Broken Plot Device - Sunny

Sunny the Mole

 

Sunny was the first avatar I made for the Broken Plot Device avatar line, and of course one of my favorite characters in the strip. A miner for the Lonestar Mining Company, Sunny is described as a bubble of sunshine and a country girl with a big dream of city life. Being a mole, she is constantly at odds with sunburn and eyestrain, and as a result, has taken to setting up home in the Byron Apartments basement level. While I've tried to remain faithful to her original design during the creation stage, I've also taken a few liberties with her appearance, as you can see below. Let's start with her overall body composition.

To start, there's a bit of debate as to what kind of body type Sunny really is - pre-BPD, she was portrayed as a short, but heavily muscled mole girl. Yet in the comics, she has a more round and pudgy frame, but can still display some incredible feats of strength. I decided to combine the two together, giving her a chunky, but muscular appearance, whilst keeping her relatively short.

Her skin tone is a modified Genesis Athletic muscle skin, made by Amazons. The company that made it no longer exists in Second Life (or they quietly moved somewhere else inworld), but I was lucky enough to get this skin before they went bust.

The head is a Curious Ringtail (specifically the Ringtail Dog head, the one that modders like to use), with a pair of generic rodent ears in place. I didn't really need to mod the head so much, since the Dog head was already white to begin with - all I needed really was to tint the nose pink, and add some freckles to the skull.

The hair was something of an issue, not because of the design in general, but because of finding a style that closely resembles it. I was able to find something similar at Calico Ingmann Creations, though - it lacked the same bounce as Sunny's hair usually does, but it's got the same similar style and color (brown with blonde highlights), so it's the closest match I could find. To make it feel more like Sunny's hair, I modified it by removing a good portion of her bangs, and adding in her trademark bandana.

When working on these mods, I found that Pixel Puss's Clawed Feet were perfect for plantigrade feet. This is because more and more furry avatar lines are using digitigrage legs for their models, and good plantigrade feet are becoming harder and harder to find, either on their own or bundled with an avatar. Another great thing about these feet is that they're modifiable, since I was able to use the toe claws for Sunny's hands, as shown below. The hands from Tokushi's Anubis were just the right size for the base, but still had to use an alpha layer to cover up the model's real hands, since they kept poking through Sunny's.

To finish up, I also added her trademark tattoo to her lower back, just above her tail. It's barely visible when wearing her regular outfits, so it's best shown when Sunny is in her bikini.

Now that we've gone over the basics of her avatar, let's move onto Sunny's wardrobe. First up, her default costume!

Sunny's shirt was made using a full-perm low cut shirt, recolored to match her official appearance and emblazoned with the Lonestar Mining Co. logo on the front. It's quite hard to look at the company logo, given it's position and also Sunny's size, so here's a shot of it in full so you can see:

The rest of her outfit is fairly straight forward - a dark-brown leather miniskirt from League, a pair of brown panties, and a pair of brown unisex work boots (since Sunny likes to wear chunky-looking footwear).

There is also an alternative version of this default costume, the key differences is that Sunny wears a pair of brown jeans instead of a skirt, and wanders around barefoot. She rarely wears this version outside of home, so I'd like to call it her lounge wear.

Another important feature of Sunny is her goggles. She is rarely seen without a pair, and often wears them around her forehead, ready to be worn when the need arises. Unfortunately, the pair I've got seem to be bugged, so they won't flip down properly. I'll probably get around to making another pair that'll fit over her eyes in the future.

Sunny's next outfit is a green bikini, useful for when out beloved mole girl goes to the beach to catch some rays... or to participate in Miss Mole-lympia (hur-hur, see what I did there?). In addition to having a belly right, Sunny also sports a pair of pink sunglasses, which she can easily flip up or down whenever she's sunbathing.

And last but not least, Sunny's dress/formal wear. Keeping in line with Sunny's design motifs, she wears a pink dress with pink platform stilletos, and again, her sunglasses in case she ever needs them.

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Well, that's Sunny in a nutshell. I actually enjoyed making her so much, that I decided to do work on the rest of the BPD cast. Coming soon, we'll be covering my next character in the series, and a well-known fan favorite - Inix.

See you again soon!