The newbies guide to USING animations and dances

At the time I've written this guide, I'm a relative newcomer to Second Life. Having spent days struggling to make my avatar use animations and dances in a seamless, easy manner, I'm writing this guide to help other newbies who are scratching their heads trying to find easy ways to use animations, animation overriders, and dances in a seamless, natural, easy, and silent way.

First things first, I *will* be recommending some specific items to use. Some are free, some are not. I have no connection to any of the object designers. They are simply the best products I've found for doing things the *easy* way.

Next, it's important to understand that many animations and dances CANNOT be set up to execute as a Gesture. I won't get technical about it, but it basically has to do with the NoCopy/NoTransfer/NoModify rights that animators and dance designers use to protect their property from duplication. So the only way to use simple chat commands to fire off your animations, animation sequences, dances, and dance sequences is to use special objects that have something called "animation override" scripts written into them. As a class, these various objects are known as "animation overrides" or "AOs". When you see people talking about their AO, this is what they mean.

There are three specific animation overrides you will need to do things the easiest, most comprehensive way:

1. The AnimAll bracelet. Costs $650 L from www.slexchange.com. Search for "AnimAll" and you'll find it. I was unable to use the in-game Find function to find this item. But it is extremely good at what it does, and it's necessary. It's also complementary to the next item, which is...

2. The WetIkon Animation Override. This item is FREE. The best place to find it is at the Reverie store. Use the in-game Find function and search for "Reverie". When you walk in the store, you'll see a display for this AO in the area with all the poses for sale. BTW, the Reverie store has some of the best, most natural poses and standing pose sequence sets I've seen in the game.

3. The Chimera. This item is $800 L and you can find it at any Owenimations store. Use Find and search for "Owenimations". The Chimera is used specifically for dance loop animations. BTW, the dance loops sold at Owenimations are some of the best.

Now, a special note here: You don't *need* the Chimera because the AnimAll bracelet can also be used to trigger any dance animation or dance sequence. Despite that, the Chimera is extremely cool because it makes it super easy to let other people (up to 6) dance with you. None of those people need to own a Chimera themselves. If you try to manage all your dances with only the AnimAll bracelet, your friends will also need to have an AnimAll too, and you'll all have to be configured to use the same secondary command channel in the bracelet. Not only that, but each person has to buy their own copies of the dance animations that you want to dance together with! So you can see that it's much easier and cheaper to just have one of you own the Chimera and all the good dance loops.

Once you've acquired these three AOs (the AnimAll bracelet, the WetIkon Animation Override, and the Chimera), you need to go out and find the animations and dances you want to use. I highly recommend Owenimations for your dance loops, and Reverie for your basic standing/walking/flying/sitting poses. Note that the AnimAll bracelet also enables you to play a sound file at the same time it plays an animation, so you can also go scouting for sound files to use with your animations if you like.

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Okay, you've got your three AOs, and you've got your cool animations, dances, and maybe some sounds too. How do you put them all together and use them?

First things first, you will need to read the "Help" or "Instructions" notes that come with each of the three AOs. I'm not going to rehash the details covered in those various instruction notes. It's up to you to learn the specifics of operating each AO.

What *am* going to describe, however, is generally how to set up the three AOs to work well together and not step all over each other. This is important because you have three different scripts attempting to "override" the normal default animations for your character.

The Chimera is easy because it seems to take priority over the AnimAll and the WetIkon AO. When you click on the Chimera, it stops (overrides) the animations being done by the AnimAll and the WetIkon AO. You'll just keep dancing and be able to use all the Chimera commands on channel /99. When you stop the Chimera or take it off your body, then the AnimAll and the WetIkon AO will come back into play and start controlling your avatar again.

The interaction between the AnimAll and the WetIkon AO is a bit tricker, however, since they have certain functionality that can interfere with each other. Here's the deal:

A. Use the AnimAll to control your walk override and your standing override.
B. Use the WetIkon to control any other overrides except for walk and standing.

To do this, just make sure that in your Setup note for the WetIkon, you leave the Walk section and the Stand section *empty*. You can safely put animations in all the other sections so that you have nice flying poses, swimming poses, etc.

The best way to think of the WetIkon is that its not meant to be used for giving yourself commands to adopt a certain pose. Instead, it's meant to be a silent background process that just notices the current "state" of your avatar and plays the animation that you listed for that state in the setup file. So when you fly up, the WetIkon plays the animation you put in the fly up section.

What the WetIkon is not really good for is giving yourself silent commands to adopt one pose or another. That's where the AnimAll shines. The AnimAll is also MUCH better at managing your Walk and Standing overrides, because you can disable both overrides to accomodate some of the shoes that already have walk overrides in them. If you use the WetIkon to control your walk override, for instance, the only way to accomodate a pair of shoes whose walk override is conflicting with the walk override of the WetIkon is to remove the WetIkon entirely while you're wearing those shoes. Not so with the AnimAll. If you see conflicts between the AnimAll and your shoes, you can just type "/21 walk disable" and now the AnimAll isn't trying to run it's walk override any more. When you put on different shoes that are more well-behaved, you can type "/21 walk enable" and you're good to go again.

That's it in a nutshell. I find this setup works great for my avatar. She's always running the nice sexy walk and standing poses. When I fly or what not, she runs the nice animations for those states. I can silently put her in any pose with a simple "/21play xxxxx" command and go back to my default standing loop with "/21 stop". I can build my own pose or dance sequences and run them with a simple /21 command. And finally for more elegant club dancing, I can click on the Chimera on my head and go to town. When I click the Chimera again to stop, all my AnimAll and WetIkon overrides are back in play.

Hope this helps some of you and saves you the days of frustration and searching that I had to go through.

Great post, sounds like some useful information.

I thought of one other important tip regarding shoes and their interacton with your various AO objects. Almost all the "sexy" female shoes have some type of sexywalk animation built into them. Many of these shoes behave well enough with the AnimAll and the WetIkon, although you might sometimes need to disable the walk override of your AnimAll for some brands of shoes or the other.

However, there are some shoes who have animation overrides that don't just control your walk, but also the posture of your entire lower body! These shoes are designed to morph your shape into a sexy ultra-high heel posture. A notable example of this genre are the various KDC shoes.

The problem is that the override that controls your entire lower posture interferes with animations that move your entire body. If you're wearing a pair of KDC shoes, for example, and you try to run the "sit" posture that comes installed by default in the AnimAll, you'll see that only your torso responds to the animation.

For this reason, I say "caveat emptor" when buying shoes. Before you buy a bunch of models from one vendor/designer (such as KDC), try on one pair and see how it interacts with your AOs. Or even better, try to get a friend to lend you a pair to try out. Once you find a brand of shoes that doesn't clash with your full-body animations, you know you can buy other models from that same designer and they should all work just fine.