Pet or animal animation tutorial

Well, it is time to stop lurking and jump in.

I am looking for a very (very (very!) ) begginer intro to animation, in particular for pets/animals. I have been researching in SL and here and google and have found great tutorials, but still not clear on where to start.

Note I have never animated anything before. I am a career IT person with several programming languages, but this is just an area of interest, not something I have worked at.

I downloaded the Poser 7 demo but besides installing it, haven't done much yet. I don't even know if thats where you start. I would imagine I have to have at least a "frame" of something to animate, no?

I would like to find something that helps me create a rudimentary "being", even a cylinder with 4 sticks, and makes it walk forward lets say. Just enough to get me started. Maybe walking is asking too much, maybe I should start with swimming?

Links, questions, help, everything appreciated.

Update : I downloaded QAvimator, and in the last while been through the tutorial etc. Still, would like something directed to pets/animals if possible. Thanks.

Hi Daduhulk. What kind of pets and animals are you trying to make?

If it's a pet made out of prims then you don't need Poser, you can make it out of prims and then you would need to script it to move around. There is a product called puppeteer that makes animating prims a little easier. You may want to buy the free version of it in-world and test it out. There is another one called Prim Animator that you can check out as well.


Another way to make a pet is to turn yourself or someone else into an animal. This is done by coverying your body with prims to shape yourself like an animal. Then you animate yourself to move like that animal. This is where you would use Poser to make your animations. Try going to I Am Legend orientation and get the free dog avatar there.

Hi Daduhulk - welcome to the forum.

To add to Bree's reply - the third type of animal is a prim one which you wear as an attachment to your avatar - e.g., a rideable horse. The attached animal has an animation override script which allows the avatar to "ride" it using the keyboard cursor control keys. The prim animal will often use animated textures to simulate leg movements and menu or HUD driven scripts to control different modes/appearances.

It is a very big subject - but I hope this gives you some idea. Producing content of this nature is often a big project involving a team of specialist builders, scriptors and animators.

Another form of animation would be sculptie animation. Building tips is where most of the sculptie information is shared.