Movement speeds

Reference info for those of you who animate in SL. Walking speed, flying speed, etc.

Movement speeds in SL

Animating swordfights?

If you make animations, I recommend this article on animating European sword fighting. I've always gone more with asian styles because I found it easier to get source videos/pictures/examples.

Mirroring animations

One of the things I don't like about QAvimator is that it doesn't let me hit a button to flip or mirror an animation.

The .bvh file format that SL uses for animations isn't particularly complicated. To flip an animation is tedious but not difficult. The bottom half of a .bvh file has a line for each frame of your animation. You flip the negative sign on the Y rotation values for the center-line joints, then for the arms and legs you copy the values of the other side and flip the negative sign on the Y and Z rotation values. Not too frustrating on a pose, but on a moving animation?  Ugh.

Fortunately Tali Rosca has made this a lot easier. Mirroring an animation? Try this!

Animation article reference

Gamasutra article on animating quadrapeds.

Restarting a looped animation

I have a vehicle where the avatar does a looping animation that's in sync with some of the prim animations... When I cross sim boundaries they fall out of sync.

I thought that restarting both when the vehicle crosses a sim boundary would put them both in sync. It turns out that stopping and restarting a looping animation is more difficult that it sounds.

I tried llStopAnimation(A) followed by llStartAnimation(A). The animation continued looping like I'd done nothing. I tried adding a short llSleep() between the stop and start. No effect. I tried briefly starting and stopping a different animation between the stop and start. That interestingly did nothing as well.

What finally worked was a combination of the two.

llStopAnimation(A);
llStartAnimation(B);
llSleep( 0.1 );
llStopAnimation(B);
llStartAnimation(A);

I suspect it's related to a change intended to prevent griefing via bombing someone's viewer with animations.

AOs and "popping

You know how quads and tinies and other "folded" avatars sometimes pop out of shape to the default stand now and then? Here's a comment from Ziggy Puff about what can be done to the animation overrider to make that stop.

animations

I spent the last several hours learning how twisted the animation bvh format is. *rubs head* Blender does have the ability to flip a pose, but there currently doesn't seem to be a way to import one in a way it can be used in SL. Blender can now import bvh files by default, and there's a method to take blender animations and export them, but the glue in between isn't there.

This takes other bvh files and tries to tune them to work in SL. It's worth reading how it works - there's a lot of details there about what SL expects from animations that I haven't seen talked about elsewhere.

Making Tiny poses

Why haven't I seen this before? *cries*

Making A Tiny Pose in QAvimator

Making Animations, Making Skins

QAvimator is working for me again. Turns out the windows uninstaller doesn't remove the program's related registry settings. Once they were removed a new install worked fine.

For those of you interested in making skins, Eloh Eliot has put up yet another free skin and the related *.psd files.

TODO list: I need to remember to link Avatar Toolbox to EE's skins. And to send a note to the Open Sim crowd to make sure they've seen them. Drop a note to the QAvimator maker about the reg settings.

QAvimator & Vending Babble

I finally installed QAvimator. Turns out it is really easy to make your own animations. The only bug I came across involved fps - changing it in the gui didn't affect the files generated. I had to change it in the bvh files by hand, but that wasn't hard - the files can be manipulated with a text editor and what I needed to change was in one place.

Spent much of the day working on the doll. The sound effects are hilarious. Now I'm trying to decide if I want to add one more pose/animation pair. Probably will. I also need to experiment with how temp objects behave when someone is sitting on them... iirc, a temp object will not de-rez while someone sits. Since it is a 32 prim object, this'd let me make a 1-prim sales tool (the rez base) and let someone rez up a doll to try out before they buy. Maybe an L shaped "base" with good background pics, let the doll appear inside the "box"...

Need an advertising pic to go with the grill vendor. I either got someone who wanted to see one they could interact with, or someone who wasn't bright enough to check out the holo vendor. I'm not sure whether lost sales due to the latter are something to cry over. :/

Need a "To see cannons, click HERE" sit-teleporter.

Trying to decide if I want to work with SLBoutique. They've dropped their fees and are going with an advertising model.

Oh! I also stuck a giant fan on the bottom of the shop so it has an excuse to be flying. The blades are a single prim - very weird.