Making a Pose for IMVU

Posted Posted by Lancewrath in IMVU Tutorials     Comments 82 comments
Jan
2

In this tutorial i will be showing you how to make a simple static pose for IMVU. first off you will need the idle pose master file IMVU offers, which you can get here http://www.imvu.com/creators/education_center.php?tutorial_id=2225012 or alternatively you can directly download the files.

For this tutorial we will be using the MaleAction.Zip go ahead download that and extract its contents somewhere. Go ahead and open the Male03_Anime01_IdleStandingPoseMASTER.max file that came with the archive.

openfile

Once you have your avatar loaded you’ll notice instead of being in a semi T-bone pose he is now standing normal with his arms at his sides.

avatarloaded

Fist before we do anything we want to freeze the mesh. This is handy for animating as it will allow you to click bones freely without accidentally selecting the mesh. to do this click on the Display Tab on the menu to the right. Scroll down the rollout menu until you find the freeze section.

freezesection

Now with your select tool up top click a body part and then click freeze. What this does is locks out that mesh from being selectable. Go ahead and do this for each mesh body part. Once your mesh is completely frozen let’s select all the bones on the avatar by dragging a rectangular marquee selection over all the bones.

You’ll notice there are several keyframes below.

selectbones

Now what we want to do is make sure the keyframe slider bar is on 0 which it should already be at. then we want to drag another selection marquee around all the keyframes below by clicking and holding down the left mouse button inside the timeline and dragging the mouse to select all the keyframes. Once you have them highlighted press delete to remove them.

selframesdelframes

Once the keyframes are gone now its time to make a pose. For this tutorial i will be creating a static pose from the ginyu force.

Ginyu Force!

Ginyu Force!

For starters i’ll pick recooms pose.  What we want to do is put the keyframe Auto Key active. To do this just click the Auto key button located to the far right of the timeline.

autokey

Once that is activated use primarily your Select and Rotate tool rotate and start rotating the bones to get them in the position you want.

Once your finally satisfied with the pose we need to export it.

pose

Go ahead ans select File >> Export and then in the file dialog select Cal3d Skeletal animation file. Xaf

saveanim

Make sure to type the extension Xaf!

On the nest screen it will ask you for the skeleton file. You need to select Female04_Anime01_SkeletonMASTER.xsf skeleton file if it isn’t already in there. It typically comes with the male or female rigged avatars. Once you have the correct skeleton go ahead and hit next.

skelefile

The next window should show a list of all the bones in the scene. make sure all of them are checked and hit next again.

allbones

Now on the next screen it will ask you for some info on our animation. Since poses only have one frame enter 0 on the start frame and 1 on the end frame. make sure Displacement is at 0 and click Finish.

frames

Now its time to load the previewer. So we need to scour the catalog for some animation we can derive from.

I’m going to go ahead and use this product as its fairly inexpensive and its derivable.

http://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?products_id=1060093

Once we have the previewer open and a derived product ready we need to go to the actions tab.

actiontab

And we want to add a new action. So click Add. In the Tigger section type a word they will say to activate the pose.

Then set the Type to Avatar, Set the # esembles played to 0 this will cause it to play infinitely And then After Player change to pick same ensemble.

settings1

Now down below in the Ensembles we need to set Stop After [Longer effect ends] then add your animation .xaf file in the Skeletal animation spot. After that make sure to change the Composition to Replace, otherwise other animations will still play if its set to average or left blank.

settings2

Once all the info is entered hit Apply Changes, now you can test your pose by clicking either the Play Action Button or typing the trigger word in the chat. Depending on your version of the previewer typing the command may or may not work. Just make sure it works at least with the play action button.

playaction

Save, Submit and your all done!

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