making animations

could anyone please give me their views on qavimator, avimator and slat (slat is still beta i know) Im interested in making my own animations and would like to use free software to start with, I believe these are the ones I can get currently.

Id appreciate any advice

Fai x

I use SLat and have recently begun using QAvimator. QAvimator is very easy to use, but I'm used to SLat and it seems like it has a few more of the functions I need. I think once you get used to one it isn't terribly hard to start using another.

I've been working with QAvimator as well and found it fairly quick to learn. It has some serious limitations, but for basic poses and animations it is a great little program. Like any other skill, it takes practice and patience. I think it took me 30 test uploads to get my first pose done and about the same for the first animatinon. Once I got better the number of uploads it took before I was satisfied started to drop. As I got better with the program I ended up going back and re-doing all my early animations & poses. There are links to tuturials and great tips down in the Animation forum.

You know, I've played with all these at one point or another and ultimately decided I just didn't have the patience to even make a static pose. And then, quite by accident, I ended up owning an in-world animation tool, UPoser. I had this thing in Inventory for months, then one day I just happened to experiment with it--and it's kinda fun! It's not free, but in RL terms it's not very expensive (and truly a scripting masterpiece). It would be pretty cumbersome to use for an extended animation, but for poses, it's pretty handy--especially for fitting to pre-existing SL objects, or for poses perfectly matching one avatar's dimensions. I think there's at least one other in-world animation tool, too, though I don't even know its name. Anyway, YMMV, but if you find the external programs overextend your patience as they did mine, one of the in-world tools might be worth a try.

I started out with Qavimator too and was pretty happy about this little free piece of software. Now I use Poser, which isn't free and has a little higher learning curve. But Qavimator is certainly the best pick if you're starting out with animations.

The only thing you must be aware of (at least when I used Qavimator some time ago) is that for some reason animations seem to play faster in sl than you see them in Qavimator. Experiment with it on the betagrid, and Qavimator will work perfectly for you for now. Good luck.

have you tried daz studio 1.8? that's free as well.

We get far fewer confused "help me" posts for QAvimator in the animation forum than anything else... QAvi is based from Avimator and is designed especially for SL, so takes care of a lot of the "busywork" you would have to do manually with other software like Poser.

A lot of people use QAvi, I can't say I'm familiar with slat at all though...

thank you for replying everybody...im going to give them ALL a go...i tried and failed miserably with the GIMP to make clothes...had a real mental block over it lol (and I use autocad, can GIMP really BE this hard??? )
Fai x

I've used Qavi with only one problem.... If adjust the height in any way, my little AV gets sunk into the floor in SL... (T_T) ... I wish they had a better way to set sitting/standing height when importing animations. (^_^)

i have Qavimator for personal use, but it magically started refusing to let me save my files, and i jsut finally gave up on it.

i liked it bunches until then, and besides a mild learnign curve, it was relatively easy to use.

I used Avimator and QAvimator to make the poses I needed for furniture. I found it pretty simple to learn (read the manual for Avimator, there isnt one yet for QAvimator, but once you can use one, you can pretty much use the other). I tried poser at one time and found it so heavy with things i didn't need that i went back to QAvimator.

There is a class at NCI on animation, which I would have found helpful if I hadn't learned by the manual and seat of my pants before I found it.

Good luck

imogen

The version I have won't save files unless I type .bvh at the end of the file name.