Furniture poses c.q. animations

Hello people,

I've been building a lot of furniture, and now comes the time to make them, well, sittable (some are a bit unusual.) I've racked the forums, but it's not so easy to find the answer.

At /54/6a/153963/1.html I found suggestions for determining a correct sit position, but try as I might, I can't get this to work for me.

Alternatively, I think I might want to use sitting animations. Is there a place where I can get these? Preferably cheaply as I'll have to rummage through a lot of them to get one or more that I can use - and if not, well, I suppose the best thing I can do is to make them myself, in Poser. I can make animations, but have no experience with doing sitting animations for objects in SL. Does anyone perhaps have any suggestions for me? All I want is to make my unusual (sometimes large, or unusually deep, or rotated) chairs sittable for other avatars.

Thank you,
Xylo

You can get lots of free sit poses at junkyards and newbie areas, after that look for a script here in the forums called easy sit target, its a real time saver, then you just need a simple sit target script to put the corrdinates the target generates and then you are done. I dont even use pose balls in my furniture unless I abosultely have to.


ETA oops I see you have looked into the targeter, well I know how to use it and am in game most days around 6pm cst if you need one on one help...

That is very kind of you, Nectere, and I'll gladly take you up on it. Just tried for you in-world right now, but you're not there (I don't know what cst is, I'm afraid.) I'll keep looking for you some more, in the coming days.

Xylo

Central Standard Time = CST - my current time is 10 am roughly

I will be popping on in about two hours if you want me to give you a shout

Your best bet is to incorporate a pose ball with a sit animation into your furniture.

Bits and Bobs sells both single-use (no-copy but transferrable) and multi-use (Copyable, licensed so you can make and sell multiple copies, which you set as no-copy for the next owner). You pay more for the copyable license, of course. Roughly 10x the cost of a single-use pose ball.

Free poses and a public script pose ball are certainly a viable way to go. 5 of the chairs I make and sell go that route. Look in the script library for a public pose ball script that you can freely use and modify. The main issue with the free poses are that most of them are absolutely stationary. Maybe your head can move, and maybe your arms move when you type, but in general the figure doesn't move or shift while you sit there. The more expensive purchased sit poses are animations that have you shift a bit, cross and uncross your legs, look around, or do other minor movements. This looks far more natural than a rigid freebie sit pose.

Some animated seating poses look overly fidgety, like your av has had way too much ribena. A mix is good, though.

Thanks, Ceera. Nectere has been helping me wonderfully, by patiently teaching me the scripting I referred to in-world. So now I can position the sit pose or sit animation very precisely, which is necessary in the case of furniture with unusual angles.

As regards the pose balls: these would add another prim to each chair, would they not? I have worked hard to make the lowest-prim possible versions of my chairs, and don't want to add prims to them. Isn't it also possible to just put an animation in the chair, possibly with an added script?

Xylo

Yes, it is possible to put a pose-ball script directly into the prims of a furniture item. I sell some one-prim Japanese kneeling cushions that do precisely that.

* Pick a suitable prim, sich as the one that makes the seat of the chair.

* Add the same script and animation file that you would use in a pose ball, but don't use any code that makes the pose ball prim become invisible when it is in use!

* Adjust the settings in the script so a default male or female character sits properly on it.

The positive thing here is that you save a prim.

The bad thing is, it is MUCH harder for an end-user to adjust the sit position so they look right on your chair, if they don't happen to have a standard-sized avatar. For example, my 4 foot tall chibi vixen kneels several centimeters above that kneeling cushion, while my 7 foot tall Sauk friend (a big winged fox) has his knees and shins almost through the cushion and into the floor below it. If the cushion had a pose ball, they could easily edit the position of the ball relative to the cushion, to fit the item to themselves.

I see. But that is not a one-time adjustment, I take it? That is to say - the poseball will always be visible so long as no one sits on the furniture?

As long as you make your furniture moddable to the end user/owner, the end user can adjust the pose ball and it will stick for them - but if some other av comes along that is a dif size, it will need to be readjusted for that av. And yes, poseballs add another prim or more depending on how many sit positions you include in your furniture. I have seen couches with more prims for pose balls than the basic design of the couch. That said however, there are times when a pose ball is required and the built in anim is not sufficient. Now on to bigger and better as you get going, there are scripts out there that will give you a menu of poses and then rez a ball for that pose reducing the amount of "floating balls". I also have a really cool chaise I picked up in the beginning that by simply touching it changes poses (and there are no balls), and for the most part the poses in it are unisex. There are all kinds of ways to do it really, it comes down to functionality and what your preference is in the end.

