Personally, I didn't think this one was nearly as funny as some of the others - plus it sort of requires that you've either done Live Help or spent a bit of time around a Live Helper to really get the joke.
For those of you not in the know, Live Helpers who are wearing their title get a new IM tab every time someone asks a question in Live Help. When things get busy, you can have a dozen or more IM tabs pop up per minute, and you're generally holding five conversations at once.
It induces quite a bit of IM paralysis. People may come up to you and say hi, and you don't even notice for minutes, or hours.
I enjoy these more and more and still get a chuckle out of the past strips. They make my day when I'm a bit down at work. Thanks Tat and keep up the great work.
Yeah, this one was a bit of a grenade joke: throw it out there and ten seconds later it goes off. I stared at it for a minute, thought "Huh?" Looked over at something else, glanced at the TV, and then said "Oh! HA!" I like those kinds of gags.
As for posing people, yeah it's difficult to work with avs posing on their own. I've found that the easiest thing to do is setup a pose ball with "stand" as the animation. Make the pose ball fully transparent (or texture "alpha" from the Library), and big enough to easily grab/edit when someone is sitting on it. Then turn on CTRL-ALT-T (so you can see it to edit it), tell your volunteers to sit on the poser, and edit the poseball to place them in the proper positions. It's much easier to just edit your shot that way than try to direct people to "take a half-step to the right and turn to face me... No, a little more."
The only downside to this method is that the volunteers get bored standing around waiting for you to get your shot setup. It helps if you plan ahead, but there's going to be some fiddling.
I actually went as far as setting up a couple of ancient, below-min-specs machines to run alts for me. This was just to have warm bodies to use as models, without having to worry about boring them to death while I spent 30 minutes in grouchy, stony silence, fiddling to get everyone placed just so. But, then, I'm insane.
At the very least, you can remind them to start chatting by pressing "/" instead of hitting "Enter" or clicking "Chat." That will omit the typing animation, so they can at least keep chatting while you're settng up your shot. (Infuriatingly, it doesn't override that little "So there!" head nod when they hit enter, but that's at least shorter than the full typing anim. You may have to hide particles to conceal the chat bursts, if the conversation is lively.)
Anyway, I have a few surplus tools that we used for setting up shots and wrangling models. Nothing particularly high tech, but kind of handy nonetheless. I'll drop you some copies next time I'm in game.
That's not true! I've seen you twitch from time to time!
ReplyDeletehehe. Who be guest starring this time ?
ReplyDeleteoddly enough, it took two attempts to login with the "other" option. hmmm.
That's also me. It's easier to tell myself what to do than to try to explain a shot to someone else and pose them.
ReplyDeleteLOL live help doesn't feel so live sometimes!
ReplyDeleteAs long as they don't build a prim around me, I don't mind.. someone even gave me flowers once :)
Looks Like Live helpers could use a prompt to switch seats every now and then.. or even better seats that just randomly move them around :P
ReplyDeleteGreat Comic Tateru. keep them coming.
Personally, I didn't think this one was nearly as funny as some of the others - plus it sort of requires that you've either done Live Help or spent a bit of time around a Live Helper to really get the joke.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you not in the know, Live Helpers who are wearing their title get a new IM tab every time someone asks a question in Live Help. When things get busy, you can have a dozen or more IM tabs pop up per minute, and you're generally holding five conversations at once.
It induces quite a bit of IM paralysis. People may come up to you and say hi, and you don't even notice for minutes, or hours.
I enjoy these more and more and still get a chuckle out of the past strips. They make my day when I'm a bit down at work. Thanks Tat and keep up the great work.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes this one funny is the genuine thanks you display once you've changed seats. Like, "Oh, cool! Everything's much better now, thank you!"
ReplyDeleteYour multitasking abilities must be incredible by now.
Yeah, this one was a bit of a grenade joke: throw it out there and ten seconds later it goes off. I stared at it for a minute, thought "Huh?" Looked over at something else, glanced at the TV, and then said "Oh! HA!" I like those kinds of gags.
ReplyDeleteAs for posing people, yeah it's difficult to work with avs posing on their own. I've found that the easiest thing to do is setup a pose ball with "stand" as the animation. Make the pose ball fully transparent (or texture "alpha" from the Library), and big enough to easily grab/edit when someone is sitting on it. Then turn on CTRL-ALT-T (so you can see it to edit it), tell your volunteers to sit on the poser, and edit the poseball to place them in the proper positions. It's much easier to just edit your shot that way than try to direct people to "take a half-step to the right and turn to face me... No, a little more."
The only downside to this method is that the volunteers get bored standing around waiting for you to get your shot setup. It helps if you plan ahead, but there's going to be some fiddling.
I actually went as far as setting up a couple of ancient, below-min-specs machines to run alts for me. This was just to have warm bodies to use as models, without having to worry about boring them to death while I spent 30 minutes in grouchy, stony silence, fiddling to get everyone placed just so. But, then, I'm insane.
At the very least, you can remind them to start chatting by pressing "/" instead of hitting "Enter" or clicking "Chat." That will omit the typing animation, so they can at least keep chatting while you're settng up your shot. (Infuriatingly, it doesn't override that little "So there!" head nod when they hit enter, but that's at least shorter than the full typing anim. You may have to hide particles to conceal the chat bursts, if the conversation is lively.)
Anyway, I have a few surplus tools that we used for setting up shots and wrangling models. Nothing particularly high tech, but kind of handy nonetheless. I'll drop you some copies next time I'm in game.