Animating Furniture and Rooms

Adding animation to your Furniture and Room products will make them more exciting for those members that purchase them. Whether you are just adding some movement to the surface water in your hot tub, or creating a fully animated robot Pet, there are a few tricks you should try to make your products more dynamic.

Texture Animation

One of the easiest, and least expensive ways to create motion in your models is to animate the texture. Texture animation is available via the Materials TAB in the IMVU Create Mode Editor . By setting the direction, speed, and rate of cycling, any surface can become move, flash, or animate.

In this example a lava effect is created by sliding a texture with an alpha map along the surface of the model. My playing with how the texture maps onto the polys, you can create the illusion of speed and viscosity of the liquid. You can see the Lava Throne for yourself here.

Animated textures can also be used for large areas, like creating the illusion of a rolling sea or moving clouds. In this example I was able to create the movement a ship on waves by moving a large water texture over an uneven plane. You can see how this came out here >

Mesh Animation

There is no limit to what a Room or Furniture product can be, or what it can do. Why just build a sofa when you can design a flying machine that flaps its brass and wooden wings over a sea of clouds? Mesh animations can be as simple or as complex as you like. In this example, our flying machine can pitch forward and backward while its back wings flap and front wings rotate. Each part of the flying machine is saved as a separate Mesh and each is Linked to its own Animation Node. After exporting each part, they are all rebuilt in the IMVU Create Mode Editor where their movements can be further refined before submitting to the Catalog.