Multiversal: BRAAAAINNSSS!!!

Friday, October 30, 2009

BRAAAAINNSSS!!!

I'm a big wimp when it comes to gore and horror movies - I'm not a fan of the torture-porn genre at all - but strangely enough I do have a weird fascination with zombies. Being a big squeamish weenie I've never actually seen a classic zombie movie but I did love Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later. I get a real thrill out of being frightened by good films and the whole End-of-the-World shtick never gets old.

With Halloween upon us I decided to explore my undead options in Second Life and put together a Zombie Avatar. Unfortunately the pre-made avatars that I found in SL all seemed more humorous than frightening so I realized I'd have to start from scratch and put together a look with the help of the talented artists selling their stuff in-world and on Xstreet SL.

I started off with an amazingly detailed Brain Eater skin from Renns TRAUM Mall- it really does look corpse-like and comes in a range of options from slightly rotted to very bloody, including a fun version with a bullet hole right in the fore-head. Plus it comes with a creepy zombie shape - modifiable luckily, since even though it was pretty much perfect I still wanted to adjust it a bit to suit my taste. Also included are bloody zombie eyes and 4 different ghastly coloured face-lights for xtra spooky lighting effects (I like the sickly green and stark white the best). This skin is almost perfect; the only thing missing that I wish was included is detail work on the feet - there are no toes - but I suppose I could just pretend my Zombie was wearing grey socks before he got all Zombie-fied.

I wasn't really happy with the eyes included with the skin - they're nice and bloody, but I figure a walking corpse wouldn't have a lot of blood left in the head since gravity would cause it to pool in it's extremities once the heart stopped beating - so I went searching for some more realistic dead-looking eyes. I eventually found the perfect ones - Blind Horse Eyes from BLU282. They are appropriately icky having been photo-sourced from the eyes of a poor blind horsey apparently, and the foggy blue corneas look nice and spooky even from a distance.

Next came the bloody outfit, which is the serial killer Halloween Special #4 from [ hoorenbeek ], only 100L! I decided to wear only one of the shoes to make it look like the other had been lost during some random Zombie carnage, and increased the size of my zombie's feet so that portions of the foot stick out of the remaining shoe and it looks like it is tattered and about to disintegrate. The blood spatters make the costume even more gruesome since it's obviously not the Zombie's own blood he's walking around covered with, and the little axe that comes with the outfit made the perfect accessory once I embedded it into the oblivious dead dude's skull.

Then I needed to shuffle and shake like an undead ghoul, so I searched for Zombie animation over-riders and found the perfect one at HUDDLES Games & Gadgets. With the classic arms-out zombie shuffle, a hunched-over zombie stand and flying hover, a creepy zombie grimace and groan and a hilarious head-falling-off zombie sit, this is the perfect AO for all your zombie rampages! I also found a zombie avatar from Grendel's Children for only 50L, and while I didn't use any of the actual avatar it did come with an AO that has a great alternate zombie shuffle and stand which made for some great poses in my photographs. The Grendel's Zombie AO didn't properly rezz - it just appeared as black dot on my screen - but the basic animations in concert with the HUDDLES AO work just fine. I might pull out the animations and put them in an empty AO - apparently there are some attack animations in the Grendel's children AO that could come in handy. I don't know though, I'm not that committed to the Zombie thing beyond just scaring people. I don't think I'm going to actually chomp any other players' brains.

After stumbling around for awhile in Ron Zombie's skin I thought he was still missing the gore factor, so went looking through my inventory for some tattoos that might help and ended up finding two gross ripped-skin tattoos that I would never have bought myself - but they had been gifts from some hunts I've been on in the past month. They ended up being perfect with one from Wicked Tattoos and Clothing including some bulging intestines that really finished off the poor dead guy's look!

But I still felt he was missing something - a corpse usually attracts a lot of insects - walking or not - so I went looking for some flies to buzz around my zombie. After a couple of attempts that included way distracting and loud buzzing I found the perfect fly emitter - Yuck Flies from -RC-. Funny and gross!

With my Ron Zombie avatar fully assembled I've been wandering around spooky and Halloween-themed sims like Bentham Forest, ::Yellow JesteR:: and Octoberville, (seen below) which are perfect for some moody photography, even though my Zombie wandered into a burning building in Octoberville and caught fire for some reason. Zombies don't seem to be very skilled at the whole Stop-Drop-and-Roll routine.

The final look - while a bit expensive - is exactly what I was hoping for: a gross Zombie that actually kind of freaks me out when I'm walking around in his skin. So far the reaction he has gotten from my fellow players has been pretty positive - lots of screams and some people expressing concern for my welfare ("Yo, dude! Do you know you got an axe in your head?") . I usually just tell them I'm feeling a little under-the-weather and then go all: "!!!BRAAAAAAIINNNSSS!!!". But I don't think I'll be wearing Ron Zombie beyond Halloween weekend; he's pretty-much finished rotting-away and I don't think he'll be in one piece for much longer!