Should I get my balls out?

I’m sure this has been posted before but I am abstaining from 'search' due to personal reasons (that have nothing to do with laziness)

SHOPPERS, do you prefer to buy items with animated pose balls or built in animations?

SELLERS, do you sell items with animated pose balls or built in animations? Why did you choose this way?

After much research throughout SL over the last few days, looking at a whole host of objects it seems to me to be about 50% Built in and 50% pose ball in stores belonging to the leading merchants in SL.

But obviously you can only create built in animations to suit a certain sized avatar so should they be aimed towards the default sized AV or the freakishly giant woman that seem to taking over the world?

Thanks allot for your input.

Squawky, Talky, Porky Gorky

As a creator, and consumer, I prefer poses in the furniture itself, without poseballs, as this both saves prims and looks more natural. I find that generally, a pose set up for an avatar between 6 and 7 feet tall will work for the majority of people, though some may be slightly above or in the furniture, it's not enough to be particularly unattractive.

Forgot you could make surveys

Hey Porky.

Shopper here. Mixed opinion on this, from a visual point of view I prefer not seeing the "balls" (insert your own joke here) or messing with "show/hide". However, for animations involving two or more parties it would be nice to be able to adjust pose balls so that all involved mate up correctly. Not that I do much "mating up" in SL.

That.

"'Scuse me. Ya mind shiftin' yore ass to the pink in th' corner?"

PS You're a card, Porky. P to th' O to th' RKY!

Around here, that is probably a good thing.

I don't like seeing the poseballs, but otherwise I have no strong preference either way. But I'll take the built in animations as my final answer. Strictly a shoppers here.

I prefer in the furniture myself- as a Creator and Consumer. Glad this came up- as I was debating the very thing in a piece i am making.

I do prefer "integrated" as long as it makes sense...

I have a raft with 5 different sit targets but I never do remember which of those 15 prims to sit on to get the specifc pose I want.

I also have couches that can seat multiple people but one sit will be in the arm rest, another in the shadow prim, etc.

(Which isn't personally a problem as long as it's mod, it's just a few minutes' work to relocate the animations to a more sensical prim; or to get rid of poseballs for that matter)

Yes, chop those balls off.

I do find things like that odd XD

In my own 5-pose couch, I put one in each of the three cushions, one in the back cushion, and one in an armrest... but it makes sense, because you sit on the arm rest =P

I try to have pose locations make sense, always... I hate having to search for the right pose. If I want to sit on the left cushion, the pose should be in the left cushion, and so on.

I prefer menu driven to be honest...but...more and more these days i buy a piece of furniture with the poses hidden, only to find that no matter where i click to sit...i will ALWAYS sit in the same pose in the same spot...If someone else sits before me, for example on a sofa, then and only then can i sit someplace else..that REALLY irritates me. I might not want to sit, I might want the laying pose...it happens on a couple of makers gear, cant for the life of me work out why? (prolly me doing something wrong I suppose)

Soooo...the question...pose balls so i can choose where and how, inbuilt is prettier but ONLY if i can choose the pose,position,location ie: I want to sit on THAT cushion...when i click on it, NOT over there on another!

It depends. Assuming you mean typical furniture, I prefer poseball-less -- sometimes.

The advantage to poseballs, if the item is mod: the customer can adjust them to fit their avatar. Some built-in scripts offer some ability to adjust poses, but often with some drawbacks (e.g., you have to know the trick, or it chats to you when you sit, and possibly takes controls so you can't spin your view using the arrow keys.)

Poseballs are also best when it's not obvious where sits might be or what roles they are. For example, I use them on my hot-tub.

For my personal furniture, I put my sits in the pillows, and use a texture convention to indicate whether a seat is masculine, feminine, or neutral/selectable. Pillows are a good optoin because (if the item is mod) the customer can adjust them easily enough.

I don't like the look of a living room full of poseballs.

I really like the furniture I currrently have from Ambiance Animated Furniture, which uses menus (and thus poseballs), but has an excellent selection of menus selecting whether the sitters are couples or not. For example, it works for two men, two women, man and woman (not couple), couple plus female visitor, couple plus male visitor, couple plus couple visitors, and more. The makers clearly put a lot of thought into it.

What I truly hate is furniture with bad poses that I can't delete or replace with my own. I generally won't buy no-mod furniture.

Oh, I do remember a couples chair or settee where the first to sit would always get the feminine pose, and the second would get the masculine. I have to tip my hat to that: a gentleman should let the lady sit first!

