Is there any technical reason why most animations are short?

Bit of a basic one this

I guess one of the few things that supprised me in my early days was the short looping feature of I'd say the majority of animations for sale in SL.

Do I kinda assume this it totally down to people at home, doing a great and very hard job in making say a drinking at a table anim that lasts (wild guess 6 seconds) you know, look left right, pick glass up, take a drink, put glass down, pause, look left right, pick glass up take a drink, put glas down etc etc etc.......

So it's just that.

Or are there technical reasons why a much longer running animation, say 1 or 2 mins of a guy drinking at a bar could not be done?

I guess, in the pro market where they have cameras (and the guys in black suits covered in ping pong balls!) once this is all set up and running, it's plain sailing to produce any animation of any length (till your hit whatever limits there are)

Just wonderring that's all. It woul dbe so wonderful if animations were a lotlonger in general, or mixed together so that it was not such an obvious loop playing every few seconds.

File size and ease of management for resident created content. (^_^)y

SL limits any animation to 30 seconds or less.

Thanks.

I was not sure how much files size was an issue as I guess it's just a massive load of numbers (coords) for the avatar points to follow.

The 30 secs I guess is easy overcome by just stringing them together.

30 secs would be great for many. 5 seconds seems quite common

The 30 seconds limitation was probably set so as not to overload the SL servers and 30 seconds was seen to be a reasonable limit. I have made a number of 30 second length animations for SL - but even though this may seem short, it can easily take several hours work to animate just one second. The most complicated animations can take me an average of 5-6 hours per second of animation to make - and I'm not a slow worker! So please remember that 5 seconds of animation may well be 25 hours of work for the animator.

I am not directing this at anyone. I'm just generally putting into writing something has been going through my mind. It may even be inappropriately posted in this thread.

I would like to recommend to anybody who is in SL basically to "dabble" in all areas of the creation part the things that go into SL.

a) Try to create your own designed shirt using a graphics program. I don't mean the "Create New Shirt" in the Viewer. Actually sitting down and drawing a nice shirt with pattern, shading and an intersting neckline, etc. Keep it simple. But make sure you have to use transparancy in there somewhere.

b) Build a simple house and furnish the living room with your own builds. Even try putting in poses.

c) Try setting up MLP with your own animation choices (plenty of freebies out there). You may not want the "originals" in there, so make it PG yourself.

d) Find a tutorial for how particles work, and try making something of your won.

e) Find some freebie scripts for an action, or whatever, you are interested in. Try to understand what they are doing, and then tweak it. Start off with a small script. I for instance tweaked one script from "owner only can drive" to "everyone can drive". OK, not a big deal - the scripters here are probably falling off of their chair laughing - but it is a start.

f) Find a photostudio and take some pictures of yourself. Save them to your harddisk, and then use a graphics program to retouche and make it snazzy. While you are at it, use a green/blue screen to take some of those pictures, and then put yourself on a different background offline. Upload the pic and look what it looks like on a prim, in your prof pic, in picks, etc.

g) Create a gesture, adding animation and sound

h) Pick up a free program (like QVAnimator) and attempt to make your own animations.

And now go shopping and look at the work of the creators after you have experienced the work put in to your "dabbling".

Thank you, all of you creators out there.

I fully understand what you are saying here, and can feel the underlying tone of, you won't appreciate just how hard it is to create somehting till you have tried it yourself, and I know what you mean.

All my life (on PC's and way before PC's) I have dabbled in creating things.

Back to my early days of having a few of my Atari Basic programs printed on a magazine for others to TYPE in and save onto cassette tape.

I KNOW only too well how long these things take, and heck evern spend like a week or two learing how to make a lighthouse in SL that many others would not even take a second glace at.

I've never really made any money out of anything I've ever made. (apart from $750 once for a Public Domain Lottery program that I wrote in Visual Basic about 10 to 15 years ago!) That was my moment of fame !!!!!

I've made a "amount" of basic items (building) in SL though no scripting.

My BIGGEST problem is "Re-Inventing the wheel" and I was thinking about putting together a new posting about this very topic and way do sometime.

However I AM FUSSY about my own work and I guess that makes me critical of others work also. Esp when there are basic obvious faults/flaws that if corrected would make a so so item into a superb item.

However I also know that once you have "the tools for the job and the know how to do it" something that may take me or you a month to do, someone may knock up in an afternoon.

Like being at work and having the right tools to hand, things are just easy then.

Regrards the animations, I'm guessing, but I would think if you DO work in the field of motion capture and have all the hardware to hand and it's "Your job" so to speak actually creating a superb 30 second (or string of 30 seconds blending together" in SL is way way easier than someone along in their bedroom sweating over their PC trying to do it all "by hand" so to speak.

And I don't fully understand why the BIG animation places seem to slow to produce new (and every improving items) for sale when I guess these GIANT SL busineses (and I'm guessing) have the hardware and knowhow, or know people who do) to make these products easier and better than 99% of the SL creative world.

OMG! And I was one of the ones TPYING them in. And when there was a typo (";" instead of ":" for instance) the whole program wouldn't work. Spent hours with two people comparing character for character to see if it was a typo on our part. And then waiting a whole month to wait for the corrected program to be printed in the new magazine.

And the graphics We were so proud when a drawn stick-figure by the name of Cactus Jack or Joe shot huge pixel bullets. And wasn't it SO nice when the one-sided 5 1/4" disks finally came out? *lol*

And nowadays, we have gigabytes of HD, oodles of RAM, graphics cards that make a Second Life almost real, and we are completely spoiled *lol*

In addition to the 30 second limit mentioned above, there is a 60K size limit.


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