Sunday, January 14, 2007

Day 112: Animating Your Prims

Its Sunday! :)

In an effort to have a bit of a RL social life (like go on dates and stuff :P), Im going to do shorter entries on Sunday. This will give me a chance to talk about cool stuff (gadgets, events, news, etc) that doesnt fit in the normal daily entries.

So let me know if you run into anything cool you would like to share with everyone :)



Gadget of the Week:

OK, this has got to be the coolest gadget I came across in a while...um...other than the Babbler last week :P

XD Fusion is home of the Kung Fu Gorilla (thats him behind me :) ). He does kung fu while you shop. Hes not for sale (the smaller Kung Fu monkey is :) ). The cool part is: you can make your own prim puppets!

XD Fusion's main product is the Puppeteer. This is a cool set of scripts for animating a linked set of prims. It comes in 2 versions: Free Edition and Vendor Edition. The Vendor Edition costs $300L and you can resell the animated products you make using the Vendor Edition.

The Free Edition is...well..free. That means you can try prim animation for free! :) The only diff between the Free and Vendor versions is the ability to sell that you make.



Just for the heck of it, I made a metal prim man and tried to animate him. You put 3 scripts into the Root Prim and 3 scripts into each of the linked prims. Then you say "/32 record" to take snapshots. You take a snapshot, move the prims around a bit, then take another snapshot. Kinda like stop-motion animation. When you are done taking snapshots, just say "/32 play" and the stack of prims will go through the motions :)

Note, they dont exactly move that fast, so dont try to model a person sprinting! Moving and rotating prims via script is laggy to begin with.



I had my metal man doing jumping jacks in about 15 minutes. Not bad for my first metal man! :) OK, he falls apart once in a while and goes back together (caused by lag). But such a cool effect!

This would probably work best for flapping wings, arms, tails, etc. It will work on attachments too! Imagine what you can do with flexi wings! :)

You can get to XD Fusion under Search/Places for "fusion". The SLURL is Schell (220,144,252).

***Update: Todd Borst, the author of Puppeteer, made this SUPER CUTE dancing Magic 8 Ball that shows what Puppeteer can do! Heres a video :)

8 comments:

Caterin said...

yes Natalia, spend more time out and about, on dates, dancing, mermaiding...

Metal Man looks just fabby! Will he replace Pose Ball?

Ana Lutetia said...

Hi Natalia.
I have new photos with my avatar in Lisbon (my city).
;)

SLNatalia said...

Caterin, Blue Poseball with always be my love! :P

The Metal Man is just there to jump about! Lol (he gets on your nerves after a while :P)

Ana, I cant want to see the pix :)

Natalia Zelmanov said...

Dear Anonymous, you could still build the same things in TSL! You have the same prims as the main grid...without all the weird places ;P

Firebird said...

Puppeteer has been updated to be easier to use - just insert the scripts, take the build into inventory, rerez and the scripts will distribute themselves into the prims they need to be in. All the funtions are menued, just say /32 menu. Best of all, you can un-publish an animation sequence if you find out you need to edit it, instead of starting all over from the beginning.

Natalia Zelmanov said...

Firebird, thank you for letting me know! Heehee this is definitely one of the coolest tools in SL :)

Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh! This thing is so cool! :D But, the sad thing is (for me at least) is that Im on TSL and all these awesome things are on the Mg. I was just wondering if something like this could be transferred or something. If not, thats totally fine.

You're such a kind person Natalia! Thanks for the tips and tricks ;P Have a nice day :D

Natalia Zelmanov said...

Dear Anonymous, I don't think this can be transferred (this is a bunch of scripts, and the author is in the main grid :( ). Lol look at it this way, you'll end up in the MG sooner or later, but we can never go to the TG...