Animations or Blinkies in SL???

I'm still new at designing things in SL. I have the whole tga to transparancy down and working on th ewhole flexi prim craze, but I'd like to figure out how to make something blink ((for example...a string of party lights)) or roll ((water)) what program does this involve? Is it just an animated gif and if so how is that uploaded? Totally lost on this one.

Animating with textures in SL is done by uploading a normal texture with multiple images and scripting it to change the placement of the texture. For example, the texture I use to make my eyes blink is made of four parts, open eyes, closed eyes, and two in between states all on the same image. The script in my head changes the placement of the texture so that only one part of the texture shows up at a time.

Here is an SLbotique tutorial on animating that might help:
http://www.slboutique.com/index.php?p=content&contentid=3

It sounds like party lights shouldn't be too hard.

It's bad enough we have floating ad boxes impeding air traffic. And we do have things that blink. We have MORE THAN ENOUGH things that blink. Please don't make any more.

What an asinine thing to say. What we have "MORE THAN ENOUGH" of is people who want to stifle other people's creativity. Please don't become one more.

Lilyanah, welcome to the content creation community. I hope you won't let "advice" like the above hold you back. SL is about creativity, individual freedom, and fun. Please take full advantage of that, and grace us with your own flavor of artistic addition to our world, whatever it may be.

Flipper's tutorial that Amber linked is great, but just to add a bit about a blinking effect specifically, the best way to do it is to use alternating shades of light and dark in your texture. For examle, if you want to do green christmas lights, have a frame of very bright light green, and a frame of very dark dull green, and set the the animation script simply to switch the displayed area back and forth between the two. Set the "lightbulb" object to full bright, and it will appear to switch from lit to dim as the texture moves from the light frame to the dark frame.

If you want to further enhance the effect, you can also have the script turn the fullbright setting on and off, and you can have it turn light emission on and off so that the object casts flashing green light onto surrounding objects (you'll need hardware lighting turned on in order to see this). I wouldn't recommend doing the latter two things though, as they amount to changing the object properties over and over, which can be taxing on the server, which can feed the lag monster. Generally, the texture animation is more than enough to get a good looking effect.

Any more questions, please come back to the forums and ask. I can assure you the discouragers like the one you ran into this time are not representative of the community at large. Most folks are pretty helpful and supportive here.

For the water part, I use this freeware program Sqirlz

You can save it as an animated .gif. Then use the above mentioned tutorial and utility located there. It will convert your .gif into a .tga file, and supply you with the code used in SL to make it work.

Side note, don't make your .gif over 256 x 256 pixels, as it creates a rather large targa file in the end.

I have only began to play with this, but a couple of results results can be seen in my home in Pimushe


Hope this helps

For the water part, I use this freeware program Sqirlz

You can save it as an animated .gif. Then use the above mentioned tutorial and utility located there. It will convert your .gif into a .tga file, and supply you with the code used in SL to make it work.

Side note, don't make your .gif over 256 x 256 pixels, as it creates a rather large targa file in the end.

I have only began to play with this, but a couple of results can be seen in my home in Pimushe


Hope this helps

Arrg, forum lag, excuse the double post

Thanks everyone for the feedback and don't worry I have no intention of letting idiots like that impede my creative side. I willl read up on the tutorials and keep practicing

Thanks again everyone!

the link on slboutique to Fipper's site for the animated gif conversion is broken now...does anyone know the url to the page?