The Tao of AO

(Updated October 15, 2009.)

AOs (animation overriders) are one of the must-haves for anyone who cares about their SL appearance. What good is the sexiest, hunkiest avatar if it moves like a badly oiled robot? So there’s a need to replace at least some of the default SL animations, especially the walk, with better, smoother looking animations. That’s what an AO is for.

Now the animations you need for that you can pick up as freebies in many places. You can also buy very good ones all over SL for a rather small price. The AO gadgets as such are free, and often you can find an AO already loaded with free animations as part of a freebie package. Fully loaded AOs with high quality animations are available from well-known animation vendors such as Vista, The Motion Merchant, or Abranimations. These aren’t cheap though – a good AO package costs between L$800 and L$1200; sometimes much more.

At some point, though, I predict you will want to individualize your avatar further – replace that walk or that standing pose from the package with an even nicer one you found somewhere or maybe even created yourself. Then at least you will want to know what components an AO is made of, how it works and how you can adapt it to your personal needs. So here’s your Tao of AO – all you ever wanted to know about AOs but were afraid of asking.

Getting Started

If you have some L$, you will probably be tempted just to go out to one of the major dealers and buy a good, fully loaded AO from them. This is certainly the easiest way, and if it doesn’t make a difference to you whether you spend more than you need to or not, this might be the way to go for you.

If you care about spending your money wisely, on the other hand, I wouldn’t recommend this for a couple of reasons. For one thing, with a fully loaded AO you are buying replacements for all default animations, including flying, flying up, flying down, landing, jumping etc. Most of the time, it isn’t really necessary to replace all of those, so you are paying for stuff you don’t need.

The second reason is that you probably won’t like all the animations in a package. You might like the walk and some of the stand poses, but other stand poses and some of the sit poses might look weird to you. So you’ll end up replacing the animations you don’t like with others that are more to your taste, thus spending even more money. Maybe you’ll even get so fed up with the package that you’ll buy an entire new one, like I did.

If I had to do it again, I’d start by picking up one of the free AO gadgets – my hands-down recommendation is the ZHAO-II, which you can find here - and filling it bit by bit with animations I like: first with a walk and a few stand poses and a sit pose, then bit by bit with other things I need or think would be nice to have.

To make it a bit easier for you, you can also pick up a free AO Starter Kit from my own store, dylanimoves, pre-configured with some of the most needed animations: a walk, three stand poses and a sit pose (female and male versions available).

Whichever way you go, it will be helpful for you to take a closer look at your AO and the parts it is made of.

Dissecting your AO

First of all, an AO is an object, either an invisible one that you wear somewhere on your avatar or a HUD object, that is an object that shows up as a display on your screen. Of course, all the things that make the AO do what it is supposed to do are inside this object, so we have to open it and have a look at the innards.

Now in the instructions it always says you have to drag your AO object from your inventory to the ground to open it and edit its contents. As the object is usually quite small and at least partly invisible, this can be a bit tricky. Countless AOs have been lost because people did that and then couldn’t find the object anymore. So be careful when you put your AO on the ground. The ideal place to do it is a smooth, uncluttered surface in a sandbox (that way, if you do lose it after all, it will be automatically returned to you after a while). Or, if you happen to be at the Shelter, you can do it right here – auto-return is set to 5 minutes. Use “View – Highlight Transparent” (Ctrl-Alt-T) and make yourself acquainted with moving your camera with Alt + left mouse button and Ctrl-Alt + left mouse button.

The good news is that you don’t have to do that every time. It’s perfectly possible to edit and open your AO while you are wearing it, and of course it is much easier, especially if it’s a HUD attachment. Just right-click on it, select “Edit” from the pie menu that appears, and then go to the “Contents” tab. The only thing you can NOT do while you are wearing your AO is dragging animations into it unless they have full permissions. Everything else works fine. (Thanks to StormCrow for correcting me on this point.)

Got it? Right. Now in the Contents tab of your AO object, you will see up to 3 kinds of things:

(1) The AO script(s). This is the heart and soul of your AO. Without them, it’s just a dead object. You don’t have to concern yourself with them, other than never deleting them.

(2) One or more notecards. One notecard that definitely has to be in there is the one that specifies which built-in SL animations are going to be replaced by which new ones. Very often it is called “Default” or “Default Anims”. If you’ve bought a pre-loaded AO, it’s alrealdy filled in; if you’re starting with an empty AO, you have to edit it to fill in the names of your animations in the appropriate lines.

Some pre-loaded AOs leave the “Default Anims” notecard unchanged and put this information in a second notecard, which might be called “Set 1″, for example. Actually, you can have as many of these notecards in your AO as you want. For example, you might have one notecard for your normal everyday movements, another one for times when you want to move like a drunk, another one for times when you want to move like a zombie. When you’re wearing your AO, you can use the menu to load the notecard you want.

Another type of notecard you might find in there is one of instructions for you to read. The best thing is to copy this one to your inventory so you don’t have to edit your AO every time you want to read it.

(3) The last thing that belongs in your AO is the animations you want to use. If your AO isn’t pre-loaded, drag them here from your inventory.

Example

Here’s an example of what a ZHAO-II, loaded with a walk and 3 standing poses, would look like:

Notice how the “Walk: Sexy Slow” animation from the objects contents is named as the walk replacement in the [Walking ] line in the “Default” notecard. For [ Standing ], the 3 standing poses are named, separated by the pipe character (|). This format may be slightly different with other AOs. Many use a separate line for each standing pose, for example, but the basic principle is the same.

A Matter of Taste

Lastly, a personal recommendation if you are going to use freebie animations with your AO: use your good taste and judgment. Try out animations from different sources and see which you like best. Specifically, not every freebie standing pose you find will really look better than the built-in SL animations. Many so-called standing poses are really modeling poses, totally static and unnatural. In my opinion, you’ll be better off sticking with the built-in animations until you can find a really good standing pose.

Right! Thanks for reading this far. Now get moving!