Beginners Questions: Animated Objects

I couldn't really decide where to ask this question, but I guess this would be the best place.

Just how does one create animated objects? I do not mean animations in avatars, but changes in (at least) the appearance of objects, like moving wings, a cigarette with smoke, or a hat changing position (ok, this one I'd had to complete with an avatars animation, I admit)

Please consider this is a very basic question, as I haven't seen any reference to animated objects so far and thus don't know if it's done within the prims, a LSL script, the textures... whatever.

Thank you for your time,
Jhary

Assuming they don't move in direct response to actions taken by the avatar, which can be done to a certain extent with flexi-prims, it would require scripting individual prims in the object to periodically change position. Or, a cruder method, IMHO, is to have several sets of wings representing separate "frames" of the animation, all but one of which are invisible at any given time.

Note, however, that complex animations involving multiple moving parts are difficult to pull off convincingly. Due to the nature of LSL, it's impossible to get multiple prims to do anything in synch reliably. In an extremely low-lag sim, the discontinuities won't be too obvious, but once it starts getting populated, the illusion falls apart rather quickly.

This is done using a particle system, again, produced by a script in the object.