Stupid Animation Tricks

I've been kicking around on the seedier side of SL lately, looking for good material. I seem to have found it in unexpected places. One thing that's been sticking in my mind is, bad animation problems. I admit to being a bit of a snob where animations are concerned. I'm not an animation creator in SL -- yet -- but I have a background in 3D art, and I own a copy of Poser which I use to create poses for my own SL products. So when things go wrong, or even wonky, I notice, maybe more than the regular guy.

Of course I also realize that this is Second Life, where animations can't be longer than a minute, and the way you get animated at all is to usually get your 'sit' animation replaced. This is why you see an avatar sit in the middle of a SexGen bed before they actually get going -- that's the default while the bed script requests permission to make you grant permission to make your av get busy. This probably going to be a lesson in SL mechanics, but hopefully this will be instructional to those creating the anims, on how to fix these problems. And why it matters to the everyday SL resident.

Here's why it matters. You know how you may be using some piece of SL bondage furniture sometime, and suddenly the person who's supposed to be clamped down suddenly jumps up to type about how hot being clamped down is making them? Anyone who's spent time in the free sex clubs has had this happen, and I've seen it in more sophisticated places as well -- the suspension racks in Latexia where the Potential Latex Dolls hang for us to see, for example. The problem here is, Animation Priority.

When you upload animations to SL, you're supposed to set a priority number, which determines whether the animation can be overridden by others. Typing has a priority of 2, and the default upload priority is 1, so if you aren't paying attention, your bondage pose is going to allow your little submissive to suddenly jump up and type "Yes, Master!" Which can totally kill the hot roleplay you might have going at the time. To me, that just looks sloppy, because really, it is.

There is a way around the 'jump up and type' problem, should you encounter it. If you're used to emoting by typing '/me', you'll have noticed that your avatar doesn't do the typing animation when you're typing out the line. Even if you don't type 'me', simply typing the forward-slash '/' will stop the typing from triggering, and the avatar will not raise hands. Which can be important when the hands are supposed to be cuffed in place.

There's another animation problem I want to hit on, because I saw it a couple of times in the last week. This is a problem that has to do with keyframing, which you won't know about unless you do animations. I'll mention it here because to some people, it doesn't look like a problem, it looks like a neckbreaker pose. The picture you see there is of my girl Erin, who, upon seating herself in that awfully-wrong pose, IMs me and asks, "Can I get out of this pose? It's too violent!" I assured her that it was not supposed to be that way.

This one happens when the avatar is placed in a position at an angle to the normal posture, like lying down or being upside-down. If you don't keyframe the head and neck , even just a little, the head animation will get overridden and the avatar head will pop upright, which looks really wrong in most situations. The solution is discussed here (under 'spinning the whole body' -- the trick is the last item), I don't need to bore anyone who doesn't need to know.

I almost started in on the Free Sex Bench (seen at right) and how it exemplifies many problems: low-priority animations, fixed-place cuffs that rarely fit the avatar's limbs, and just plain bad, jerky, poses... but I won't. Actually, I just did. Maybe someone needs to make a free replacement... maybe that someone is me.