tutorial for animated poses?

Hi all,

I have been doing some static poses for modelling with 2 frames in QAvimator and Poser 7 but I want to do animated poses suitable for AOs. Is there a tutorial for animated poses?



Thanks all!

Actually, yes! There are a few tutorials out there that will show you how to do it, but the best way to do it, is to go to 'school' in Second Life. Yes, you heard me right! Go to school! I've been taking classes now for a few months, and soon will be teaching them myself and I find that it is much easier to learn if you have someone there showing you how to do it by example. Some of the teachers are so easy to get along with and the classes can be so much fun that you wish they were longer then the short hour or hour and a half! Hee hee!

In SL there are several schools that will teach you how to animate using QAvimator or Avimator. The class/school that I am thinking of off the top of my head is NCI as that is the one that I took. To make sure that you get that class, you will need to either go to NCI or TUi and check out their class schedules, or you can do what I do and sometime each day do an "event" seach, typing in "TUi" or "NCI" and then checking what classes they have coming up. This is usually the best way to do it because the classes change all the time.

Recently I took two classes in a row on animation at NCI teaching how to use QAvimator and Avimator, that gave you the basics, and then I was able to go on from there. I have been looking into further classes to see if there are more detailed one, but so far have just run into the basic ones. But the basic ones are very good, as they give you what you need to get you going.

As for a tutorial online.... Here are three that I found:

Day 391: Creating Poses Part 1 (Standing Pose) : http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2007/10/day-391-creating-poses-part-1-standing.html

Day 405: Creating Poses Part 2 (Animations in Objects)
http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2007/11/day-405-creating-poses-part-2.html

Day 419: Creating Poses Part 3 (Animation Priority)
http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2007/11/day-419-creating-poses-part-3-animation.html

I hope that those help you! Good luck!

The FAQ sticky at the top of this board has some links. The thing to remember with animations intended for AOs is that they must remain in one place - i.e., walk, run etc on the spot, because the travel is done via the AO script. This needs quite a different mental image to the way you normally see motion. If you have only done static poses so far, then I would suggest you start with something simple that doesn't involve moving the legs or hip.

I know there a lot of classes going on at SL but my RL working schedules as well my timezones aren't really compatible with the usual schedules... That's why I didn't even looked for it.
http://eventful.com/events/categories/learning_education?l=Second%20Life

I have been to Natalia's blog but there's no tutorial on how to do an animated pose with more than two frames.


THANKS SO MUCH FOR THE HELP!!

It's very difficult to give you a potted answer in a forum Ana - if you have Poser 7 then under the Help menu option you can download a pdf file which contains a very good background to using Poser for animations. This will tell you all the basics and give the details of using Poser.

For SL you just have to remember a few limitations:

- use the Poser 2 figure or download the SL avatar figures from the SL web site
- the very first frame must be the default T pose with zero rotation on all the joints
- you can only upload a maximum animation time of 30 seconds, so if you are using the default Poser setting of 30 frames per seconds, that makes a maximum of 900 frames
- break spline on frame 2

From then on it is more a matter of learning to use the tool - Poser or QAvimator, whichever you use.

I plan out my animations on paper first - but that is just my way of doing things. I work out the timings and identify the key frames. Having done that, I create a pose for each key frame and let Poser work out the in-between frames and see what I've got. I then refine it, frame by frame if necessary until I think it is the best I can do. Then I test it on the beta grid. It usually takes a number of itterations back to Poser until it looks right in SL.

If you have any specific questions, then please post them, as it would be easier to help you if you could say more specifically what it is you want to know about.