What do you love/hate in pg furniture animations & menus?

[Eidolon Aeon]

I'm looking for input about what you love or what drives you nuts about how pg furniture is animated. Anything is welcome, and I'd specifically be interested in things like camera angles, props, his/hers vs. unisex, couples anims, adjustments, menus, etc.

[Lindal Kidd]

Whether it's PG or XXXX, what I hate most is furniture that is non-intuitive.  Last night my date and I sat on a couch.  It was easy to find the singles poses...just right click, sit, the menu of poses came up.  The couples poses, on the other hand, were awful.  He found the way to get to them.  Being a complete noob, he couldn't describe to me what he'd done.  I clicked everydarnwhere on that couch and could not find them.

Noob-test your designs!

[Drake1 Nightfire]

names... Name your animations something that at least partially describes the pose. A1 means jack to the user. Spooning however tells us exactly what the pose is. 

[Mollymews]

i love sequences. Sequences help to create a scene, a mood. Even when just sitting by ourselves. Like an AO, it changes the animation periodically  by itself

[FairreLilette]

8 minutes ago, Drake1 Nightfire said:

names... Name your animations something that at least partially describes the pose. A1 means jack to the user. Spooning however tells us exactly what the pose is. 

What is spooning?  I really do not know without looking it up.   I'd have to look it up in the dictionary.

EDIT:  Okay, I looked up spooning.  Actually, my online dictionary doesn't even have the word spooning...it just takes you to the word spoon and then puts a bit at the end about "spoon".  Spooning needs a better word.  

spoon

[ spoon ]SHOW IPA

EXAMPLES|WORD ORIGIN|IDIOMS

SEE MORE SYNONYMS FOR spoon ON THESAURUS.COM

---

noun

a utensil for use in eating, stirring, measuring, ladling, etc., consisting of a small, shallow bowl with a handle.

any of various implements, objects, or parts resembling or suggesting this.

SEE MORE

verb (used with object)

to eat with, take up, or transfer in or as in a spoon.

to hollow out or shape like a spoon.

SEE MORE

verb (used without object)

(of two people) to nestle in close contact with one another, as when both are lying on their sides with their knees drawn up, the back of one person tucked into the front of the other like the bowls of two spoons:They spooned without shifting position the whole night through.

 

Older Use. to show affection or love by kissing and caressing, especially in an openly sentimental manner.

Edited October 25, 2019 by FairreLilette

[MrsSeren]

1 minute ago, FairreLilette said:

What is spooning?  I really do not know without looking it up.   I'd have to look it up in the dictionary.

Basically where one of you cuddles other from behind; I agree with Drake on what he said though as that is pet hate of mine too.

[FairreLilette]

3 minutes ago, MrsSeren said:

Basically where one of you cuddles other from behind; I agree with Drake on what he said though as that is pet hate of mine too.

Yeah, absolutely...names are good...A1, A 2 not good.   But, spooning...I didn't know what it meant until I looked it up.

 

[Claireschen Hesten]

What i don't like all that much If it's say a chair or sofa you might want rezzed against a wall and there's couples cuddle animations, the ones that only really work if you and your other user are propped against the back of the chair making you both stuck in a wall or not inside your property

[Pussycat Catnap]

There is a lot of blend in these 2 lists - many of my likes and dislikes are the same things when done right or wrong...

 

I dislike when:

• Props don't auto-attach. Use the AVprop system properly so it can connect to the AVPos experience.
• The root prim is very 'odd' such that the pose positions are all weird angles and numbers and customization gets complicated.
• The furniture is too big - resulting in a need for extreme customization, but something is no-Mod, preventing this. Make sure any rezzed or attached props are mod.
• The AVsitter Faces system isn't set up, so there are no facial expressions.
• The AVsitter system is not used... It's kind of a standard now - use it, not some weird off-brand system. Especially since AVSitter is free. It is the best for letting the end user customize and add/remove animations, props, etc...
• Anything uses transparent set to 100%. Learn to do invisible objects right: apply the default transparent map, set to alpha masking, and set the mask value to 255.

