Day 46: Pokadots and Animation Override

Here I am, all dressed up in my latest pink pokadot prim skirt and flower top to visit Yadni's Junkyard. This doesnt sound like the kinda place you go with a new skirt and white heels, but if you havent been there, its well worth the trip. Behind me is the famous wall of freebies, with items arranged by the dates they were boxed. Each box contains several dozen items, with most being free or selling for $1L (since that's one-third of a penny, lets just call that free :) ).

Yadni's is a great place for household stuff and gadgets. They have everything from furniture, decorations, entire buildings, vehicles (cars, planes, boats), avatars (furries, monsters, etc), plants, scripts (dangerous!), gadgets, and even food and drinks. To get to Yadni's look up "Yadni" under Search/Places. The SLURL is Leda (210,28,54).

Yadni's also has men and women's clothing. However, I prefer Sarah's and Free Dove for women's clothing, since they break up outfits into separate displays. This saves me time afterwards in sifting through all the cloths.

Here are a couple gadgets from Yadni's that I wear:

1. antiAFK HUD: This prevents your Second Life session from timing out. Great for camping! (under 5/06, 25 Free Attachments)

2. MultiTool-Hello-v5 - Hug/kiss/goto/etc: This gives you the ability to hug and kiss other avatars in SL, provided the other person accepts the action. I use this to ruthlessly hug all cute AV's I see, so watch out! :) (under 12/05, 51 Free Gadgets)

My outfit today is the result of the Photoshop pattern grab from a couple days ago. I grabbed the pokadot pattern because I always wanted to do a pokadot skirt. The top is my first successful attempt at producing a V-neck top.



I used the Photoshop Emboss effect to create an edge seam effect on the top. But because of the flower pattern, its tough to see the seam unless you really stare at my chest. Hey, stop that! :P

The purpose for my visit to Yadni's is to find an Animation Override script for my white heels. Animation Override are animations that you can use to replace the standard Second Life animations, such as for walking, standing, flying, swimming, etc. I was trying to replace my robot walk with a more feminine version.

You can do Animation Override (or AO) using a number of techniques. Some objects have built-in AO, such as shoes or bracelets. You just wear it and the AO happens. You can also purchase AO HUDs. HUDs are attachments that attach to your screen instead of to your AV. AO HUDs range from the top-of-the-line HUDDLES Deluxe to WetIkon to a number of pre-loaded HUDs based on Ziggy's HUD Animation Overrider (ZHAO).



For day-to-day use, I prefer ZHAO. For one thing, its free :) The best place I have found to get a clean copy is at Outrider Animations (Search/Places).

You will also need some animations. There are several boxes of animations at Yadni's. Once you get them into your Inventory, you can see what they do by right clicking on the animation and selecting "Play in World". Some of these animations are rather...unusual. :P

ZHAO comes with instructions on how to load it up. In short, rez the ZHAO object on the ground, edit the ZHAO object, drop the animations you want into the Content screen of the ZHAO object, edit the "Empty" notecard, "Take" the ZHAO back into Inventory, and "Wear" it.



You will see this show up on your HUD (Natalia is not included :P). The ZHAO HUD is on the right side of the screen.

Theres a trick with editing the "Empty" notecard that I want to share with you. Below is the contents of the "Empty" notecard from my ZHAO:

--------------------------------------
:: [ Walking (also Striding) 1 ] ::
sl stiletto walk
:: [ Running ] ::

:: [ CrouchWalking ] ::

:: [ Flying (also FlyingSlow) ] ::

:: [ Turning Left ] ::

:: [ Turning Right ] ::

:: [ Jumping ] ::

...continues...
--------------------------------------

Only the Walking 1 animation has been replaced in this part of the notecard. The replacement animation is "sl stiletto walk". Note that the name must match your animation file name *EXACTLY*. It is case sensitive, space sensitive, and sensitive to symbols!

Also, make sure that you dont add any extra blank lines to the notecard! When I first filled mine in, I placed a blank line under "sl stiletto walk" to make it more readible. Dont do it! It must have *EXACTLY* 1 line between each heading, whether you put an animation name in that line or not. 1 and only 1 line. Took me a hour to figure that out! And thats before I went blonde :)

So thats it! If all went well, you should be strutting to your new sexy walk and standing like a model.

Of course, once you get hooked on AO, you are going to need animations. There are 3 large animation vendors that I know of: Abranimations, Animation Warehouse, and M&P Animations & Poses.

I have some complaints about animation stores in general in Second Life. First, I feel like I am walking into an adult toy store whenever I am in one of these places. 90% of the store is...um...mature content. Typically in a small corner on the first floor is where you will find the Walk Replacements and Model Poses. So if you are an animation store owner, can you create a separate section for...um...daily-use animations?

Second, guys totally get the wrong idea when they find you in there. Ive gotten some rather suggestive approaches from guys in the animation stores. So look here: Im just there to get some walk replacements and poses. Just because you catch a girl in an animation store doesnt mean she wants to cyber!

So can we get our own little section for the PG animations? Preferably with a sign saying "Don't Hit on the Girls!" ;P