Grinning (about myself)

Five March was shopping with a friend, looking as always for bargains. Exploring a Japanese sim Five bought a jacket for nearly nothing. The idea of this jacket was fine, but ok: it was just a first try, because the sides didn’t fit together on the body.
Five looked around, steering the camera along all sorts of things.
Five is always looking for things and suddenly something dearly needed was presented. A grin, a smile!
The faces in Second Life are very very dull. Faces normally don’t show anything. But making a snapshot, you can see that for a moment, the avatar says “cheese”. So it should be possible to change the expression of the face.
So this HUD facilitating facial expressions came as a surprise.
In fact all kinds of facial expressions nicely assembled in a HUD.
And the price was a bargain: all emotions for 15 L$!
It is very funny to zoom in with the camera and look at the different expressions. This emoter, “Smile” as these HUD’s are called, was made by: yaman Oh.
Five searched for other emoters. There is one in the “swiss-knife” HUD of
MystiTools.
This HUD is incredibly multifunctional. All kinds of things, normally done in single HUD’s are here put together. And this one has a free version! The expressions are much the same as the “Smile” HUD.
Searching further Five came across another emoter from EB Creations, costing 1 L$.
This EB creations emoter reacts to chat commands, and has no visible HUD on the screen.
After using these emoters and comparing, Five really wanted to know how to make them.
Nothing much can be found about them. Strange!
First of all you see that all the facial expressions are the same, really. So it seems to be just a command, coming from Second Life presets.
Ok that reflection gave the clue: in fact showing facial expressions is one of the easiest things to do really. The expressions are standard animations in Second life.
So all you have to do is to “wear” a scripted object. In the object ask a permission to animate your avatar, and play the animation from the list, found for instance here:
http://slhomepage.com/lsl/animation.htm
so:
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llRequestPermissions(llDetectedKey(0), PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION);
llStartAnimation("express_open_mouth");
}
already works….
Ok, Five learned another lesson: if something seemed to be undocumented, or is apparently hided in mystery, nobody talking much about it, oh well, then maybe it is even too easy to mention it! Grin!