 

I like when:

• - AVsitter is used to maximum effect
• - The base sale is real world. Google measurements, then use them. The make it mod for people that need to change that.
• - The item is low land impact.
• - There is a root prim that is not something visible - so that I can quick customize the entire thing by just moving that prim.
• There are more solo animations than couple ones. 99% of the time I'm using it to sit around my SL home and goof off.
• ALL the animations are bento. No splayed hands.
• Everything is mod. Visible objects have enough faces that I can apply a color or my own texture to a spot for my own accenting.
• There is use of the AVsequence system to string a series of animations together into a scene.
• Dimensions of things are properly proportioned. A king sized bed is X" wide, Y" long, Z" tall. Even if you refuse to follow real world measurements, if you make X 30% larger, make Y and Z ALSO 30% larger...
• Bounding boxes are proper. If I walk up to that chair, I should not bump into that chair and be stopped until I see my avatar touch that chair. And I should NOT walk through it. There is the ability to set different parts of a linkset to prim, convex, or none as needed to make this work.
• There are playful animations. Things that I would logically be doing on that object. How do you use that object in the real world - this is more often a criticism of Adult furniture where the 'dislike' is common (who exactly sits on the burner of a stove when having sex...). But even in G furniture I find things like... hand standing on a streetside payphone... but no animation to even look like I'm dialing that phone... Give me lots of good play animations that fit and I like it

 

 

 

 

[suzyst]

I go along with what everyone else has said, would just add I hate that drink animations either pour the drink in my lap or try to push it up my nose.

[xViXeNx71]

Like some other people stated already, first of all: name the animations! Same with the texture menus. I know nothing about scripting and stuff, but is it really that much harder to name the textures red, blue and green, instead of 1,2 and 3? It would save people alot of time if they wouldn't have to cycle through the whole menu to find the right animation/texture.

For the PG animations for 2 avatars, start with a default animation that is not a cuddle, but is "friends only". I hate to end up in someone's lap when I'm sitting down with someone who is just a friend. Also start with a "normal" animation as a default.....I once bought a bench that started with some weird animation that made you both float in the air when a second avatar sat on it. It's fine if you want to add a funny animation like that somewhere down the menu, but only as an option and not as the default animation please. It annoyed me so much that i got rid of that bench.  

[Skell Dagger]

2 hours ago, suzyst said:

I hate that drink animations either pour the drink in my lap or try to push it up my nose.

That one is probably down to your shape, especially your shoulder width and arm length. I frequently see pose sets that include a notecard detailing the ideal shape settings for them so that the poses work perfectly, and I can only assume that animations have the same issue. A classic example would be a Bento 'naughty lollipop' created for female avatars to use. Try using it on a male avatar and - no matter what you do - when the animations run you're left sucking on something that you're holding about a foot away from your mouth. Sliders matter!

[Cinos Field]

I really dislike it when furniture adjusts my camera angle. Almost universally, the camera will go into a wall or something because my home has a different layout.

I like it when the helper function of avsitter is left enabled, because being a smaller avatar, I have to adjust all the poses to fit me anyway, and the regular adjust menu is way too slow

[Resi Pfeffer]

3 hours ago, suzyst said:

I go along with what everyone else has said, would just add I hate that drink animations either pour the drink in my lap or try to push it up my nose.

Its not only the animation itself, its much more the frequenzy. A sip each minute would be ok, but not every 10 seconds.
Ahhh, dont get me started. Now i have waterfalls and fire (flames) in my mind... always moving too slow and being unrealistic because of that.

[Qie Niangao]

43 minutes ago, Cinos Field said:

I really dislike it when furniture adjusts my camera angle. Almost universally, the camera will go into a wall or something because my home has a different layout.

I like it when the helper function of avsitter is left enabled, because being a smaller avatar, I have to adjust all the poses to fit me anyway, and the regular adjust menu is way too slow

Both of these are things I as the furniture owner find I need to manage myself. Camera angle in particular is something I usually keep clear but when the furniture is close to a wall it can be absolutely necessary to prevent the unscripted cam swinging behind the wall.

Also you can (almost) always re-activate the Helper feature by simply adding a copy of [AV]helper and [AV]adjuster to the object. This is only "almost" always because sometimes AVpos contains the line "AMENU 0" which removes the adjustment option from all menus... and even rarer, some objects are scripted to completely replace the whole AVsitter menu system. (Note that in mod perm furniture, you can always change or replace the AVpos notecard, even if that notecard is no-mod. The furniture creator may be violating AVsitter's open source license by even trying to distribute a no-mod AVpos, but some may even be deluded into thinking they're protecting their own creation or something. Anyway, one quick way to replace a no-mod AVpos is by running the pos-shifter utility and copying the resulting text from the website into a fresh notecard.)

8 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

• The AVsitter Faces system isn't set up, so there are no facial expressions.

