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 shoot more footage, because the Linden Lab web designers can trim down. Also, after you're done a shoot, it takes 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 was making SL jerky every few minutes. This is more of an overall machinima rule, but good to keep in mind.
• Two clips for each avatar, each animation being 15-30 seconds in length, is recommended. Each clip can contain an animation looping several 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.

Recording settings

Torley's fave tool to capture is FRAPS on Windows.

• No sound capture is required.
• 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.

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.)
• 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.
• 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 shoot!