If, like me, you’ve barely scratched the surface of animating for Second Life but don’t really understand how it all works, you might want to look for a class at Caledon Oxbridge conducted by Red Quixote to get a really solid grounding in the basics, with lots of detail. It’s presented in a very focused, text-based format (YAY for text instruction, BOO for voice instruction).

The class consists of a series of engaging slides (many of which use classical cartoon animations to illustrate the theory behind avatar animation using the SL skeleton). A LOT of text will scroll by, full of seriously detailed information. You will be given a notecard with the slides and the class transcript as a part of your materials, plus there is a tutorial on how to create a simple animation in QAvimator on your own later. This is the method that seems to “stick” best for me – I need to refer back to notes a lot, and trying to make decent notes from a lecture-based class format has let me down badly as the typist’s brain cells get older.

Dhughan’s most popular products are all dependent on animations, and it’s becoming clear that improving them is necessary, but neither of us were willing to spend the Linden$ on Avastar, the $22USD upgrade for Blender that makes life easier for clothing and animation content creators. At least, not until our/my Blender skills improve, which won’t be soon.

Also, for some time now I’ve actually had QAvimator installed, I downloaded a lot of Linda Kellie’s .bvh files, I’ve got BVHacker installed, I’ve watched a number of tutorial videos and even dabbled with creating a standard “start” file that’s supposedly already optimized, but that was months ago and of course, I don’t remember much.

Not only that, but I’ve got New World Studio installed and have a private grid handy as a test bed… actually, I’ve got various versions of NWS installed and my file structure is a mess, but I’ve got a place to build, backed up as an OAR, so that I can upload textures and animations and mesh for free. I’ve put in some time today to straighten things out and re-learn how the server commands work, so after some struggle I’ve got my most recent inventory loaded, running the current latest version of New World Studio. It’ll always be a private grid; I’ve toyed with the idea of opening something up on a spare machine that could be a server, but don’t have the calling, I think, it be the goddess of an open grid.

Some of the sites I frequently visit on these “refamiliarization trips” are:

Hypergrid Business: Making New World Studio work for you to remind myself how to configure a specific viewer (currently Kokua)
Inventory Archives – Opensim
Opensim Archives – OpenSim

Next time I upgrade, I really need to follow Maria Korolov’s advice and configure before unzipping the new version. I did it the bass-ackwards hard way this time.

Anyway, QAvimator, tutorial, test bed for free uploads.