I've pretty much removed Faces from everything now. I've never seen it or its workarounds look even passable on Bento mesh heads. So folks using the furniture in my locations need to operate their head HUDs for animations. (This was a gaping design flaw in Bento that's far too late to fix properly now.)

Just in passing, the original facial expressions required constant refreshing, which is both laggy and makes the underlying pose engine scripting more complicated than it would otherwise need to be; worse, most engines "solved" the problem by adding a whole separate script to do it, another source of script lag even when the object isn't in use.

[Cinos Field]

The problem with face animations is that there doesn't seem to be a one size fits all kind of deal... animations that look decent for one brand can look downright ghastly on another.

I'd avoid them in furniture.

[FairreLilette]

5 hours ago, suzyst said:

I go along with what everyone else has said, would just add I hate that drink animations either pour the drink in my lap or try to push it up my nose.

Objects that are NO MODIFY can still be MOVED and ROTATED...they just cannot be stretched.  Right click on the object you are wearing and choose EDIT and then check either MOVE or ROTATE to move objects to fit your avatar better.  

 

Edited October 25, 2019 by FairreLilette

[Pussycat Catnap]

9 hours ago, Cinos Field said:

The problem with face animations is that there doesn't seem to be a one size fits all kind of deal... animations that look decent for one brand can look downright ghastly on another.

That's why you just trigger them and let the individual head maker answer the callout.

If they look bad to you - maybe use a different expression HUD or different brand of head. Just calling the built in expressions won't actually even animate a bento head - the bento head has to see that the expression animation has been triggered and then run it's own animation.

And the amount of time that animation runs for, is set by that head or animation HUD.

But if your furniture never sends out the call, the head has nothing to react to...

 

[Tari Landar]

Any furniture I do purchase, when I had land, is pg furniture, but even then, pg assumes you always want to cuddle at some point too. 

The people I buy furniture for don't need cuddles, lol. They, mostly, need furniture that has poses for individuals, not cuddlers, lol. One friend I struggle to help her find stuff because it's just her and sometimes her friends or family. Most pg furniture caters to couples...she's not a couple, lmao.  The compromise is to buy furniture that has singles plus couples...but I think that's not the greatest compromise, even if necessary. I understand why creators have to choose it though, because it's a lot of work to try and cater to as many people as possible. So creators are between a rock and a hard spot. If they want to make pg furniture they have to cater to pg couples, with some singles thrown in here and there (usually the same singles in their adult versions) because doing otherwise would be costly (time, money, manpower).

That's my long way of saying I wish more couches and sofas and other indoor stuff catered to singles and groups of singles and had no cuddling at all-but those things can be hard to find and can actually end up costing more (probably because it's a niche-creators DO have to make their money somewhere). I've found a few more in the outdoor furniture areas than we've seen in a long time, which is nice. But the indoor market..yeah, no bueno. 

[Bree Giffen]

One thing I don’t like is how PG animations don’t seem to be customized to the furniture. Like, a nice armchair where all sit animations avoid touching the arms of the chair or the animations don’t have the avatar leaning against the chair back. That’s why I just make my own.

[Qie Niangao]

On 10/25/2019 at 5:40 PM, Pussycat Catnap said:

That's why you just trigger them and let the individual head maker answer the callout.

If they look bad to you - maybe use a different expression HUD or different brand of head. Just calling the built in expressions won't actually even animate a bento head - the bento head has to see that the expression animation has been triggered and then run it's own animation.

And the amount of time that animation runs for, is set by that head or animation HUD.

But if your furniture never sends out the call, the head has nothing to react to...

But, hmm, I don't think this was ever implemented, was it? There was a lot of discussion about it when Bento was under development (summarized in a few pages of commentary on the old AVsitter Q&A) but as far as I know, the playing of the old morph-based facial expressions was never exposed to scripts for overriding* (neither the old-fashioned way by polling llGetAnimation nor by llSetAnimationOverride). I took a quick glance at the [AV]faces source code (2.2-03) and it looks like it's just playing those morphs, not calling out any protocol anim to be played or overridden by the Mesh head. To test if I (and the wiki) had missed a change, I rezzed an [AV]faces example box and tried it with my LeLutka and Catwa heads (and their animation HUDs of course) and nothing happened.

So you're getting [AV]faces to play Bento anims on your Mesh head somehow? Which head, and is its protocol documented somewhere I've missed?

___________________
*This was something I argued for in an ancient Forums post I could never find now; I remember a once-recognized animator (now obscurely "Sansar famous") arguing I was missing some subtlety of how animation purists wanted their facial expressions to operate. But I don't know of anything being done instead.