Use them or lose them!

*For some, Use them AND lose them will also be the case*

Ditto!

The challenge with going without pose balls is that your potential customer doesn't know where the sits are. While pose balls do indeed look like crap, a whole lot of people have to be guided through something other standard pose balls. Like Lear said, it isn't always obvious where the sit poses are without a ball showing you.

So, the hard part of NOT using pose balls is in finding a way to market the furniture piece showing all the poses that are included so that the customer knows where to look.

I spend a lot of time configuring lengthy themes of pose sets in logical 'stories'. There's nothing more annoying than to find a pose pair flipping from one direction or situation to another without any indication this might happen.

In my opinion, a good deal of the problem with pre-configured items is that the menu buttons are limited in the amount of letters that can be used to describe what is going to happen: there is only so much information that a button can convey. Another issue is that for reasons of style or the sheer absence of logic many content creators are happy to lump all sorts of animations into the menu without any regard for how they will be used.

For this reason, the smooth functioning of most menu-driven objects is entirely dependent upon familiarity with the controls, which means disaster if you're a caring, sharing kind of individual, which I'm not: a partner who is not familiar with the controls can seriously screw proceedings (and I don't mean in a 'nice' way).

Nevertheless, I gave up buying a long time ago because I prefer to set complex and entertaining arrangements of animations I have chosen that play sequences in a logical order of my own devising.

The trouble is that, as with texturing clothes and skins, I spend so much time messing about to get suitably 'convivial' effects from menu-driven objects that I don't find much time to get 'convivial' at all. Which brings me back to:



I wish there was some place in SL that could provide content creators with a few essential pointers on setting up quality products. I'd be more than happy to shell out good cash dollars for an item where someone else had saved me the time and trouble and thought the thing through carefully.

I might have more fun in that event.


I guess I would be one to risk usin' and losin' em but what the heck - they're full perms.

As a creator, I prefer the animations in the furniture itself. My own furniture uses a menu to choose the animation. Poseballs are just ugly, though in some situations hard to avoid (sexbeds, poolsides).

Currently I am working on a brand new script though that will give the user much more possibilities. It will replace my current CTP menu (CTP stand for Color Texture Pose) but will take some more time to finish. It is always a balance between aesthetics and functionality.

As I sell low prim furniture, I embed the poses to save prims. As a consumer I generally prefer this too, though if an item is mod, allowing me to adjsut the positioning, then poseballs don't put me off buying an item.



Very true. I put multi-pose seating in a lot of my items and have the same trouble with that. If they don't sit on the item and don't read the hover tips text they never know about all the scripted features in an item.

I've had some luck posting graphics I've made that show all the poses near some items, and it seems to help with sales. Something simple looking, like a bench, that is scripted to do a bunch of stuff. I was afraid no one would take a second look at it without the graphic that shows what it does. It would be too many textures and too much clutter to do this for every item in the store though.

That's one of the main reasons that I choose to make (and buy occasionally) items using a menu system for poses and animations. I find that not only does it allow a much larger selection of poses/animations to choose from than if I were to embed them in cushions, etc., but that it also then allows for customized positioning by the owner. If the avatar is larger or smaller than the ones I used to set the poses, then the owner can adjust for proper fit.




This is another reason why I find "nested" or "tiered" menus really helpful. I also find it somewhat frustrating when menus don't make sense. By categorizing menus the frustration is minimized or eliminated and makes for a much neater and easier to navigate system.

Another bonus to the menus I find is the ease in which you can change poses--no standing and re-sitting in many cases. Makes for a little less interrupted conversation or romance. *wink*

~ Desi

I hate poseballs, especially when they have some floating text over them. Why they can't build the sit poses into the pillows?! Furniture usually comes no copy, so while removing the pose balls would be possible if the object is mod (remove pose, add sit target script to pillow, play with the numbers), it is just too much of a hassle to deal with no copy items.

My problem with built in is trying to adjust them. On the other hand, I do not really like seeing the poseballs, but can tolerate them if they have the hide command in them.

Ever since I discovered Pillow Talk, for a lot of furniture or "around the house relaxing", I just purchase them and place where needed.

I'm for built in, even though it can limit what I can use with my avatar. Pose balls take away from the realism (such as it is) of the world.

And I have seen some examples of scripts out there that allow adjustment of built in animations. Amonium Marvin's store has some couches with that feature.