...get more than you expected!
A very dear friend of mine recently asked me to help her find a way to easily access a every growing list of poses she has in her inventory. She told me that she wanted to sort her poses in certain ways, and was there a simple way for her to do this.
Being the ever helpful guy and gadget junkie, I set out to see if I could find such a tool. I had in the back of my mind a way to do it myself (I am getting better and better at scripting), but wanted to see what others had done in this area first.
I was not searching long, when I came across a VERY useful tool, that fit the bill perfectly. The tool I found is not new, and if you have been around SL for any length of time, you have probably heard the name of this tool before. I had also heard it before, but never really looked at it closely. Boy am I glad did!
Care to make a guess? You sure?
Ok ok, I will tell you what it is (I know you were VERY scared I was not gonna tell you...admit it!). I am talking about the HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe.
As part of my search process, I was thinking about how would "I" use one of these devices. Do I need one, and if so, why? I started to think about what I do in SL, and how would such a device benefit me. Well, a couple thoughts did come to mind.
First of all, when I am at a party or an event, and there is dancing (and just about EVERY party or event has dancing in SL), I have never been fond of the dances that most places have in thier dance balls. Outside of the fact that I hate looking like everybody else, I find that most dance balls have dances that look MUCH better when women dance with them...not men. Given that, I spent an afternoon over at Sine Wave and then over at AKEYO to put together a nice little set of dances that didn't detract from my masculine mystic that I worked so hard to create.
(alright...you can stop laughing at ANY time now).
Also, I have put together some nice poses for basic photography that I have been doing, so I had a list of those poses also. Now, you can sort things by folder, as I do a LOT of, but the more I looked into the HUDDLES HUD, I realized how nice it would be to have all of these things right at my finger tips!
I really started to dig into the HUDDLES, and the more I dug, the more I found. And the more I found, the more I liked it. This gadget has some REALLY nice features that have really made my life inworld simpler, which is always a BIG plus for me!
What features did I like? I am soooo glad you asked that.
The first thing that caught my attention was that you can set up notecards that list animations that you load into the HUD, so you can sort them any way you want, and just load them up at the click of a mouse. That in itself was huge for what I was looking for, not only for my friend, but for me as well.
I started off with a dances notecard and a poses notecard, and played around a bit. I then divided up the poses into "standing" "leaning" "sitting" notecards. I was clicking around changing things left and right, all from the very well laid out HUD. I was having a blast!
After my afternoon of dance shopping, I only came away with a total of 3 actual dances that I liked, but also had a couple of fun "swaying" animations that I like to use at live music events and such. So my next task, was to create a "dances" and "listening" notecards.
I suppose I should talk about the notecards here for a moment. The notecards, especially the animation notecards, is just a list of the animation names that you want to have loaded when you pick that particular notecard. There is a button to list available notecards, and when you select the one you want, it loads up that group of animations. There is even a function to list all the animation IN the HUD, so you can copy and paste the output into a notecard, and edit away!
Once the animations are loaded, you can either just let the HUDDLES play them in order, randomly, or just pick each one yourself. This allows you to either relax and enjoy the atmosphere of where you are, or if you want to impress people, you can pick your dances to fit your mood, or the song, or both...:)
Ok, so...sounds pretty good so far right? Well, it gets better.
Another one of the very cool features of this gadget, is that it also has a built in AO. Now, if you read my article in Role Magazine (*cough, page 78), I talk about AO's quite a bit. One of the issues when going out dancing is that your AO can interfere with the dance animations you might want to use. This usually means you have to deactivate your AO before starting to dance. Not so with the HUDDLES.
As I talked about in my Role Magazine article (yes, I AM gonna keep saying that..:) ), I talked about how customizing your AO is not as difficult as it seems because most of the AO's out there are based on the ZHAO engine, and the HUDDLES is no different. What this MEANS..is that the odds are that you can copy the notecard out of your existing AO, and put it into the HUDDLES, along with the animations from your other AO, and have all your stuff in one place! ALSO...the HUDDLES will automatically turn OFF your AO, when you pick another animation to play, such as a dance! One less thing to worry about!
There are several other features of the HUDDLES that I am not gonna touch on, because I have not used all of them yet. For example, you can use it to invite others to share your dances (like a chim), you can use poofers, there is a flight assist, keep track of landmarks, hugger, build macros, emotes, object rezzing, etc etc etc.
Some might say this is a bit overkill, but I have to say it is nice to be able combine so many features in ONE HUD attachment. Talk about simplifying your screen!
OK, so lets get some details here. The HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe was made by Keiki Lemieux. There are several versions available, some with VERY specific functions, which might be a bit more to your liking, but most of those versions are combined into the DELUXE model.
The DELUXE version, which is what I have is available both inworld at
HUDDLES Main Store
and on XSTREETSL
HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe on XSTREETSL
(which was recently acquired by Linden Labs).
The HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe sells for $1499 at both inworld and out. I consider it money VERY well spent!
Before I go, let me give you a sampling of what the HUDDLES EZ Animator actually looks like..
and
If you want to see me dancing...you will have to wait till the next party!
