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, in essence, can be as simple or complex as you like. Actions also afford you the incredible ability to create random playback events and, therefore, add a feeling of life to all of your products.
Adding Actions is well worth the effort as those product that contain Actions (and chickens, mustn’t forget chickens) sell very well with the IMVU audience.
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?
Every product type can include Actions. This includes Avatars, Avatar clothing, Avatar Accessories, 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 Action:
- Idle Actions
- Stance Actions
- Triggered Actions
An Idle Action is a built-in IMVU action and plays forever and does not require input from a user.
A Stance Action is also a built-in IMVU action and is dictated by a room or furniture seat node. For example, if a Seat node is named seat01 and labeled .FloatinInWater, then the IMVU code will play an animation called stance.FloatingInWater.
If an action with the same name exists in either the avatar product or within the Room or Furniture product, that animation will be applied to the Avatar.
The three main built-in IMVU Avatar Actions names are stance.Idle, stance.Standing and stance.Sitting.
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’ the LOL animation to play on your avatar.
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.