How do I kill my avatar.

I have a death pose responding to a sit target that puts me in the coffin nicely paralyzed from the neck down and my hands folded across my chest.

But I keep blinking, moving my eyes, and a smile script keeps me smiling. I don't look at all dead - in fact rather impudent lying there.

How do I paralyze from the neck up? I made the death pose priority 4 to override everything but it is not killing my head.

You can fix the head and neck position in an animation, but there is nothing you can do about the eyes because SL does not have the functionality to accept morphing data for faces (or hands). Make sure you have moved the head and neck a few degrees on frame 2 of your animation - otherwise SL will ignore those joints and your head will move as SL default.

I think your smile must be an emoter attachment of some sort - which you could detatch to stop that. The only thing I can think of is to check whether there is a LL animation or gesture that closes both eyes and see if you could use that in an emoter or other script to keep your eyes shut - maybe someone has tried this? I'd like to know too.

You could wear eyes that are an even texture, so that they don't change when looking around. Nothing to do about the blinking, though, unless there's a built-in 'sleeping' face animation. (Where's the link for all the built-in animations again?)

Try finding or creating a simple texture that's a good color for a dead person's glazed-over eyes. Wear a set of newbie eyes and go into Edit Appearance. Choose Eyes, and click on the eye texture. Select your texture, and Save As "deadeyes" or whatever. Bingo.

Or better yet: prim gold coins to wear, placed over the eyes. Not only does that fix the blinking problem, it also pays passage over the Styx.

Perhaps a sculpty mask?

It would cover your face and give you the right cast.

"Impudent avatar" would be a good band name.

The facial expressions need to be accessed through a script, maybe the same one used for sleeping poses would work? I forget the name of which closes the eyes, but have it in a sleeping poseball script I'd made for a bed maker last year...

Oh, searched it out:

You could make a pair of prim eyes with the proper texture, link them up and wear them attached to your nose. That way they wouldn't look around at all and they would still look like eyes should. Positioning them would be trickier than if they were attached to your eyes. But once they were in place you can take them off and wear them whenever you want.

As others have said, however, there's nothing to be done about the blinking. It seems like it should be such a simple thing, but closed eyes is not a standard feature of emotes that I have seen.

Really? I would be very interested in a closed eyes script. I have also been looking for an emote that combines anger and smile into sort of an evil grin for an SL photography project I am working. Are custom facial expressions possible?

No, but there are a selection of facial expressions that one can associate with animations on upload. As standard they only last for a short time and can't be looped, but I assume that said script just restarts the animation frequently so that the expression is effectively permanent.

Thanks all for the suggestions.

I did find that you can't leave any body parts unaltered by the death pose or they remain governed by the original animations. So by making small changes so nothing is default mode I locked the avatar up.

One problem I have is that although I am testing on my avatar, when finished it will be used by unsuspecting avatars over which I have very little control as they progress through my labyrinth.

I've tried mixing stock emotes with the death animation but that doesn't seem to be working. Perhaps a conflict in priority levels.

BUT I think I have a better solution. About 30 minutes prior to arriving at the coffin I gave them a safety helmet which they HAVE to wear "for their own protection" to (eventually) get to the coffin. I can add an invisible face mask to this helmet that has a texture for cross-eyed buggy eyes and an open mouth with gangrene on it to cover AO smiles. When they "sit" in the coffin I can change the alpha on this mask to visible to overlay the eyes and mouth.

Hehe, more than one way to kill an avatar ))

Sounds wonderfully hideous *evil grin*
Do post later and let us know how it turns out.

How about making a pair of glasses that have closed eyes and no frames? Like the Matrix shades.

Thanks Pinky, the problem is the avatar is a visitor who doesn't know I'm about to murder them and put their body in the coffin they just opened. I can't just hand them a pair of strange glasses and say please put these on for the next event. Kind of kills the anticipation.