Making Animated Sequences or Actions in Virtual Stage from Scratch

Disclaimer: All the steps are generalized. Detailed instructions can be found in the tutorials in the Help section of Dakine Wave's VirtualStage software.

When you launch Virtual Stage (version 2 and 3), you will see 4 main buttons on the top left. When you click on the tools button, you will more icon buttons open up (from left to right): Set Manager, Action Repertoire, Voice Coach, Prop Manager, and Actor’s Agency.

The Action Repertoire is the heart of VS’s animation generation. This is where you can create and edit all kinds of animation sequences to your character. With characters that have similar body shapes, you can apply the same animation.

The VS software comes with about 2 dozen animation sequences from hand gestures to walking. The user can make many copies of the given sequences and edit each one to make many variations. If you need a certain animation but it is nowhere close to what is provided, just make one up completely from scratch.

To make a new animation, click on the icon for creating a new action. A character will be selected at random but it can be changed easily with a click of the “Select an alternate character” icon. You will also see a timeline which you can shorten or expand. You can right click on the timeline to create a new keyframe. This keyframe can be moved anywhere in the timeline.

With a new keyframe, you can move the character and its body parts to define a pose in the animation sequence. Add another keyframe to another point in the timeline to create the next movement. Like the Poser software and many other 3d applications like it, there is no need to create a frame by frame sequences. Just create the keyframes and let the software determine how to make the character go to the next keyframe. If the results between keyframes are not what you expect, add another keyframe(s) in between to get the results you need.

The results are automatically saved once you exit out of the action repertoire function.

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