How to create animated assets?

[Oaklandis]

I would like to learn how to create animated assets. Are there any tutorials available?

If someone can recommend a person who makes assets, I'm open to hiring help.

Thanks

[Rolig Loon]

If you want to have a specific item created, you should post a request in the InWorld Employment forum.  Be as clear as you can about what you want to have done, and be prepared to pay for it.  Creation of custom items in SL is not cheap.

You are using the term "animation" in a non-specific way, so it's not clear exactly what you mean.  If you are interested in objects that move or that have parts that move, you'll want to have a scripter write a script that is designed to work with the particular model you have in mind.  There are several different ways to script moving objects, so it's difficult to say more without knowing just what your interests are.  If you are interested in objects (like furniture) that contain animations to control a person who sits on them, you'll want to go shopping for animations in world and then have a scripter write something to trigger them in your objects.

Learning how to do all of this yourself is an exciting and worthy challenge, and it is definitely cheaper than paying others. SL is designed to encourage residents to do just that.  You will find free classes in many places, to help you get started.  I recommend Builders Brewery, NCI, and Caledon Oxbridge University as good places to begin.

[Lindal Kidd]

If you want to make your own static poses, you can do that in any 3D program that will let you save a zero-frame animation in the correct Poser format.  There's a free one especially for Second Life avatars you can download, but I doubt that it has been updated for the new avatar bones provided by the Bento update.  

If you want to make animations...dances, or walks, stands, and sits to put into an animation overrider or other object, it's a huge and specialized field.  The best animations these days use "motion capture", or mocap for short...a set of cameras captures the movements of an actual human model, and then that information is used to animate an avatar in a program like Maya or Lightwave 3D.  Once the animation has been tweaked for correct performance, it's uploaded into SL.

Here's a company that makes a relatively inexpensive mocap system: http://ipisoft.com/