Gidge’s SL daughter, Hatchy Mills, made an adorable child’s Animation Override at a very low cost. With the popularity of children’s avatars growing, there is a need for children’s AO that produce the naive, unaffected and innocent movements and stances of children.  While a child at Hogwarts would need something more sedate than this one, there’s nothing to stop you from making your own AO at little cost.

You begin with an animation override, such as the Zhao II – MDB. The Zhao is a free, open-source AO. It is the base of many AOs that are sold in SL anyway. The fun part is first, running around to Animation stores to find the poses you want. If you’re making a child’s AO,  you might want to configure two sets of animations, one for school and one for play. The animations Hatchy used came from Kuso and cost a mere 8 – 12 lindens each.

1. Rez the AO on the ground.
2. Drop the  animations in the contents tab. Even if it seems silly, do it one at a time so you don’t lose anything. In moving inventory around haste makes waste.
3. Open the Configuration Notecard. It will have the following slots. Simply copy and paste the names of each animation behind the slot where it belongs.

• [ Standing ]
• [ Walking ]
• [ Sitting ]
• [ Sitting On Ground ]
• [ Crouching ]
• [ Crouch Walking ]
• [ Landing ]
• [ Standing Up ]
• [ Falling ]
• [ Flying Down ]
• [ Flying Up ]
• [ Flying ]
• [ Flying Slow ]
• [ Hovering ]
• [ Jumping ]
• [ Pre Jumping ]
• [ Running ]
• [ Turning Right ]
• [ Turning Left ]
• [ Floating ]
• [ Swimming Forward ]
• [ Swimming Up ]
• [ Swimming Down ]

1. It’s critical that the animation name is entered perfectly, with the right upper and lower case letters and the right number of spaces, etc. The easiest way to do this is go to properties for each animation and copy and paste the name directly so you cannot make a typo.
2. For multiple animations type a | between each animation with no spaces.
3. You don’t have to add an animation in every slot. There are default Linden animations that will be used for the ones you leave blank.
4. Save the card.
5. Take the ZHAO back into inventory and it’s ready to wear

You can configure multiple notecards. In fact, you can combine all your AOs into one AO with multiple notecards that you switch between as you need to. There’s a very, detailed, step-by-step guide to combining your AOs and making your own mega-versatile AO by the super-organized Sasy Scarborough. It’s a great suggestion and I plan to do it one day when I am better-organized and caught up.