The information in this tutorial is not yet final.
Introduction
Animations add life to all environments including IMVU and Actions are the tool Creators use to piece those animations together in an IMVU product.
What is an Action?
An Action is a collection of animation assets that play back in IMVU. Actions follow several hard coded rules but can be as simple or complex as you like. Actions also afford you the incredible ability to create random playback events that add a feeling of life to all of your products.
Adding Actions is well worth the effort as those products that contain Actions (and chickens, mustn’t forget chickens) sell very well with IMVU players.
The IMVU Action System
Some basic rules
An Action is a collection of one or more Ensembles and a few rules that the Ensembles follow.
The name supplied in an Action dictates whether the action is played automatically by IMVU or is a action triggered by a user.
An Ensemble contains the actual animation assets and the rules that those assets follow.
There can be multiple Actions of the same name. For example, there can be multiple Actions named stance.Idle
There can be multiple Ensembles in each Action.
What Products Contain Actions?
Almost every product type can include Actions. This includes Avatars, Avatar clothing, Avatar Attachments, Furniture and Rooms. Even more, Room and Furniture products can contain Actions that effect the Avatar as well.
Although Eye and Skin products are, by definition, Avatar clothing products, they can not contain Actions.
Action Types
There are three types of Actions:
- Idle Actions
- Stance Actions
- Triggered Actions
Idle Actions
An Idle Action is a built-in IMVU action and plays forever and does not require input from a user.
Stance Actions
There are three main built-in IMVU Avatar Actions named stance.Idle, stance.Standing and stance.Sitting.
A Stance Action is a built-in IMVU action that is dictated by a room or furniture seat node. For example, if a seat node is named seat01.FloatingInWater, then IMVU will play an avatar action named stance.FloatingInWater and a room or furniture action named stance.FloatingInWater-seat01 when an avatar occupies seat01.
Be aware in the Classic Client, the naming of actions is case sensitive so it has to be named “stance.FloatingInWater” and not “stance.floatingInWater“.
Triggered Actions
A Triggered action is triggered by what you type in chat and that plays once (or loops infinitely until removed) and then goes away. For example when you type “LOL” in IMVU, you trigger an action named “LOL” to play on your avatar. Triggered actions work on rooms and furniture too.
Any product that can contain an Action can contain any and/or all of these three Action types.
Look for information to come on creating triggered action products and cooperative animations.