IMVU is all about creating a place for people all over the world to meet up and express themselves, all within a virtual 3D environment. What your avatar wears is one form of self expression, but just as important is the place you choose to gather within. The IMVU Catalog offers a wide selection of Rooms, customizable 3D spaces created by fellow Developers, which act as the backdrop for an even wider array of furniture items to populate them with. There is no limit to what a Room can be, big or small, but there are some specific technical challenges to creating your own environmental product.
Examples of just a few of the many Rooms created by IMVU, inc.
What is a Room?
Rooms are places to hang out with others. They are products, like clothing or accessories, that can be worn or used, although by the world, rather than the avatar. And can be customized in a myriad of ways using furniture, items designed and built specifically for room decoration, or managed from within the users inventory.
Example of a Bundle containing Furniture products that compliment the Room theme.
What Makes Rooms Different?
Rooms are not free roaming spaces, in fact Avatars, Furniture, and Rooms contain no collision information, so there is no way for an avatar to wander around inside a 3D Room, stand on a chair, or sit at a table by itself.
Rooms and Furniture items include invisible Nodes where an Avatar can stand or sit, and these Nodes can be placed anywhere, in any number, and they can include triggers for Avatar Actions and animations.
Nodes are hand placed by the developer responsible for the creation of the Room, and these can live in the floor, walls, and ceiling of your 3D space.
Example of Room with Nodes in place. Note the Node boxes on the floors, walls and ceilings of each Room.
Room Skeleton
The room skeleton is what makes a room function. What nodes you place into your room, determines what users can do in the room.
There are different “seat” or “pose” nodes that can be placed around a room. For example, seat01.standing would be a node a user stands at, while seat02.sitting would be a node a user sits at. Custom poses or actions can be added to a seat, and triggered with the name after the period. seat03.dancing will cause the avatar to do whichever action is called dancing, if one exists.
Furniture nodes can be used to further customization of a room, and can be placed anywhere, in any direction.
Lights can be used to define the mood of a room. The light types are: Omni Direction, Directional, or Spot. The ambient lighting can also by modified from within the IMVU Studio editor.