How to… A/Os

Ok, I’m going to start a series of tutorials.  I’ll group them all properly and tag them to make them easy to find.  By request, here is the next in the series… the A/O.

Let’s start at the beginning.  An A/O or Animation Override will animate your avatar through walking, sitting, standing, flying, falling, swimming, running, crawling, etc.   This means you will stop walking around like you have a stick up your butt and will be able to sit gracefully or manly anywhere you like.  The *new resident* look will be gone from personna.

There are 2 basic ways in which to get an A/O.  You can go and buy one already done for you or you can make your own using the Zhao basic hud(HUDs will be another topic   ).  Lets talking about buying one first.  There are many stores selling them.  You get a variety of stands/sits/walks/etc all packaged neatly into a hud that you simply attach and your off.  No muss no fuss.  Most of the time.  Occasionally something breaks or doesn’t quite work right but we’ll go with, no muss no fuss.   How on earth can you possibly pick one out though?  Sorry, can’t really help with that one.  It’s all rather subjective.  My suggestion though, go thru all the pose stands, sometimes twice.  Don’t go for the most expensive, or the cheapest.  Your looking for something that feels like you when you look at him/her.  There are loads of animation stores out there.  Currently I’m using one from Vista.  Their hud has the *sit anywhere* which I’m sure everyone has by now.  I simply like the transitions between animations.  It looked natural.  Price wasn’t bad either.  I can also edit it to add more poses if I so choose.  Which brings us to the build your own option.

Most A/Os are run off of notecards within a menu driven HUD.  The HUD reads the notecard and the script within plays the animations.  90% of them have instructions on how to *update and add* animations.  The script does all the work provided  you type the name of the animation correctly in the notecard.  Now there are lots of options here too.  You can buy a Huddle which will hold all your dances and your A/O as well as other stuff, or you can grab a free A/O huddle and use that or you can buy one.  For the most part, these are easy to do if you type the animation names correctly on the notecard.  You rezz the A/O, which is normally a round transparent prim that you’ll *wear*, on the ground, edit it, add your animations on the contents tab, edit the notecard, pull it back into your inventory, then wear it and off you go.  If you get script errors, check your spelling! 

So, there you have it.  A rather brief tutorial on the A/O.  My recommendation???  Buy one that you can add animations to.  That way you can swap animations and never really get bored with it.  Someone else has done all the scripting leaving you to simply enjoy it.  If your really really geeking, build your own.  Me, I’m happy with my new one from Vista.  kthxbai

 

P.S.  I’m not being paid in any way for recommending Vista.  There are other animation overrides out there:  SEMotion, Animazoo, Abranimations to name a few.