Jeep Movement

1. Animations and Scripted Movement for Virtual Humans in Second Life Affiliation Authors Hugh Kinsey III : Hkinsey1@uncc.edu UNC Charlotte, Clemson Austen Hayes: AHayes@clemson.edu Objectives The Code • We had 2 primary goals to accomplish with this project. • Enable jeep movement for the environment. • Make Clem life-like with animations. • Learning from our first avatar demo, we proceeded to design a method for avatar movement as well as animations that would give the avatar gestures to draw your attention to what he was talking about. The jeep script consisted of 686 lines of code need to script the movement for the jeep. It took two weeks of work to complete. This was difficult because Second Life limited scripted movement to only 10 meters at a time. Cornering also required nested loops to adjust the jeep angle as the jeep distance decreased. Creating Animations Jeep Movement Animation Transitions Qavimator was used to create the animations that Cara and Clem performed. One problem we encountered was that in Second Life, when an animation ends, the avatar immediately returns to its initial position. To avoid this limitation, we animated the avatar back to its initial position, before reaching the 16 second maximum animation length. We used the Second Life Linden Scripting language to program the movement for our avatar ‘s vehicle. This avoided a limitation of Second Life in which an avatar cannot be moved by script, but scripting can move an object when an avatar is sitting on it. We scripted this jeep to move Clem between each exhibit in the world we created.