COUPLES DANCES
Purchased one or more of our couples dances in Second Life and need some help? You cannot find the answers to some more frequent questions below. If you still need some help, please drop me a line by email support@abranimations.com or use the contact form on this website. If you prefer you can also send me a notecard in-world with your question.
We sell couples dances in pose balls ready to use. These are two balls linked together for each avatar to sit on. They are usually indicated as blue and pink to identify which ball is the male animation (blue) and the female (pink). When the avatars are sitting the animations will play synchronising each avatars animations.
Some people prefer to use our couples dances in third party couples dance machines like 'intan' as this allows them to only rez balls when needed and have multiple people using a set of dances. Our animations should work in most of these, but it should be noted that these are third party creations. For support and setup help you will need to contact the creator or refer to the dance machine instructions.
You cannot use the dances in a regular dance machine for single dances (not as couples dances anyway), but they can be used in some couples dance machine (such as intan). As mentioned above, these are third party devices that I am generally not familiar with. You will need to contact the creators or refer to the dance machines instructions for further information on how to setup and use our dances with them.
That being said I do have a notecard for older intan dance machines that contain the settings for most of our dances, you should find it near the couples dances in our store. I think newer intan machines set themselves up automatically when dance animations are placed inside. I did not create the intan notecard and am not very familiar with intan setup myself. The notecard was setup by someone else, but I can confirm that the setting in it are correct and our dances do work with intan. You can find the settings here
I cannot be so certain about other dance machines in SL, you will need to check with the creators.
Whilst I am not familiar with the specific setup procedures. I will say that in all cases it will be necessary for your to take the animations out of each poseball. Sometimes confused customers have asked me why the dances are not working in their dance machine and it turns out they put the poseball itself inside. Also remember the blue ball and pink ball have their own animations inside. So you will need to remove the animations from BOTH balls to use them in your dance machine. Only adding one half of the dance will not work.
Our couples dances are sometimes longer than the maximum animation length allowed in Second Life. To overcome this our pose balls sometimes contain several animations that are played in sequence to form one long animation. The animations themselves do not loop like or regular animations instead when they get to the end they stop and freeze in position. The script then plays the next section.
Generally speaking you will need to use the dances in the supplied poseballs, a third party dance machine or some other scripted device that can play the animations in sequence.
You can try, to some extent it may work. However it is extremely unlikely that they will work well. In Second Life there is no reliable way to move avatars around or position them with any great accuracy except by having them sit on an object. This is why pose balls exist. There is currently No Other Way to do this!
There are Couples HUDs like our own couples animator (one of the very first such huds) that do allow very simple couples interactions. However they rely very heavily on the avatars moving themselves into an approximate position and hoping the animations will work. The animations that do work tend to be very simply ones like hugs or animations that do not require very precise positioning. Couples Dances however are very complex motions an require very very specific positioning for them to look right. A couples HUD will not be able to do this without having you sit on an object that can fix your avatar in the correct position and orientation.
To add to this, many of our couples dances are quite long. As such they have been split into sections to overcome animation length restrictions in SL. Most HUDs do not have the functionality to string sequences of animations together.