Getting Animated

By David Fliesen (SL: Joey Aboma)

bring.your.prims.2.life

with Prim Puppeteer

Brief History of AnimationThe Magic Lantern(c1650)

Thaumatrope (1824)

Phenakistoscope(1831)

Zoetrope (180 AD; 1834)

Flip book (1868)

Praxinoscope (1877)

A phenakistoscope disc by Eadweard Muybridge

The Silent Era

The Golden Age of Animation

The Television Era Animation

TechniquesStop motionCGI animation

Key Frames and TweeningKeyframes were done by the main animators and their assistants did the inbetween frames, known as tweening

Later this process became automated as we now see with today’s GIF and Flash animations on the web Key Key Tween

DEMO: Prim Puppeteer

Prim Puppeteer is just like stop-motion animation. Use the “Record” button to take a snapshot of Position, Rotation, and Scale of all the linked prims. Playing back the recorded snapshots is what creates the animation.

Prim Puppeteer by Todd Borst of XD Fusion

Beginner Tutorial Video: http://tinyurl.com/puppeteervid

Get Prim Puppeteer: http://tinyurl.com/puppeteerlm

Hands-on: Bring Your Prims to Life

More Advanced Skills

Editing Tips

Animation Triggers

Playback Styles

Snapshot Order

Optimization

Puppeteer Anchors

Editing Tips

Use /32 replace, /32 delete, and /32 insert to make the recording process easier.

Use undo (ctrl-z) to copy prim position between different snapshots.

Make backups!

More Advanced Skills

Animation Triggers

It is useful to know the manyways that you can playback the animation with Prim Puppeteer.

Each TRIGGER, STYLE, and ORDER combination can have very different and useful effects.

Get familiar with each one.

More Advanced Skills

Playback Styles

LOOP – after playing returns to beginning and plays out again in a continuous loop

STEP – same as LOOP but each click moves just one position of the animation

PLAY-ONCE – plays animation to end and stops

PING-PONG – plays animation either (a) from first-to-last frame and stops or (b) from last-to-first frame and then stops

More Advanced Skills

Snapshot Order

TRIGGER TIPS:

Use “Quiet Mode” to turn off trigger instructions. It’s under “Advanced” menu.

Set On-Chance to 100% to use it as a simple timer based trigger.

Reuse snapshots with custom order.

More Advanced Skills

• Low-to-High(ascending)

• High-to-Low(descending)

• Custom (5 4 3 2 1)

• Random

• Random List (2,3,4)

Optimization

Don’t animate too many prims. 100 = too much. 30 or less = ideal.

Avoid small delay speeds. Faster animations use more resources.

Avoid using channel zero for chat triggers.

Use “/32 removeunusedscripts” to delete Puppeteer Link scripts that are not needed.

Don’t use Puppeteer on temp-rez objects. Rezzing objects with mono scripts is currently very slow and resource intensive.

More Advanced Skills

To avoid lag when using Puppeteer:

PuppeteerAnchorsPuppeteer has an anchoring feature to make editing animations easier.

It is like attachments for linked objects.

Creating anchors also allows additional prims to be added to a published object without breaking its animation.

The system can currently support about 20 anchors.

See Puppeteer Guide Anchoring section for more details

More Advanced Skills

Hands-on

Animation Mini Build Off

Use demo prims or your own

Show what can you do with what you learned

How can animations bring value to your training?

Animation Resources“The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams (director of animation for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”)

Puppeeter v8.5 Guide by Todd Borst (XD Fusion)

Open Prim Animator by Todd Borst: wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Prim_Animator

Thanks to all of the developers that provide Open Source to help further the state of the art.