Before I start this post, let me make a disclaimer.
The thoughts here are my own and based on my own personal experiences with the Artiste. I paid for my HUD, just like everyone else.
I am not receiving any consideration from Yummy by blogging about my experience, I’m doing it because I want to and because I think others might be interested.
Your experiences may similar or they may be completely different. (I’m betting on completely different, because I made a lot of mistakes.) However, you learn from mistakes, right? So I should be an expert soon. 😛
Ok, with that out of the way, on with the post!
I’ve only had the HUD for about a week, and I really haven’t had much time to play with it. I do also own the SILVER version of the HUD, but it has been so long since I used it that it’s sort of like learning a new language. Compared to some of the other competing products on the market, the Artiste has a fairly steep learning curve. However, there is loads of documentation about everything it can do, and of course, you can always contact customer support with questions (and I asked some pretty dumb ones).
The Artiste is very versatile, but it takes a while to get used to the way things are set up. Rather than everything being on one notecard, there are several pieces (and notecards) that have to be filled out to make everything work correctly.
It may seem rather clunky and/or time-consuming at first, but once you get used to it, it goes fairly quickly. I think the added time is more than made up for by the plethora of things you can do with the HUD (and the Palettes).
As I was learning, I tried to take notes, both for myself and with an eye towards these blog posts. In 10 days, I’ve racked up an impressive amount of notes, but I’m fairly certain that when I run into a question, the answer is in my notes.
When I got the HUD, the first thing I did was to unpack everything – there are various pieces and parts (which Yummy keeps adding to) and I wanted to get everything organized (yes, I may be slightly OCD when it comes to my inventory). I ended up with about 12 new folders.
One of the boxes you get is filled with books detailing all the information you need about the various parts of the Artiste Performer’s Series and what they all do. On the first day, most of it was spent reading through all the IntelliBooks. I made it to Book 13 before my eyes glazed over and I broke some of my brain synapses. 😛
So after all that reading, I figured I was ready to load a dance sequence into the HUD and see what happened. I planned to load a sequence, try to make a mover (using a Palette), and perhaps write some emotes. Just a quick ‘get your hands dirty’ kind of thing.
I decided to use a sequence I already had made (lazy, I know) and loaded it into the HUD (on the *sequence1 nc). I came across questions as I worked, which I wrote down in a notecard to send to Yummy later. I got the sequence loaded and played it through the HUD pretty quickly and easily.
One thing I didn’t like was, as the sequence played, the HUD would chat each time a dance started/stopped. Some may find that useful, especially during the choreography stage. Personally, I found it very distracting. (I included that in my notecard to Yummy, and there is now an option to turn off the sequence chat if you wish – woohoo!)
So after my success (yay!) with the sequence, I decided to move on to create a move route with a Palette. The instructions were fairly straightforward, and being familiar with other mover systems was a plus, I think.
Feeling pretty cocky, I started playing with the Palette and setting up a route. There are two different methods for setting up a route, so you’ll have to play with them and figure out for yourself which one you like best. (I’ll talk about those in a little more detail in the next post.) For some reason, I couldn’t get it to remember the route. And I discovered that the default time for a move was 3 secs, so I changed it to 0.2.
(A little explanation here – I have a habit of starting my movers offstage. I generally set the movers backstage and then the first move jumps to position onstage at the beginning of the sequence – hence the 0.2 secs move time. After some discussion with Yummy, apparently I am in the minority, as most people start their movers onstage.)
After an hour or so of fiddling, I couldn’t make the Palette work. I was sure it was something simple I was missing, but it was late and I was getting frustrated, so I added a few more questions to my notecard to Yummy and logged off.
My last thought for the evening was that Yummy will probably be sick of me by the time I learn the HUD, because I ask so many darn questions!!
A Kat and A Mouse 
Timelines. The instinct is to design and plan around a horizontal time-line. It is how we were taught in school. Time designated across the bottom of graphs by years.
But my gut was to design a ‘so-called-time-line’ around ‘events’. That’s how our minds really work or express; relative to major events in our life. Like birth of a child, started school, high-school prom, high-school graduation. bar mitzvah, baptism, debutante ball, soon after getting her license, wedding, we had been married almost 2 years when, was soon after i joined the armed services, happened right before she went in for a major surgery, i made the first trip out of state when my dad had his surgery, deaths – just a year after mom passed, upon reaching full retirement age we went on a cruise / started our cross-country tour its been 4 years since his accident and hes competing again.
was soon after he broke his thumb, started dating about a year after my divorce
lost his job and thats when he started drinking, we moved just prior to when hurricane Katrina hit.
All of these events could have been expressed as an exact date(time?) on a timeline
but ‘events’ and relative to events i how we talk about them or even mentally construct them. Things happen in relation to key events and are described relative to them.
Thats how I approached the ‘timeline’ of things happening. By defining events. Then things happen at or relative to those events and it encourages you to associate things with each other, not unlike how we describe the happenings in our real lives.
Yumz
A great explanation of events! Yes, that is how we tend to think of things. It’s just learning to make that transition from one way of thinking to the other in SL.
It’s fun to read all that and what Yummy said about the events. It’s interesting how differently everyone’s mind works. I bet Kat would have a heart-attack should she see my half-organized inventory with similar stuff in several folders (I always have hard time deciding whether something belongs to my “show props” folder or my “furniture” folder, or perhaps the “some cool stuff I don’t the real function of” folder), not to mention those massive folders labelled unambiguously as “miscellaneous”.
Also, to me it wasn’t really all that big of a change in thinking when I switched to Artiste. Of course we all still need to learn a new way to “code” everything into the notecards, but I think the most essential point remains the same. You want certain stuff happen at a certain time. I don’t know if anyone else has done this, but I sort of used “events” long before I had even heard of Artiste. Whenever I was planning an act, I would write down the dance sequence (I’m old fashioned, I like pen and paper, so I still have this notebook with the timings and “events” of my numbers) and then add little side notes next to the time line that said something like “Do the first strip here” or “Start the rain emitter here”. Of course with the tools we had back then, when you had to strip via your inventory folders and trigger every effect from a separate hud, there was no way to time these “events” very precisely, but I used my emotes to do that. So I would always stare at my emotes and when the one with “slides out of her potato sack” or “feels the raindrops on her forehead” would pop out, I knew it was time for me to execute the corresponding action and hopefully have it happen at the right time. Sometimes I also picked certain words from the song I was using. So I might have a little mental Post-It note that said “When Geri sings ‘…dancing in my pink underwear…’ it’s time to do the first strip.”
So, in that respect, the Artiste hud has really helped me to wrap up all this craziness and save me the effort of having to make these “events” occur at the right time manually in every show and rehearsal. I know, I know, that’s what the whole idea of Artiste has always been… Hehehe.
You’re right, Nancy – I’m having palpitations just thinking of your inventory! (I often log into hubby’s account and organize his stuff while he isn’t looking, lol.)
I think for me, the Artiste is a new way of thinking because I don’t (usually) have a clear plan in mind from beginning to end when I create a routine.
I will hear a song and start from there. I may have the choreo done when I suddenly decide I want to add sitting in a chair or going down some stairs, which means adding in a walk or sit, for example.
Yes, it would be much easier if I had a plan before I started, but sadly, I don’t think that’s the way my mind works.
So, a bit more work for me at the front end, but when I’m done, everything is ready to go! As I’m learning, I’m slowly learning to think about those other things that the Artiste makes possible – effects, movers, things falling, lights, throwing things, etc. 🙂