Till next time!
A very dear friend of mine recently asked me to help her find a way to easily access a every growing list of poses she has in her inventory. She told me that she wanted to sort her poses in certain ways, and was there a simple way for her to do this.
Being the ever helpful guy and gadget junkie, I set out to see if I could find such a tool. I had in the back of my mind a way to do it myself (I am getting better and better at scripting), but wanted to see what others had done in this area first.
I was not searching long, when I came across a VERY useful tool, that fit the bill perfectly. The tool I found is not new, and if you have been around SL for any length of time, you have probably heard the name of this tool before. I had also heard it before, but never really looked at it closely. Boy am I glad did!
Care to make a guess? You sure?
Ok ok, I will tell you what it is (I know you were VERY scared I was not gonna tell you...admit it!). I am talking about the HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe.
As part of my search process, I was thinking about how would "I" use one of these devices. Do I need one, and if so, why? I started to think about what I do in SL, and how would such a device benefit me. Well, a couple thoughts did come to mind.
First of all, when I am at a party or an event, and there is dancing (and just about EVERY party or event has dancing in SL), I have never been fond of the dances that most places have in thier dance balls. Outside of the fact that I hate looking like everybody else, I find that most dance balls have dances that look MUCH better when women dance with them...not men. Given that, I spent an afternoon over at Sine Wave and then over at AKEYO to put together a nice little set of dances that didn't detract from my masculine mystic that I worked so hard to create.
(alright...you can stop laughing at ANY time now).
Also, I have put together some nice poses for basic photography that I have been doing, so I had a list of those poses also. Now, you can sort things by folder, as I do a LOT of, but the more I looked into the HUDDLES HUD, I realized how nice it would be to have all of these things right at my finger tips!
I really started to dig into the HUDDLES, and the more I dug, the more I found. And the more I found, the more I liked it. This gadget has some REALLY nice features that have really made my life inworld simpler, which is always a BIG plus for me!
What features did I like? I am soooo glad you asked that.
The first thing that caught my attention was that you can set up notecards that list animations that you load into the HUD, so you can sort them any way you want, and just load them up at the click of a mouse. That in itself was huge for what I was looking for, not only for my friend, but for me as well.
I started off with a dances notecard and a poses notecard, and played around a bit. I then divided up the poses into "standing" "leaning" "sitting" notecards. I was clicking around changing things left and right, all from the very well laid out HUD. I was having a blast!
After my afternoon of dance shopping, I only came away with a total of 3 actual dances that I liked, but also had a couple of fun "swaying" animations that I like to use at live music events and such. So my next task, was to create a "dances" and "listening" notecards.
I suppose I should talk about the notecards here for a moment. The notecards, especially the animation notecards, is just a list of the animation names that you want to have loaded when you pick that particular notecard. There is a button to list available notecards, and when you select the one you want, it loads up that group of animations. There is even a function to list all the animation IN the HUD, so you can copy and paste the output into a notecard, and edit away!
Once the animations are loaded, you can either just let the HUDDLES play them in order, randomly, or just pick each one yourself. This allows you to either relax and enjoy the atmosphere of where you are, or if you want to impress people, you can pick your dances to fit your mood, or the song, or both...:)
Ok, so...sounds pretty good so far right? Well, it gets better.
Another one of the very cool features of this gadget, is that it also has a built in AO. Now, if you read my article in Role Magazine (*cough, page 78), I talk about AO's quite a bit. One of the issues when going out dancing is that your AO can interfere with the dance animations you might want to use. This usually means you have to deactivate your AO before starting to dance. Not so with the HUDDLES.
As I talked about in my Role Magazine article (yes, I AM gonna keep saying that..:) ), I talked about how customizing your AO is not as difficult as it seems because most of the AO's out there are based on the ZHAO engine, and the HUDDLES is no different. What this MEANS..is that the odds are that you can copy the notecard out of your existing AO, and put it into the HUDDLES, along with the animations from your other AO, and have all your stuff in one place! ALSO...the HUDDLES will automatically turn OFF your AO, when you pick another animation to play, such as a dance! One less thing to worry about!
There are several other features of the HUDDLES that I am not gonna touch on, because I have not used all of them yet. For example, you can use it to invite others to share your dances (like a chim), you can use poofers, there is a flight assist, keep track of landmarks, hugger, build macros, emotes, object rezzing, etc etc etc.
Some might say this is a bit overkill, but I have to say it is nice to be able combine so many features in ONE HUD attachment. Talk about simplifying your screen!
OK, so lets get some details here. The HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe was made by Keiki Lemieux. There are several versions available, some with VERY specific functions, which might be a bit more to your liking, but most of those versions are combined into the DELUXE model.
The DELUXE version, which is what I have is available both inworld at
HUDDLES Main Store
and on XSTREETSL
HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe on XSTREETSL
(which was recently acquired by Linden Labs).
The HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe sells for $1499 at both inworld and out. I consider it money VERY well spent!
Before I go, let me give you a sampling of what the HUDDLES EZ Animator actually looks like..
and
If you want to see me dancing...you will have to wait till the next party!
Till next time!
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