Construction Junction Session 4: Integrating Scripst, Sounds and Animations into Your Builds

Session 4 of the Construction Junction workshop, again presented some new educational tools and taught some interesting new skills. The tool that we were introduced to was the Speak-Easy HUD. I may have mentioned it previously but during this session Mali Young provided each of us with one of the HUDS and showed us how it works. Some of the skills that we were taught dealt with scripts, audio clips, animations, and building.

The Speak Easy is a tool that creates a heads up display (HUD) when you wear it. It's purpose is to read text from a notecard and display the text in public chat, as if you were typing it in. This is a huge time saver when you have text that needs to by provided to a group and you do not have time to type it out. Our instructor from the Construction Junction workshop, Mali Young uses this HUD when she is providing instructions on a specific task. I find it very useful because the directions are clearly displayed and a history is available if needed.

The fist project that we created in this session was a student greeter. This is a useful tool that greets and provides objects to visitors when clicked. We first created a cube and put a texture onto it (I used my picture as a texture). For the student greeter to play sounds and give objects we needed to insert scripts into the contents folder of the object. The two scripts were the Play Sound Once script and the Notecard Giver script. A few simple modifications were required for our items to work with these scripts in our student greeter. I then added a 10 second audio clip (.wav), that I recorded in Audacity, to the contents of the object. This allowed for the audio clip to play when the object is clicked (very cool). The final item added to the contents of the student greeter was a welcome notecard. When clicked, the student greeter now played the audio file and handed out a welcome notecard.















Student Greeter created by Jeff Kurka. (photo taken August 14/08)

The second project we made during session 4 was a Rock that played sounds. This object is useful when you want sounds like birds or water playing in the background. We first made a rock from a sculpty prim. This is one prim that is sculpted into a shape to represent an object. A rock texture was then added to the object. Five bird audio files (.wav) were then added to the object contents. To make the sounds play a script called Sound (Random-string of same names) was added to the object contents. Again some simple modifications of the script were required to play the audio files that were added.

Rock that plays bird sounds (photo taken Aug. 14/08).

The third project for this session was a scripted ice cream cone. To make this object we first created the cone and then created the ice cream. The two objects were then linked so animations could be added. Before the animations, we added a script called Animator to the object contents. We then added two animations, one called ice cream eat and one called ice cream hold.

Ice cream anyone?(photo taken Aug. 14/08)