Anime

[BenniJay]

I've tried searching for anything having to do with anime on this forum and haven't found much. I am trying to make an anime head. I think I have the basic shape down, but there are a few questions. First the eyes. On anime avatars the eyes just look like some kind of decal that you can change for different emotions. Should i still leave a hole in the head for the eyes or just make it flat and put the decals over them? Also how do I make the decals? They blink so they can't be textures right?

Edit: It is the same thing for the mouth I am pretty sure.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Most anime heads i've seen have 3D eyes not just textures, but its up to you.  If you want to go with just textures, then you could use a timer event and texture change for the eye blinking, this of course would require some scripting.

[Ceera Murakami]

I'll suggest that a good thing to learn from is to get a free, full-perms "Furry" avatar, like a fox or wolf, and see how they do their eyes. You can learn a lot of useful construction and scripting from dissecting one of those avatars. You can often find them offered for free in furry sims.

Blinking eyes as a texture is easy. The texture typically has four sets of eyes, making four frames of a blink animation, and is displayed on a prim surface. When the eyes are to 'blink', the script animates the texture, showing 1/4 of the actual texture at a time on the surface, and moving through the 4-frame cycle.

Better quality eyes will be built up in 3D from more prims, often with layers and parts for the eyelid; eye lashes; iris color; and the black detailing, highlights and white parts of the eye. Scripts can then allow the eyes to be color changed, and to blink, or to display a wide variety of expressions.

Scripts can also change between different sets of textures for any given surface, so for example you could have a normal blink cycle, and a one-eyes wink as a seperate texture, and swap between them with a script.