Animation Overrides (AO)

Basic Walk

Don't Underestimate The Importance Of Body Language

 Animation Overrides (AOs) are great for adding life, realism, and personality to your Second Life avatar.  With the right AO, you can make them appear to be shy, bold, sexy, anxious, or silly just through the way they walk, stand, or run.

You will also need them for the more unusual avatars. For example, mermaids will need swimming and floating animations. Got wings or a tail? They will require a different kind of AO. 

AOs only work when you right click and 'add' them to your avatar body. You can turn them off while you're wearing them, but if you take it off again, your body will got right back to the built in system animations.

Where Do I Find AOs?

These are some of the most popular sellers. The links will open a teleport map in a new window.

Body Language

Go&See (mostly dance and faces)

Gold Square

Omy (walking and running animations are in the Dance section)

Oracul (Budget friendly, all the basics, mix and match)

Sweet's (on Marketplace, search for AO, great basic Free AOs that you can customize)

Tuty's

Vista

Voir

My favorites are Oracul and Voir, for their low cost, the ability to test and buy animations separately, and their more subtle options.  You can also look for 'breathing' poses in pose shops. They are almost like static poses, but they move ever so slightly.

I keep seeing the word 'Bento.' What does it mean?

Project Bento is an enhanced 'skeleton' added to Second Life avatars after mesh bodies became popular.  Basically, it adds more points of articulation so that the mesh bodies can move more realistically. It affects hands and faces in particular. If you see it mentioned, it means you need a mesh body for best results. 

What's In An AO?

These are standard animation categories:

• Standing (when you're not moving, you're still moving/looking around/fidgeting)
• Standing Up (when you get up from a fall or from sitting)
• Crouching
• Walking
• Running
• Turn Left/Turn Right
• pre jump/Jump
• Falling/Landing
• Sitting on a chair/on the ground
• Laying
• Hovering in the air
• Flying up/forward/down
• Swimming up/forward/down
• Typing

Your system avatar body has animations built in, so it will default to those if you don't have a custom animation. The animations are premade and run on a loop, anywhere from 2 seconds to 2 minutes. They can't be altered, but other animations and static poses can affect them.

Can I Run Multiple Animations?

Yes, but! There are multiple levels of overrides within animations, and they are assigned numbers when they're made. The higher the number, the more likely it will override the other animations you're wearing. You may need to turn your AO off when you're sitting in a chair or using a poseball, because they might interfere with the effect.

Faces And Hands

You can customize your expressions and hand movements with the HUDS that come with the head and body. You can also buy them separately. Oracul in particular has a nice, free Bento enhanced hand and face HUDs in their shop with basic options.

How to build a custom AO

So maybe after a while of testing animations, you realize that you like the walk animation from one, but the stand animation from another, and the flying animation from a third? 

Yes, you can custom design your own.  I recommend buying the Zhao-II AO from Marketplace.  It's free, and easy to set up.

Find A Place To Work

You will need to rez the box to open it. This means you need to find a place where you can pull it out of your inventory and drop it on the ground.  Do an area search for 'sandbox'* if you don't have your own place.  

*Sandboxes are places where everybody can build and drop things on the ground.  Be polite, move away from other people working, and right click and take all your items when you're done.

AO HUD Setup

Pull the box out of your inventory and drop it on the ground. 

Right click on that object and select 'Open.' All of the items in the box will be copied into your inventory into its own folder, named 'ZHAO-II MB2 BOX (2.0.19)'

Inside that folder is an object, named 'ZHAO-II MB2.0.19[modern].'  Pull that object out of your inventory and rez it on the ground as well.

Right click on the Zhao-II object and select 'edit'.  

Rename Your AO

Click on the 'General' tab and give the object a custom name in the Name textbox.  I usually call it the avatar's name, 'Custom AO,' and the date. Naming it now will let you find it more easily in your inventory, and not accidentally wear the empty one later.

Find The Content

Next, click on the 'Content' tab in the 'Edit' window. You will see two notecards, labeled 'Read Me First' and 'Default'. Open those and review them.  You don't need to worry about the scripts, just make sure you don't remove them.

Add More Content

Go into your inventory and click and drag and drop the animations you want to use from the inventory into the contents folder of the object. It may take a moment for it to generate, be sure you see the little running person icon and the name of the animation appear.

How To Get Content Out Of Other AOs

If you've have animations in other AOs that you want to use, drop those AOs on the ground as well.  Right click on them, select 'edit,' go to the content tab, and look for the animation files (these have the little running person icon.) Click and drag the animations into your Inventory folder (make sure you're on the main tab and not the 'recent' tab). From there, you can right click and play them to figure out which ones they are if it isn't obvious from their name.

If an animation is no-copy, it will disappear from the AO object, and when you move it to the new AO, it will disappear from your Inventory. Keep track of where you put it!

Edit The Default Notecard

'Read Me First' is very informative, but a bit much to look at.  The vital editing information is all in the 'Default' notecard.  

What you do is take the file name of your animation and add it to the category line you want it to be in.  

If you want to put multiple animations in for a single motion, you write out the first name, followed by a vertical bar: ' |  ' and then the next name, with no spaces in between the names and the bar. 

Then hit save on the notecard.

Here's a sample of a blank and full completed Default notecard. Note that you do not need to add animations for every option. It doesn't care if you put a floating animation on the walking line, either, so be as creative as you want.

Finishing Up

Once your 'Default' notecard is saved, and all your animations have been added to the contents tab, you can close the edit menu, right click on the object, and select 'take.'  It will pop back into your inventory. Now you can right click on it and select 'add.'  It will show up in the bottom left hand corner of your viewer.  If the bottom most button is red, click on it to make it green, and active. I don't really mess with the other buttons, but their use should be outlined in the Read Me First notecard.

I welcome all questions and comments! I am posting my own experience, so if you have places you like to shop, please feel free to add them in the comments section.

Second Life - All About Animations

There are three major categories when it comes to animation in Second Life.

Dancers showing off their skills.  Since this was for a photo, I used Static animations, or poses.  If this were a live event, you would use a sit animation from a Dance Ball or HUD. If you just wanted to boot scoot all the time, everywhere you went, instead of walking, you would drop an animation into an AO (animation override).

Animation Override, or AO. 

All Second Life system bodies have built in animations for movement. These include walking, running, jumping, flying, swimming, sitting, falling, etc. They're kind of old, and don't work very well with mesh bodies, so most people wear an AO (a HUD) to customize their movements. These animations get dropped into an object that you then wear. Mesh heads may also have custom AOs for facial expressions.

See my follow-up post on AOs for more details!

Sit Animations

Next most common are what I am calling Sit animations, because you have to 'sit' on an object in order to use them.  They are placed inside furniture and objects that you interact with, so when you select sit on a chair, for example, your body will be positioned and controlled by the animations within the chair.  It doesn't have to be furniture. You can 'sit' on a dance ball and start dancing, climb a ladder, drive a car, interact with other characters, and more.  They generally run on a loop of premade movements.

Static Animations

These are poses that don't move, mainly used for photography. They are also placed inside objects and furniture, or you can operate them directly from your inventory.

I will follow up on these in more detail in future posts.