Anyway, what you end up doing with or without pose balls is using a happy medium shape and adjusting to that for both male and female so that the sit anim is not too far off on either end of the av scale regardless of what size av sits there. I have an apparently smaller than normal av so I am often floating above whatever it is I am using, whether its dancing, sitting or what have you.

Pose balls that hide/show become invisible when you sit on them, they can also be told to hide so you dont have the pose ball clutter mucking up your pristine view - but rest assured they are still there taking up prims. The point is if you use a show/hide pose ball script in a chair cushion, then whenever the av sits on the chair the cushion will disappear, I have seen some expensive bars built this way and its a shame it wasnt corrected. (barstool seat disappears beneath user leaving a stump in the rear lol)

Good to hear you got everything working for you!

Most pose balls are scripted so that when you sit on the ball, it becomes invisible, and when you stand up, it becomes visible again. Better quality ones also have a chat command, typically "/1show" and "/1hide", that allows you to show or hide all of them that are within voice range, all at once. I normally hide mine when they are not in use.

If a chair has only one pose ball, you don't ever need to see the pose ball to sit on it. Sitting on that chair will assume that the pose ball is your sit target.

A pose ball is FAR easier to adjust than a script. Edit the chair, select 'Edit linked parts', sit on the pose ball, and move the ball as needed until you're seated where you wish. Stop editing, and the ball is custoimized for you. It will hold that setting until someone else changes it. And they must have mod rights on thr chair to change it.

Editing a script inside a no-ball chair is much tougher, as you must enter numerical values that ars often not simple distances or angles. If the seat prim has been rotated or altered from the default creation position, you'll start seated at a wacky angle, and must compensate for that. For example, my one-prim cushion looked far better for texturing ourposes if I rotated the sphere 90 degrees before flattening it, so the 'poles' were on the edges. But that meant that the initial pose ball seated position was sideways to the edge of the cushion!

Hello Nectere and Ceera,

Thank you both, again, for your extensive answers. I do think I'd like to go the way of the poseball-less script. Is there an example-script anywhere, that I could use to work from? I suppose one adds such a script and an animation, to the chair? (I'm still not having much luck with adding animations to chairs. I keep coming out sitting in the default sit pose, instead of the animation.)

There is a Dutch saying: 'one fool can ask more questions than 10 wise men are able to answer.'

Xylo

Look in the scripting forum here for Lex Neva's Sit Target Helper. Don't waste money paying for one, certainly. Lex's scripts will give you the line of code you need for setting sit targets after lining stuff up with a temporary poseball.

I made two-prim sofas with two poses in using it. It's fried gold.

Get one of my kneeling cushions. The script is open-source, and I only charge L$10 for them. That would give you the script and a sample of how it is used. They are for sale on SL Boutique. Or IM me in-world, and I'll give you just the script itself, free
.

I'll buy it. Don't want to rob you of the L$10...

Thanks, Ace. I've been working with that, under the generous guidance of Nectere. What I can't get to work is making the chair use the added animation; it keeps using the default sit pose.

Are you going to be inworld today at around 10am SLT? I would really like to see what you are working with since I cant seem to produce the same issue.

Pose ball scripts usually either reference the exact name of the animation they are to use (by editing the script or a notecard to name that animation), or more commonly they do an inventory check of the prim they are in, and take the first animation that they find there. So the animation file needs to be in the same prim as the pose script, and both need to be in the prim that they click to sit on.

And I'm hardly worried about the sale of one L$10 cushion, dear. It's one of my oldest products, other than my t-shirts that I sell. The only reason those cushions are even still an item that I sell is that some people still regularly want to buy them, and having them on SLB is a handy way to distribute them. Statisticly, their sales hardly make a blip in my overall sales figures.

Hello Nectere,

I'm going to be online right now, but this is sleeping time in the US....and the very early morning for me. Who knows, maybe I can make it work now, although mornings aren't my best. Will let you know how it goes,

Xylo

Hello Ceera,

I wasn't really assuming that your existence hinged on the 10 Lindens, large sum though it is. Precisely because it's such a negligible amount I didn't like to come asking for the script for free. You do understand.

Xylo

Update:

Got things working! With the inestimable help of Nectere and Ceera (your kneel script helped) I finally have it all working. Can now have the pose coordinated right, add an animation, and even rez the chairs at the right height.
Thanks so much, Nectere and Ceera and others who were kind enough to help. I'm very happy to finally have control over my chairs.

Xylo

Thats awesome Xylo - so glad to hear you got everything working - its a pleasure to help someone learn to do for themselves

It's very generous of you both to spend so much time explaining.

Xylo

Great! Glad to help!

Someone else IM'ed me in-world asling for similar help with a sit script. Unfortunately, I had to restart my client before I was able to nore down her name and reply. Whoever you were, could you IM me again?