How to Create Animation Sequences
What exactly is a Choreography Sequence?
When we talk about a "choreography sequence", this typically refers to the body movements of an avatar over a period of time. "Body Movements" in this case are manipulations of an avatar's skeleton such as leg bends, hip rotations, arm extensions, etc. In Second Life, body movements of an avatar are accomplished by playing pre-recorded "animation" objects. By playing specific animations in specific orders at specific times, we can create a graceful, continuous story.
Building an animation sequence with ChoreoHUD Solo
There are a few different ways to compose sequences of animations together. In this section we'll describe one of the simplest methods, using the "ChoreoHUD Solo" tool included in the MetaHarper Show Tools package. This tool can be used to create an animation sequence suitable for a single avatar at a time.
You might ask what if wish to compose sequences for more than one avatar at a time? Or try out other methods? We'll come back to this later.
Load your Animations
- Go to a place where you can rez objects. You will need about 70 prims free.
- Drag the "MST Choreo HUD SOLO" from your unpacked MetaHarper Show Tools folder onto the ground nearby.
- Copy some animations from your avatar’s inventory and paste them into the HUD’s inventory on the ground. For best results copy less than 40 animations per copy-paste. If you have a very large number of animations to import from another device see the FAQ documentation for a fast method. TIP: Don’t use no-copy animations
- Pick up your MST Choreo HUD off the ground and attach it to your avatar
Select Your Desired Animations
Click the blue button at the bottom of the ChoreoHUD. The display should change to "Sequence Builder Mode"". This mode can be used for quickly assembling a list of timed animations that flow together to create an effect or tell a story. This is often the first step in creating a larger performance that involves dances or animations.
To build a sequence, first click the ‘list’ button in the lower right area of the HUD. This will slide out an window on the right showing all of your loaded animations. Browse and click animations on this right panel to see them play on your avatar. If you like the way an animation looks and want to use it in your sequence, Click the the “left arrow” button at the top of the right-hand window bar to move the currently-playing animation onto the left sequence panel. When you add an animation to the left sequence panel, the name of the animation you selected will be shown in nearby chat (only visible to you). This can be handy if you need to copy and paste the name of an animation for any reason later.
Edit Timing and Order
Once you’ve added a a few animations to the left selection panel you can click lines on this panel to fine-tune the sequence. When you click a line, additional buttons will appear at the top of the left-panel.
Next to each animation, you will see a number to the right of it. That number represents the number of seconds the animation should play. You can change this number by selecting the animation in this left panel and clicking the 'pencil' button at the top of the window. In addition to the pencil button for changing play times, there are a few other buttons you can use at the top of the sequence panel:
- The “(x)” button will remove this line from your sequence
- The “up/down” button will move a line up or down in the sequence order depending on which part of the button you click. Note that sequences begin from the top and work towards the bottom.]
- The (>) button will start playing the sequence starting from the currently selected line, so you can see what it looks like.
You may notice a line that says "STOP" at the end of your sequence. Do not delete this line or move it around. It's normal for this line to be the last in your sequence.
Special Note: If you want to find out low long an animation naturally plays, you can double-click this animation in your avatar inventory, and use the "down" button on the window that will pop up. This is a relatively new feature of SL viewers that some veteran might not know.
(Optional) use 'Record Mode' to help find timings.
If you click the stopwatch icon on the right panel, it will toggle ‘record mode’ on and off. When record mode is active, clicking an animation will play it immediately. As soon as you click a second animation, you will get a printout of how long the previous animation played, and its name. This will be printed both in local chat and additionally in red text at the bottom of the right hand panel. You can use this get quickly get timings for a sequence. Toggle record mode off again to allow selecting animations and bringing them to the left-hand panel.
Special Note: You may notice that your timings are rounded to the nearest hundredth of a second. You might be tempted to use more digits, but the SL sim engine and latency between sim and viewers cannot handle timing resolutions greater than 1/45th of a second at best. Using additional numbers in your timers is not helpful and can be misleading.
Testing / Playing a Completed Sequence
You can test your sequence at any time by using the solid-black triangle “Play” button in the lower right corner of the left panel. When you click this Play button, animations will start playing from the top to the bottom, in the order and timing that you have selected. Animations that have been played will be highlighted in green. You can stop the sequence from playing at any time by using the square “stop” button at the bottom of the left panel. If you desire to start the sequence playing from somewhere in the middle, you may select the line you wish to start from and click the circle-play icon at the top of the left-panel.
Note: When you are playing back sequences, you may click the ‘list’ button to close the animation browser slide out panel to save screen space. The slide out panel is only used when designing a sequence, and not needed for playback.
Save your Sequence
When you are happy with your sequence in the right panel, you can click the “Print” icon in the left-bottom of the sequence panel. Lines will be printed to your nearby chat window (only visible to you). Copy and paste these lines to a notecard, give it a short name, and add this notecard to the MST Choreo HUD. You will want to do this so that your careful work will not be lost in future changes, and also so that you can load your animation sequence into other MST tools such as the Performance Engine in the sections to come.
When you press the save button, you will see output lines that look a little different from the window. Here's an example:
@group animations|ALL|waiting animations= 0.00|Figure Eight 20.00|standing dance 40.00|The Robot 60.00|STOP
You'll notice a couple of new lines at the beginning, "@group animations|ALL|waiting" and "animations=". These are often called the "group definition lines". You can ignore them for now, they are used later on.
You'll also noticed that the numbers are now at the front of each line, and they count up from the start of the sequence instead of just each animation individually.
You might ask 'Why are the lines in this format?' The short answer is that this is for compatibility with other popular choreography tools and older releases, and that the numbering format can make it easier to make certain types of changes later. You can ignore this information for now, it will be covered in later sections. Loading notecards in your choreohud will always automatically convert between the simpler panel format and the longer save format for you.
At any point in the future you can click the “Load” icon that looks like a file box at the bottom of the sequence panel, and then choose your notecard from the popup list.
Additional ChoreoHUD Techniques
You might notice there's a few buttons on the ChoreoHUD Solo HUD that we haven't spoken about. You'll want to read the ChoreoHUD documentation section for detailed information. Some of the extra functions you can include:
- Caching animations so you won't see a stutter when playing them in your viewer the first time.
- Changing the alignment and width of text animation names
- Changing which side the animation library panel will slide out from
- Using animations from sources other than the ChoreoHUD's contents, such as MST Performance Engines
- Importing hundreds of animations in bulk automatically from other objects.
- Filtering your library of animations into smaller subsets for easy browsing
- Searching a large animation library by name, and navigating using the hot bar rather than next/previous page buttons only.
If you have the ChoreoHUD Dancer edition, you can share a playback of a sequence with a crowd of friends. Simply use the invite buttons or rez one of the other inviter mechanisms, and any animation sequence you play in the HUD will be performed by everyone who has accepted the invite.
Once you've created an animation sequence with ChoreoHUD, you might be wondering how you can synchronize the sequence to other parts of a performance such as movement, prop special effects, and/or camera movement. You might also wonder how you can run multiple sequences at the same time, each applying to different groups of avatars. You can do these things using MST's Performance Engines, which will be described in the section titled "How to use your Animation and Movement Sequences in a Timeline".