart type avatars.

The “Shork!” avatars will use top-notch mesh components, which will make swishing or posable tails look much better, as seen on JOMO avatars. “Shork!” avatars will also utilize the Bento skeletal system for good looks and compatibility with planned future features of the Linden Labs derived technologies - such as gesture tracking. 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.
We're social sharks, you see?
By publishing the components, we invite modders and scripters to produce individualizations. Preferentially, we'd love to see those kits published on Second Life and OSGrid equally, but we understand that modders and scripters want to earn money.

In return, all we ask is that mod-kits and -files should be published 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 the Cafe website for a location to publish such items.