This tutorial follows after Create your first Virtual World, so if you haven't gone through that tutorial you can get a copy of the park here.

Animated objects look great in a scene, but unless you know what objects are animated it's pretty hard to get them going. One way of figuring out if a model is animated is hovering over the item in library. If the description has the word animated in it you're in luck. Also if you use our Publisher tool you will know what items you have published that are animated.

One item that has animation data in it is the Stone Windmill, so go ahead and add that into the scene. Compared to everything else we have in the scene, the windmill looks a little bit small. We want to scale this up to match everything else so go and use the uniform size tool.

Now it's time to get this windmill animating. To do this we are going to go into the IMML editor by clicking on the tab in the bottom left of the scene that says IMML.
IMML is a simple, XML based specification, designed from the ground up to standardise interactive media inclusion on the Web, especially in the context of the Virtual Web.
In the same way that HTML describes to a Web Browser how to render a webpage, IMML tells a Virtual Web Browser how the world should function, look and interact, with support for driving script logic through trigger based events and control structures.
The IMML editor may seem scary to some people, but if you are familiar with other editors like Dreamweaver you will have no problems.
In the IMML look for your stone windmill, it should be at the bottom of the list as it was the last thing that was added to the scene.

The first line of IMML for the Stone Windmill should look something like this:

<Model Name="Stone Windmill" CastShadows="False" Source="..."
Position="-94,50,155" Size="50,55.6,27.3">

All we need to do is add in command for the animation and it is Animation="windmill_turn" where windmill_turn is the name of the animation. So your IMML for the Stone Windmill should now look like this:

<Model Name="Stone Windmill" Animation="windmill_turn" CastShadows="False"
Source="..." Position="-94,50,155" Size="50,55.6,27.3">

Switch back into design mode and you will instantly see your windmill turning. It is important to note that the name of the animation is defined by the person who published it. So unless you published the content yourself, you may find it difficult to get objects animating. Check the MetaWSS information in the objects properties for a URI to link to and you may be able to contact the publisher to learn more about the object.