NordenTafali

I´m in SL over 9 years and I´ve used and customized a lot of AO HUDs including the zhao and akeyo, but really since switching to the Firestorm one I never looked back. To me it´s the most elegant option there is, built right into your viewer, you know, nothing additional to fiddle around with and clutter your screen, you´re flexible and have it all in 1 place, plus the added bonus of never having to ponder if you should take off your AO to meet some sim´s limits. I´d save myself the time to get used to whatever specific AO and spend it to put together a few AOs in Firestorm, it´s as easy as clicking and dragging animations over. You can have several animations for whatever, not just stands, and set them either to play only the first animation in any category, or to cycle through them (randomized or in order option too), say you could put in 20 stands and set them to cycle, and put 3 walks and 5 jumps and set those to play only the top one if you want that one 90% of the time and manually forward to a different walk and jump as the occasion warrants etc. You can set up as many as you might need, or you could like choose a very neutral calm animation as the first one to be played, and if you want to talk to a friend and not have your avatar run around and through any furniture, wall and person nearby just turn cycle off so he simply stays on the first animation, and so on. I can´t really see any disadvantages to any AO out there, apart maybe if you´re a 'professional dancer' or something' and have an AO optimized for that. If you just go to a club to dance there´s no need for anything other than the Firestorm AO, you could just make one AO 'dancing' and put dances in instead of the walks and switch between that and your other AO(s) as needed, you´re really flexible with the Firestorm inbuilt one. If you set up more than 1 AO in the Firestorm one, you get to choose one of them as the default, which will be active when you log in, so you make your favourite/everyday one the default, and if you feel like another one, simply click the button integrated in your viewer and switch. Really can´t recommend it enough lol I´d say since Firestorm and it´s AO is free, just give it a try with the animations you already have now, before you get anything else! edited to add: I use a wild collection/combination of different animations from almost exclusively Vista, Sinse, Akeyo and SEmotion, anything else I got didn´t get much use. I usually prefer calm not over the top animations and some that are memorable for different flavours (I´m a roleplayer so need to distinguish characters not just by looks but by 'body language' too to satisfy my perfectionism ) but not recognizable as 'oh, that AO', hence mix and matching beyond brands too. It´s just a matter of patience then, hop any of the animation trying things and cycle through them, even if the ad of the AO doesn´t speak to you, there might be some nice animation hidden in there. Hope that helps. Have fun playing around until you get your perfect AO/s! Here´s a link to Firestorm´s AO info page - if you choose the 'create AO manually' and not NC method, I don´t think you need any info though really, I didn´t, I had my AOs up and running before I even ever got the idea to look at Firestorm´s page for that, to me it's intuitive, but you can get an idea of what it can do, if you read it. http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/animation_overrider

I made tattoo appliers for both maitreya and omega, iirc both had instruction notecards in their dev kits, maybe look through your folders for it. For Omega (there´s no omega body though like there is a maitreya body btw, omega makes a kind of relay that makes it possible to use a tattoo on the mesh bodies that are prepared by their creators to work with omega scripts, best to read through the websites of omega, maitreya and whatever else you consider to get some overview) go right to the source, they have a 'Learning Center' on their website which should have all you need to know: http://lovenlustdesigns.blogspot.com/p/lets-learn.html

Hi. I second using the firestorm ao. It´s 1 of only 2 reasons really that make me go back to firestorm everytime I try an update of the LL viewer, when I see they still haven´t got that option in. I don´t use Niramyth, so didn´t try it out, but when I was at Vista Animations last time, they had an AO that said it was made for Niramyth, maybe try that out. I think it could make a difference actually, just like I sometimes have to delete certain animations from my firestorm aos, when I notice they are at odds with my avatar's body or clothes, I just can´t watch him moving in a way his hands go too much into his body, or setting his hands on his hips only ending in the air cause his hips aren´t as wide as the ao-creator´s model's and such, I´m much more finicky with my aos than clothes or hair actually. Something to keep in mind If you go for individual animations to create a really personal AO: when you test animations, and like something, don´t start to buy them yet - first go through them all and keep a count on how many of them you´d want, it adds up fast, and might be the better option to buy the whole AO, if you end up liking a lot of it. I found it´s a good method to find an ao you mostly like, get that as your base to cover stuff like turns, flight etc, use the stands and what else you like from it and add some individual stands, or a walk or whatever, you like best from some others. You can still rez a 'whole AO', copy all the animations to your inventory and then mix and match to your heart´s delight, either only those of one ao or add other individually bought animations from other aos or creators for the firestorm inbuilt ao, or edit an AO to your tastes, either by notecard, or website, depending on the creator. And like someone else said, it´s useful to make different versions, so your avatar won´t look hyperactive in situations he´d just stand there like a rock and so on.