[Pussycat Catnap]

41 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

 

So you're getting [AV]faces to play Bento anims on your Mesh head somehow? Which head, and is its protocol documented somewhere I've missed?

Well...

It works.

 

I sit on furniture using AVsitter's faces, it runs one the animations under the expression list. I track that that animation is running, and so run another animation that is bento alongside it - and so... my bento head moves.

I put on a different HUD, and different animations run. I could even tell it to run a dance animation instead...

 

If you wear an LAQ head - it works with their animations right out of the box.

Otherwise, you can use any of these 3 HUDS:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/BENTO-EXPRESSION-HUD-V13-box/11827184

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/HD-bento-Facial-expression-HUD-BENTO-poseao/11027732

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Bento-Expression-HUD-SL-furniture-expressions-for-Catwa-Head-v10/17467034

 

To do this without spending any money... get a LAQ demo head and the LAQ demo HUD, and enable the 'furniture' option on the LAQ HUD.

You will notice the third HUD listed there is mine. So yes, I know how this works - I wrote a HUD to do it.

 

The methodology:

You just look at what animations are running on your avatar ( http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlGetAnimationList )  , and if one of them is one you're looking for, you start your choice of animation. The animation you choose just has to be a bento one that moves a face.

Thankfully the expression animations are all full perms known animations - the UUIDs of them are listed on the SL wiki, so you can watch for that:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Internal_Animations

 

The main hurdle all of this faces is that right now... almost no one puts out animations for this. But every bento head has some - just... among the brands I have tested, only LAQ bridged it's animations to the internal animation system.

 

[Qie Niangao]

42 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

among the brands I have tested, only LAQ bridged it's animations to the internal animation system.

I think I see why: wow that's a lot of script lag. 

I honestly thought all this time that the Lab excluded the morph-based expressions from the list returned by llGetAnimationList but I now see that they're included, so that does make this possible, but it strikes me as a pretty bad idea.

The way animation overriders (either scripted or viewer-based) have always worked is by using the singleton (non-list) value of the avatar's "locomotion state" -- for scripts, the value returned by llGetAnimation() -- to determine which other animation to play instead. Very rarely (maybe during a transition) a special purpose AO might check the full animation list, but because it's list-based that's a much more costly operation. In order for a head's animation script to do this for facial expressions, it would need to check that list -- usually a half-dozen long or more -- matching for any of the facial expression UUIDs it wants to override. I guess it would do this all the time, not only when seated (because attachments and other stuff can want to change facial expressions), and on a fairly tight timer lest the replacement anim lag confusingly from the original expression timing.

All that said, I had no idea anybody was doing this (whether it's a good idea or not), and I'd wrongly thought that facial expressions were intentionally omitted from the script-accessible anim list to reduce lag.

[Raspberry Crystal]

On 10/25/2019 at 12:48 AM, Eidolon Aeon said:

I'm looking for input about what you love or what drives you nuts about how pg furniture is animated. Anything is welcome, and I'd specifically be interested in things like camera angles, props, his/hers vs. unisex, couples anims, adjustments, menus, etc.

So many of the female poses look very uncomfortable. There's one that I call 'menstrual cramps' that crops up over and over, others I see as 'my knicker elastic is too tight', 'terrible back-ache', 'haemorrhoids' 'the acheing emotional pain of existence whilst also having a bad knee'. More cheerful, chilled out poses would be great.

It would be useful to have the option to make adjustments to all the poses at once, especially height. I seem to have to keep adjusting my hover height according to my shoes, and then I float over, or sink into chairs.

More solo sits which aren't chatting. Crazy woman talking to myself might work in real life but I try to avoid it in sl. 

Poses which work with the big name AOs so I don't have to turn that off (maybe that's down to them rather than furniture makers..setting their priorities too high?)

A chance to test out the poses inworld, quality of anims is important to me when buying furniture.

[Raspberry Crystal]

On 10/25/2019 at 10:57 PM, Tari Landar said:

That's my long way of saying I wish more couches and sofas and other indoor stuff catered to singles and groups of singles and had no cuddling at all-but those things can be hard to find and can actually end up costing more (probably because it's a niche-creators DO have to make their money somewhere). I've found a few more in the outdoor furniture areas than we've seen in a long time, which is nice. But the indoor market..yeah, no bueno. 

I'm sure there are more singles using furniture than creators realise, even couples will use their furniture as singles, it feels like a neglected area.