Registration avatar animations

Use these guidelines to create animations for join.secondlife.com. You'll want to have a dedicated, focused setup because new avatar animations should appear consistent with each other and existing ones on the website (at least until some undetermined time in the future when we move to a totally different layout).

General intentions

• Disk space is your friend. Always err on the side of shooting more footage, because the Linden Lab web designers can trim down. Also, after you're done a shoot, it can take considerable overhead time to setup again, which is why you want to capture as much as you can during the initial session.
• Disable background processes. Torley found his automatic backup app was making SL jerky every few minutes. This is more of an overall machinima rule, but good to keep in mind.
• At least two clips for each avatar, each being 15-30 seconds in length, is recommended. Each clip will contain a unique animation looping one or more times.
• Each animation should artistically match the avatar's body language. For example, rabbits bounce, robots rock, a human in a leather jacket swaggers like The Fonz. :)
• The LL web designers will crop and trim usable loops out of longer animations. Keeping that in mind, at a minimum, an animation should have at least one complete loop cycle within a clip to facilitate seamless looping. LL designers may also use time manipulation, like speeding up the clip, to "make it fit".

Recording settings

Torley's fave tool to capture is FRAPS on Windows. He also uses a Scythe Foot Pedal to record/stop while keeping his hands free. Even if you don't have a foot pedal, use the Video Capture Hotkey option to make it easier for you to start/stop takes.

• Capture at 30 fps.
• Force lossless RGB capture can be off, because since these animations will be scaled down for final publication, quality loss with the tradeoff of saving disk space is fine.
• No sound capture is required.

Avatar setup

There are various specific methods you can use to get the same results done. Here's what the setup looks like:

• Basically, you want your avatars positioned in front of a "blue screen" or "green screen", depending on the avatar's actual colors. This makes it easy for the LL web designers to chroma-key out.
  • You can create a simple "blue/green screen" by rezzing a large, hollowed-out cube that you place the avatar within, so you see nothing else except for the avatar and the solid, matte color.
• Due to how SL positions avatars, you may also want to build an "invisible shelf" underneath the avatar so their feet don't clip.
• You can sit your avatar on a pose stand, or trigger animations from your inventory. If you're using a pose stand, remember to hide it before recording. Everything else except for the avatar, including floating text, should be invisible while recording.
• You should position the SL camera so that the avatar is roughly in the center-to-lower-center of the frame, with a generous amount of space on all sides. There's no need to be super-precise with camera positioning, so don't worry about that. Remember that the final result will be masked out anyway. The point here is simply that the avatar never clips an edge of the window. Thus, when you play an animation, let it cycle through fully and make sure that the avatar doesn't clip.
  • Also keep in mind as you go through avatars, some may appear considerably larger than others! For example, a bouffant dress or simply being tall may clip the frame edges.
  • You may have to manually reposition/tweak the camera for each avatar. This is fine.
• Watch out for animations that initially look cool but have other problems. For example, animations designed for an avatar with a very different height, leading to arm-intersecting-through-head and other messy problems. See the existing examples on join.secondlife.com for reference ideas.
• You should make avatar positioning consistent — this can understandably frustrating since SL has no elegant built-in tools. A camera position save/recall tool like Furware Peek may be immensely useful.
• Variations on the above can also be deployed to see what works best for you: earlier, Torley's shot using two computers, with one being the "filming avatar, sitting in a chair with a locked camera angle" and the other being the "filmed". He no longer does that, but you may prefer it.

Second Life Viewer settings

• You should already be familiar with and have enabled the Advanced menu.
• Use Advanced menu > Set Window Size. Set window resolution to as large a square as possible. For example, on a 2560x1600 monitor, 1500x1500 is great. On a 1920x1200 monitor, you could go for 1100x1100. (Keeping in mind some vertical space is used by SL's "chrome" and possibly the Windows taskbar.
  • The reason why we use a square is we want to leave some blank space around the avatar, and yet, avoid animations that have the avatar walking too far left or right, or even vertically, because this makes them hard to present.
• Use Advanced menu > Debug Settings and set RenderVolumeLODFactor to 8.000. This increases detail so curves appear smoother.
• Pick a neutral WindLight setting like Nam's Optimal Skin 2, or if this appears too washed out, Nam's Optimal Skin and Prim is a better choice. (The latter was used for the present round of Robot Avatars by Renn Yifu.)
  • These settings can be found by installing the Firestorm viewer.
• In the Preferences' Graphics tab, set it to Ultra but disable Lighting and Shadows. That lowers framerate and we want a relatively neutral look here.
• Also in the Graphics tab, click Hardware and make sure Antialiasing is at least 4x. (At Ultra, it defaults to 8x — just make sure you've got a powerful graphics card and computer that can handle that!)
• Press Ctrl+9 (Advanced > Shortcuts > Zoom Default) to neutralize zoom.
  • On rare occasion for some avatars, tapping Ctrl-0to Zoom In once may look better. This is a subjective call, use your best judgement!
• Hide the Viewer UI and HUDs: disable Advanced menu > Rendering Features > UI and disable Advanced > Highlighting and Visibility > Show HUD Attachments.

Now you're ready to record!

Post-production

• Once you've got the animations done, you can deliver them to your Linden Lab contact by using Dropbox or another sharing tool suitable for large, multi-gigabyte video files.
• Torley prefers compressing FRAPS files further in Sony Vegas — and transcoding them to H.264 QuickTime MOV format that the LL web designers have requested. (Yes, this induces some blockiness and color bleed which is negligible, as the final results are scaled down.) If you can get the FRAPS AVI files to us, Torley can handle the transcode (if-needed).