Animations and where to get them, Part 1

Last time -- so long ago! -- was about animation beds and how to customize the devPose, so this time I'm going to throw some quick hits on places to actually get the animations themselves. With my personal favorite, Deviant's devPose by Riann Maltese, all you need is the animation files, a notecard to set it up, and a little editing skill.

Bits and Bobs
Animation files themselves don't have an in-world substance, they're like textures or scripts, you can't rez them.Which is another reason we have poseballs. It's fairly simple to buy a poseball set, drag the animation file out of the ball and into your inventory, and from there, into to the bed base. Keep in mind that you'll be breaking the poseball by doing this, but since they usually only contain a simple posing script, it's no big loss. One value of poseballs is, they're usually positioned and rotated to adjust the placement of the animations, so you'd do well to take note of the relative position and rotation. If you do some math based on that, you can get an idea of how best to place the balls when you're setting up the pose on the bed. But for that, you have to be an experienced Edit box user, which not everyone is. Suffice to say that I have an Inventory folder called "empty poseballs", in case I want to put the poses back.

That's all information that's usable if you want to pull animations out of poseballs, but ironically, the first animation store I'm going to mention is one where sometimes, you don't want to do that.That would be Bits and Bobs, Craig Altman's store. You many not know the name, but you know the animations. It's easily the most popular 'poseball store' in SL, and although he's not responsible for all the animations the store sells, they all meet a consistent standard of quality that stands above. The ground level of the main store is the 'utility' area, with all kinds of sitting and 'household' poses. The side room and upstairs is strictly romance, from cuddles to sex to weddings -- and they're all good.

If I have to only mention one Bits and Bobs animation, it would be 'Lovescene'. It's easily the best sex animation in SL, not for how dirty it is, but how expressive and compelling. It's not really a pose, but a series of synchronized animations which takes a few minutes to cycle through. And for those people for whom sex poses are evocative of the real thing, its effect is profound. Lovescene isn't a sex pose, it's a lovemaking pose. And this is one of the poseballs that you don't want to take apart. It has a series of ten to twelve or so separate animations that the script runs through, from the initial clinch, to foreplay -- yes, actual foreplay -- to a genuinely hot missionary pose that always, always makes her swoon. Okay, I sound like a hookup artist, but take your SL sweetheart down to Bits and Bobs and try it for yourself. The quality is in the flow of movement and the timing of the interplay between the avatars. Bits and Bobs sells a lot of other poseballs that have single animations you can pull out and add to your custom bed. But for Lovescene, taking the animations out would destroy that functionality, so it's best to keep Lovescene intact someplace, on the couch at home, or in your Inventory for 'romance emergencies'. I could say similar things about 'Devotion', but either you've heard of these two items, or you need to.