2. Brief History of Animation
The Magic Lantern The Silent Era
(c1650)
The Golden Age
Thaumatrope (1824) of Animation
Phenakistoscope
The Television
(1831)
Era Animation
Zoetrope (180 AD; 1834)
Flip book (1868) Techniques
A phenakistoscope disc Stop motion
by Eadweard Muybridge
Praxinoscope (1877) CGI animation

3. Key Frames and Tweening
Keyframes were done by
the main animators and
their assistants did the
inbetween frames, known
as tweening
Later this process became
automated as we now see
with today’s GIF and Flash
animations on the web Key  Tween Key

4. DEMO: Prim Puppeteer
Prim Puppeteer is just like stop-motion animation. Use
the “Record” button to take a snapshot of
Position, Rotation, and Scale of all the linked prims.
Playing back the recorded snapshots is what creates the
animation.
Prim Puppeteer by Todd Borst of XD Fusion
Beginner Tutorial Video: http://tinyurl.com/puppeteervid
Get Prim Puppeteer: http://tinyurl.com/puppeteerlm
Hands-on: Bring Your Prims to Life

5. More Advanced Skills
Editing Tips
Animation Triggers
Playback Styles
Snapshot Order
Optimization
Puppeteer Anchors

6. More Advanced Skills
Editing Tips
Use /32 replace, /32 delete, and /32
insert to make the recording
process easier.
Use undo (ctrl-z) to copy prim
position between different
snapshots.
Make backups!

7. More Advanced Skills
Animation Triggers
It is useful to know the many
ways that you can playback the
animation with Prim Puppeteer.
Each TRIGGER, STYLE, and
ORDER combination can have very
different and useful effects.
Get familiar with each one.

8. More Advanced Skills
Playback Styles
LOOP – after playing returns to beginning and
plays out again in a continuous loop
STEP – same as LOOP but each click moves just
one position of the animation
PLAY-ONCE – plays animation to end and stops
PING-PONG – plays animation either (a) from
first-to-last frame and stops or (b) from last-to-
first frame and then stops

9. More Advanced Skills
Snapshot Order
TRIGGER TIPS: • Low-to-High
(ascending)
Use “Quiet Mode” to turn off
trigger instructions. It’s under • High-to-Low
“Advanced” menu. (descending)
Set On-Chance to 100% to use it • Custom (5 4 3 2 1)
as a simple timer based trigger.
• Random
Reuse snapshots with custom
order. • Random List (2,3,4)

10. More Advanced Skills
Optimization
To avoid lag when using Puppeteer:
Don’t animate too many prims. 100 = too much. 30 or less = ideal.
Avoid small delay speeds. Faster animations use more resources.
Avoid using channel zero for chat triggers.
Use “/32 removeunusedscripts” to delete Puppeteer Link scripts
that are not needed.
Don’t use Puppeteer on temp-rez objects. Rezzing objects with
mono scripts is currently very slow and resource intensive.

11. More Advanced Skills
Puppeteer
Anchors
Puppeteer has an
anchoring feature to make
editing animations easier.
It is like attachments for linked objects.
Creating anchors also allows additional prims to be added
to a published object without breaking its animation.
The system can currently support about 20 anchors.
See Puppeteer Guide Anchoring section for more details

12. Hands-on
Animation Mini Build Off
Use demo prims or your own
Show what can you do with what
you learned
How can animations bring value
to your training?

13. Animation Resources
“The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard
Williams (director of animation for “Who Framed
Roger Rabbit”)
Puppeeter v8.5 Guide by Todd Borst (XD
Fusion)
Open Prim Animator by Todd Borst:
wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Prim_Animator
Thanks to all of the developers that provide
Open Source to help further the state of the art.