Why would you want an animation HUD? Because when you take a picture with the pose from a HUD, then you don't have to add anything to the picture itself - no pose stand or anything else. This is a really cool part of this gadget. The other part that is cool is the HUD itself...
Last step - just right mouse click and take the new animation HUD :-) It'll show up right next to that copy you had made in your inventory. Except it'll be 'no modify'.
What's a HUD? Basically, it's a graphical gadget that shows up on your screen only - where only you can see it - which is why it's called a heads up display. Here's what the 'Animation Preview HUD' looks like up close:
Lets try making one with just dances in it.
First - Duplicate the 'Anim Preview HUD 0.2' (via a copy and a paste) so that you won't be modifying the original one. Why? Because once you get done putting animations into it, you won't be able to modify it again (other than deleting things out of it).
Next step will be to rename the copy of the HUD to indicate what kinds of animations you'll have in it. For this example, I'll make one with a few dances in it.
Here's my inventory after I had duplicated the 'Anim Preview HUD 0.2' and renamed it to 'Dance HUD':
Next step is to create a collection of your animations. I'd recommend putting copies of them into a folder and renaming the folder to indicate what kind of animations they are. Why? I'm planning ahead - since I can't modify the HUD later - then I'll need to have a copy of the animations so that I can create a 'new' HUD later with the same animations and more... I should mention that I learned this the hard way by putting a 'no copy' dance into one of these HUDs and... all of a sudden the spiffy dance that I had just bought was only in this gadget.
Here's what my dance animations folder looks like:
Next step is to drag the new HUD from your inventory to the ground - you will need to be in a place where you can rez things to do this. Once you have the HUD on the ground, you probably want to reposition your camera to get a good view of it - because now you just drag your animations right on top of the HUD which on the ground. The HUD will just grab them and add them to itself. Here's what mine looked like after adding those three dance animations:
Last step - just right mouse click and take the new animation HUD :-) It'll show up right next to that copy you had made in your inventory. Except it'll be 'no modify'.Now that we've built our own dance HUD, let's try it out. Here's what the bottom/middle of the screen looks like right after I right mouse clicked the 'Dance HUD' and selected 'Wear':
The buttons at the bottom are to control the HUD. The text above the buttons shows you the name and number of the animation. In this example the first dance was called caramel. The first little button will take you to the previous animation (it'll make sense in a sec). The little triangle is 'play' and gets the animation started. Once you get animated, then you probably want a way to stop - that's what the third button is for (pause or stop). The fourth button is to change to the next animation. And the last button will delete an animation from the HUD (I don't use this button much at all). I'd be very careful with that delete button - it doesn't take prisoners - and I've deleted that one dance animation that I couldn't copy - just by accident.
For taking pictures, having poses in the HUD is really handy because you don't have to do much more than wear it, push 'play' (that second button) and then quickly click through the poses until you find the one you want for the picture. This is MUCH easier than opening each pose file and clicking to start the animation button... and then closing it and opening the next one...
That's all for now - time to go take some pictures. :-)
