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 :)