Which is the most comfortable animation package?

[Crias Rowlands]

I worked a couple of months with Qavimator but sometimes it gives me a headache (undo?!) and i am curious different peoples what apps found comfortable to animate for Second Life? It's not about which program know more fancy trick than the another, more rather I am curious about which is handy and feels good to work with.

[Dora Gustafson]

My experience is that making animations is bound to give a headache;)

I have used Qavimator and now I use Blender. In Blender you can do a lot of things you can't do in Qavimator like copy and paste and move parts of the animation without moving anything else.
The learning curve for Blender is very steep, but learning may be worth it.
Blender is good for making sculpties too.
Blender is free.

You will need an animation exporter plug-in with Blender.
I use the one offered in this tutorial

[George Orellana]

As Dora said Blender is good. If you want something not too complicated to learn you can try Daz Studio which is also free.

[Crias Rowlands]

What a shame!

I am using blender for sculpts and didn't know it has an animation exporter for SL!

[Medhue Simoni]

Qavimator is good to have, and I use Poser on occasion, but the program that I think is the easiest and fastest to make animations is SLat. It is a pure bvh editor and does not work like any other animation program I've ever used. Personally, even if i make animations for another game, I will do most of the editing in SLat and then convert the format or skeleton in Poser. I thought maybe i would have to use something else for motion capture but it almost looks like SLat was made to edit mocaps, lol.

I use an older version than is currently on the animation wiki pages. If any1 want to use a version that I use, just drop me your email address and I will send it to you.

Here is a sped up video of me creating a 2 animation greeting, incase you have never seen SLat.

[DMom2K Darwin]

Ditto what Dora said.  Troupe I perform with ( ~D R U M~ ) makes their own instruments and we looked for suitable animations but those who made the very few we thought were of the quality we wanted and suitable (only 2 sort of met our interest) refused to sell them to us so I decided to look into making our own and stumbled into this site  http://tentacolor.com/sl-animation-for-blender-newbs/  It did take a while to learn what to do and I still learn every time I work with it, but we are producing custom animations to our instrument sets that get better and better. It is a learning curve but oh, so worth putting the time and effort in to get the results. Every time I work on a new set, I learn more and more. Eventually I will go back and redo my early work and I am always on the lookout for more information on using Blender animations and applying what I have learned. Performing with what I made and seeing the audiences enjoy what we are doing makes all the hard work worth it.

[Crias Rowlands]

Yeah, surely i'll try blender's animation system and the plug-in for it. As soon as i do it i write some stuff here how it succeed!

SLat looks comfy too

[Bree Giffen]

I mostly use the old Avimator program. It has practically nothing else but the basic tools to move your avatar. Saving files is a real pain though as the save window is very unfriendly when choosing a save location.

[Claireschen Hesten]

i tried Qavimator the layout is user friendly but the frames and what have you for the length of the animation confused me now i use an inworld tool called animare it's a hud and poseball system you don't quite get the accuracy that you do with Qavimator but it suits me i can use the poseball around my furniture and make poses to fit, the only problem i had was not knowing the empty bvh file (provided on the tool's help site) where the the animation export 'code' goes had to be done in notepad wasn't mentioned on site but i eventually figured it out

[Hubs Howlett]

Depends on what you want to do, Crias - as per the answers above, there are a few other programs available.

I do lots of couple animations, and find Poser rather easy to use (although the adjustments when uploading in-world can take hours, if not days to set up correctly).

I probably should say that I've never tried Blender to create animations - and never heard SLaT that Meduhe mentions above (but definitely will try... haha!)

Good luck! :smileywink:

 

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Qavimator Gives me a headache at times too

[Morgaine Christensen]

Medhue,

I looked this over a bit at work .  Are there any other tutorials or manuals that you know of for SLat?   Will this program run on a MAC?

[Medhue Simoni]

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Morgaine Christensen wrote:

Medhue,

I looked this over a bit at work .  Are there any other tutorials or manuals that you know of for SLat?   Will this program run on a MAC?

---

I've never seen a tutorial, other than the 1's I made for it, which are not good. I should redo them. I doubt it will run on a mac, but I really have no clue.

For me, SLat is all about speed. Speed of doing or changing any aspect of the animation, from softening up some hard edged movement to cutting your fps in half and still retaining the detail, it is all just clicks away. Plus, you get 1 of the easiest to use camera controls that I've ever used, and that is a huge plus when it comes to speed. The Lycan thrashing video was done as an exercise, which I wanted to film myself making the 2 animations. So, I had to move very fast and think of the fastest way to make it, which is why i used alot of pre-existing animation and blended it all together. That whole video took me about a half hour to an hour, to make, and only has 3 added cuts to show the final animations. It is sped up around 3 times normal speed, but that was only to cut the time to the length of the song. This is why i use that video as an example of the program. If you want to see my SLat tutorials, which i only have 2 and they just show the basics, then do a search on youtube for "medhue slat".

[heatherr Noel]

If you're talking about the "undo" feature and it crashing, I have the same issue, and reinstalling doesn't help.  I'ts been like that a very long time; however I still feel it's the better program above the others as far as ease and use.

 

 

"ANIMATIONS ROLEPLAY SHOP"~ HOME OF ALWAYS FREE ANIMATIONS AND MORE!

[Gavin Hird]

DAZ Studio can also be used to make animations for SecondLife as soon as you have the SL avatar files imported. The basic version is free.

I find it less convoluted than Blender, although here is a bit of a learning curve here too.