From the Wyverns nest

Making A Tiny Pose in QAvimator

March 8th, 2008 Posted in Tutorials

You may notice in Second Life that sometimes you come across these cute little tiny avatars. They come in a number of forms, rabbits, cats, pandas, hedgehogs, dragon hatchlings…  All are blindingly cute, mischievous ankle biters.

Interested in making a tiny, you try to duplicate what you have seen, but no matter what you try, it isn’t possible to create an avatar smaller than ~5ft yet these tinies are smaller.

The first tinies are acknowledged to have been created by Kage Seraph. The technique he introduced was to use a script to override the currently active default animation(s), and activate another in its place (often called an animation-overrider or ao). The animation itself folds the human avatar up into a smaller package to achieve the required “tiny” height.

This tutorial covers how to create a simple tiny standing animation using QAvimator.

Getting Started

The first stage is to open the QAvimator program. The screen shots I have used are the Windows version of QAvimator, but the other platforms behave in much the same way.

Before starting to create your pose, un-tick the “Joint Limits” under the Options menu. This allows you to twist the body beyond normal human limits. Normally QAvimator will constrain limb movement to “sensible” human limits. In this case we are going to fold the human avatar so we need to exceed normal limits.

Also drop the number of frames in the animation to 2. The first frame is protected and therefore you can not edit it (and it’s required by SL). For a simple static pose you only need two frames. This isn’t absolutely required, but I like to do this to be tidy.

Legs

The first mod to the human avatar is to fold the legs in on themselves. You do this by selecting the Left Shin (lShin) by either clicking on it or choosing it from the drop down menu and set the X rotation to 180 degrees. Then select the Left Foot (lFoot) and set this in to the leg by setting the X Rotation to -90 degrees.

Repeat this process for the Right Shin and Right Foot.

Arms

Again the arms need to be folded, the process to do this is much the same as for the legs, this time take the Left Fore Arm (lForeArm) and twist the Y Rotation to -180 degrees. Repeat for the Right Fore Arm. You can leave the hands as they are as we will deal with those later.

Torso

The changes up to now have given you a basic human torso with folded legs and arms. The final stage is to fold the torso as well. To do this take the abdomen and set the X Rotation to 180 degrees, then take the chest and set the X Rotation to -180 degrees.

Upload Animation

Now save your completed file as a “.bvh” file for upload into SL. You may also wish to choose the “Optimise BVH” option from the Edit menu.

To upload the completed animation into Second Life, choose Upload Animation from the File menu, make sure you select the Loop tick box and the priority to 4.  In Second Life, the minimum priority is 1, the maximum is 4. By setting the priority to 4 you minimise the chance of your animation being interrupted by a standard Linden animation.

To try to tidy the hands into the body I tend to also set the hands to fist. Most “primmy” tiny bodies will hide them anyway. If you don’t choose Loop, the animation will play once and then exit back to a standard Linden pose (probably stand).

Now you have a completed animation suitable for a pose ball.

Hold On, That Doesn’t Look Right!

Yes! One of the idiosyncrasies with Second Life is that any X,Y, Z Rotation set to zero in the animation will be treated as a movable joint.  Therefore when you activate the animation in Second Life, rather than your avatar taking on the T-pose as seen in the program, the avatar instead stands with the arms by it’s side. If you actually want to set a T-pose then the Z Rotation must be non-zero.  To fix the position of any body part, you must set at least one Rotation as non-zero.

You may also notice that the avatar is floating in the air slightly.  This isn’t so important if a pose ball is being used, since the position can be altered with an offset.   To correct this, the Y Position of the hip part must be reduced.

Tiny Development Kit

Now this just gives you a tiny standing pose with the arms set as a ‘T’.  You can repeat the process to make any number of different animations that would be suitable for a pose ball.  However, this is not the full story!

If you where aiming to make a tiny avatar, you would also need other tiny animations to use when the avatar is performing certain actions, such as sit, stand, animations for walk, run and fly.  You would also need a script to override the default Linden animations and trigger the special animations instead.  Lastly you would need a tiny shape.  The animations will work on the current size of the avatar, therefore if the avatar is 7ft, you will get a folded 7ft.

If this sounds like too much work, Kage Seraph sells a Tiny Development Kit that comes with full-permissions versions of various tiny animations, scripts and a shape that would allow any tiny animation maker  to get started with the minimum of fuss.