Hi I'm sorta new to posing and stuff... Can anyone help me start out ?

[debterr]

Hi I'm new to blogging and to second life so I was wondering what I would need to do to start creating poses and stuff. I would need to know how to get an animation program and how to use it ... Thanks :)

 

[Peewee Musytari]

Avimator is easy and free, always a good place to start

[Knowl Paine]

Hello debterr,

I enjoy spending most of time spent in SL building. My knowledge of animation is limited but if I make a bunch of inaccurate statements the corrections should begin to pour in.

The difference between a Gesture and an Animation is not entirely clear to me. They both make your avatar (or object) do things. I would recommend finding some Full Permission's Gestures and Animations and get in there and start playing with the numbers.

I have modified some Gestures with some success. The gestures play animations, most of the animations I have seen are people piece-mealing components of other gestures/animations. I've seen only few animators who are making entirely new animations.   

I have a Mech (robot) I made. The legs would have to be animated to make it look like its moving. Each new position of the leg throughout the walking movement is somehow recorded into the animation. idk

All righty, I think I've done enough damage to this subject, a response from others who know more should be on it's way. :smileyhappy: 

 

 

[Bree Giffen]

http://www.qavimator.org/

http://www.avimator.com/

http://www.daz3d.com/

http://www.blender.org/

Here are four sites with free programs that can make animations for SL. Avimator is really old and hasn't been updated but it still works. Qavimator is built from Avimator and was updated back in 2010. Daz3D and Blender are full 3D creation programs. There are more 3D programs out there but the rest have to be purchased.  I'd recommend Qavimator as it's simpler to use and it's more modern than Avimator. Poses and animations are the same thing except poses are just 2 frames and animations have many frames.

I wrote up a quick thing on how to make poses here:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Animation/Model-Poses/td-p/700483

 

Knowl. I think your moving robot legs is a different kind of animation. That's prim animation. There are prim animating devices in-world like Puppeteer and others. Animating avatars has to be done with animations created in Qavimator/Avimator/etc. and then imported into SL.

 

[Peewee Musytari]

hehe Knowl, I kinda liked that description

I will say that the difference between a gesture and an animation is fairly simple, an animation is a recorded sequence of postions that you put an avatar through, often looped but not always. A gesture is one of the places in SL that you can use an animation (obviously balls and furniture etc are others)

There isn`t much you can do to mod an animation that someone else has uploaded, but they are a lot easier to make than you would imagine. All you need is a program such as Avimator which has a nice litle model for you to manipulate. As you move it you get a sequence of frames like a movie, then you save it, upload it and set things like the speed to play it at etc.

The trick is to get good at making smooth running complex sequences of movements, but as with most things practice makes perfect.

I will say its very easy to make an anim of avvie having a seizure, my first few were pretty much all like that LOL