›–» Introduction, Rules of Thumb
Avatars
whilst one of the most difficult things to create are also the most
rewarding. The few avatars I have created in my time, I have been
very proud of. I personally consider avatar creation an art form
in its own right. As a learner, avatar creation should be the last
thing you learn, once you can make objects, avatars and articulate
them, the only thing you have left to harness is your creativity
:o)
First you need to deicide what your avatar is going to look like. A quick sketch on a piece of paper is always a good idea. Or a picture to base it on if your recreating somthing. Creating your avatar can take hours, so make sure you have plenty of time.
Remember, your always trying to keep the nubmer of faces in your avatar to a minimum. If your avatars are going to be used by a number of people in a busy world, you never want your AVs to have more than 3000 or 4000 faces at the most! I like to keep mine between 1000 and 2500 personally. Also you should make your avatar in a stood still position like in the picture below, as it would stand when not moving.
Another thing, remember that all the parts of the avatar need to be separate objects. Although the only required part for an avatar is the pelvis, here are all the limbs you can have:
Also above in brackets are the names of each limb. These are the names you have to give to your parts in trueSpace for AW to be able to reconise them. As you can see there are quite a lot. And there are even mor ethan this. There is all the possibility for a tail (aw_tail) and you may also make child objects for each limb. For example if your avatar had a hat, you would name it aw_head_1 and if the hat had a feather you would name that aw_head_2 and so on. They would then be treated as if they were part of aw_head whilst remaining and separate objects.
The reason you give part of the avatar names, is so that AW can animate it. Active Worlds has, incase you don't know, .SEQ files. These contain the intructions for animating avatars. For example qwalk.seq makes your avatar walk along in Active Worlds. If you write your own .SEQ files, you can call the parts of your avatars anything you like so long as they correspond with the names in your SEQ animation file.
"To
make Avatars more realistic, they have SEQs. Say that out loud to
yourself..."
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Eric (315650)