Putting animations in furniture

HELP ME!!!!
I'm am starting up a furniture business and having the most trouble putting animations in the furniture.I'm trying to stay away from poseballs as I'm not too fond of the look. Is there anyone who can help me? And where the heck do i get the scripts I will need?

p.s...I purchased pre-made sculptie furniture, and when i go to change the texture it removes the shadowing texture already there???
Man..and I thought this would be easy! LOL
please teach me everything you know about this sort of stuff. It would be greatly appreciated, Thanks Kris

I can help you. But the quickest thing is to go Lex Neva's store and get his Sit Target Helper. It's free, and super easy to use.

Doing furniture without a pose ball offers a couple of trade offs:

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One less prim per pose ball eliminated, which is nice...

BUT

Much more dificult to adjust the sitting position for differently sized avatars.

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With a pose ball, the person who buys your furniture can easily adjust it so their avatar fits perfectly in the seat. Just edit the pose ball position.

With no pose ball, you end up building the chair for one specific height of avatar. Any other height will position the avatar too high (if they are short) or too low (if they are tall). Compensating for that in a no-pose-ball chair requires editing the sit target, which can be beyond the capabilities of many end users, who have no idea how LSL works for sit targets and rotations. It may even be impossible, if you didn't give them full perms to your sit target script.

If you don't use a pose ball, plan to add a scripted menu that will allow the end user to add a positive or negative offset to your base sit target, so they can make it fit.

You don't need to make the poseball a garish pink or blue, either. You can make it the color/texture of your furniture, set transparency to the max in your Edit >> Textures window, and be sure to remove and floating text. If you're clever enough, you can get the poseball to hang close enough to the seat that it is almost imperceptible too.

I was gonna say what's to stop one from making it invisible and keep the hovering text?

Another common trick, of course, is to disguise the poseball as a cushion. After all, there's nothing magical about poseballs that says they have to be spherical. Make it a nice cushion with a pose script in it -- a simple torus or a sculpty -- and voila! It's an attractive addition to your furniture instead of an ugly poseball.

On my newer bar stools, I made a menu driven sit control thing that lets you pick between different male and female poses with a blue menu and each menu item has its own sit position vector configurable in a notecard. So, I can have a "Female Sit Small", Female Sit Medium", etc. and they can use the same pose but different vectors to set the Z-axis just right without messing with a pose ball.

The problem there remains that it is difficult or impossible to adjust seating position. What are you going to do for a small avatar? Have the cushion float 6 inches above the rest of the chair? Or for a tall one, have the cushion so embedded in the rest of the chair that you can'tt click on it to sit there?

A decently scripted pose ball shows and hides on command, and hides when in use. They don't need to detract at all. And making them 90% or so transparent makes them very low-key when they do happen to be visible.

True. I didn't say it was a perfect solution, but I figured it was worth including as long as we were making a list of options.

Actually, I was thinking this afternoon of creating a script that measures an av's height and then adjusts the z-setting accordingly in the poseball as she/he sits. Has anyone ever tried that?

There is a changeable sit script out there that does let the sitting avatar adjust position and rotation.

Yeah, but I was thinking of writing one that does the adjustment automatically as part of the sitting process. It would save annoying people with an extra step every time they go to sit down. This is really a scripting question that doesn't belong here, but I thought it would be cool if someone had already done this. It could take care of a lot of the limitations that prompted this thread in the first place.

Yep, I wrote one. It works great for some things, but not if there is more than one sit target in a piece of furniture. It goes all kersplooey in that case.

It is here if you want to try it out:
/54/d7/273176/1.html

Or better yet, if you want to try fixing it!?!

I do on of two things.

1. make it transparent

2. Make it a cushion ( if sit is able without the cushion being in the air)

As Ceera and others have pointed out, the problem I have encountered with poseballs is that sometimes after adjustment they end up in location that are hard to see and click. It’s my understanding that poseball location is based on the hip location in the animation. Is that true? If so is it the “T” frame 1 which is the same in all animations or is it the flex frame 2 or is there any function in LSL to code an offset for “llSitTarget” relative to the animation?

What I would like to be able to do is have a couch that uses the poseballs only when adjustment is necessary but stay hidden otherwise. Then be able to use the couch cushions as the click objects that send the sit code to the poseballs. Can this be done with a listen event where a poseball script would listen to the cushion for the “sit” command?

If anyone knows of a script that is already doing something similar please let me know.

Making a script that automatically corrects sit position for avatar size would be a real challenge. Consider these scenarios:

"Ruth" female avatar : Has a known height and known proportions for leg and torso length, as well as a detectable height.

"Ruth" male avatar : Just changed the gender button, and is taller now. Still as a known height and known proportions for leg and torso length, as well as a detectable height.

"Giant" : Keeps the same proportions for body parts, but runs the height slider to max value.

"Beanpole" : Runs height, torso length and leg length to max values.

"Kid / teen" : Keeps the same proportions for body parts, but runs the height slider to minimum value.

"Toddler" : Runs height, torso length and leg length to minimum values.

"Dwarf" : Keeps torso size fairly normal, but has really short legs.

"Anime" : Keeps torso size fairly normal, but has really long legs.

All of the above will have different ratios between the detectable height of the avatar and the location of their hips. And I don't think LSL gives us any way to detect any measurement other than the height of the avatar's eyes.

It is easier to add a menu script that starts you with a default sit target, and allows the user to repeatedly select "Adjust Higher" or "Adjust Lower", and then "Save Position". Quite a few of the fancy beds do this, and even allow you to save diffferent settings for different avatars, using the same pose set.

If auto-detection of avatar body height and limb proportions could be perfected, it would be a real boon for all sorts of animations. For example, try using most "slave collars" on a really tall or really short avatar, and put them through some of the poses like kneeling on all fours, or laying on the ground. If you are not pretty close to the standard Ruth height, it can look pretty bad.

Too bad. I knew that avatar height was going to just be an approximation, but didn't realize there was really enough variation in body proportions to make automation impractical. Rats!

You are correct about this being a real challenge. I have done some research and some experiments and found it to be almost insurmountable to do it all automatically. I do have a height-adjusting pose ball that I made a while back. It works pretty well when the avatar is standing. I have not tried it while sitting. And, it turns out, it works very well for medium sized avatars all the way up to giant avatars. It does not work quite as well for kid sized or dwar sized avatars. It still comes close, but thier feet still float off the ground a little. If anyone would like a copy of it to try, just IM me in-world.

The beds that allow correction or position and rotation have the advantage of using pose balls that are not actually linked to the bed. They are rezzed separately and can be moved by scripting. So that really isn't the same as putting the sit target in the furniture.

I would love it if at some point LL decided to give us functions to determine the exact lengths of limbs as well as their position and rotation. I don't see that happening any time soon, though.

It would seem that with AV hieght one could work out the ratios for a reasonably proportioned AV.

Besides, it is the distance from hip joint to bottom of butt with legs bent 90 that matters. It would not seem that distance would vary by that much.

Getting the hip to knee and ankle distances would be a problem, but in reasonably proportioned AV's that should also be a ratio.

Odd ball AV's will look odd in SL. But... so what?

I've thought of that script too. Just have not gotten round to it.