We’ve known Warm Animations as a maker of good but unexceptional sex animations for some time, but with the release of their new Stories Sex Rug, Warm has propelled itself into the very first rank of SL sexual animators, and seems to be signaling a new and inventive direction for the company and its products. In the sheer number of animations, their quality, and in Warm’s innovative approach to organizing these animations into extended Scenes, the Stories Rug virtually reinvents scripted sex furniture and puts itself into a class of its own. This is not just another sex rug. This is something new.
What makes the Stories Rug so unique is not just the number of quality animations—certainly more than any comparable product on the market—but the way Warm has organized these animations into Scenes and the quality of the Scenes themselves. A Scene is a pre-set sequence of single animations that plays like one, extended-length animation. Scenes are nothing new and most manufacturers of scripted furniture offer some version of them, but Warm’s are something special: graceful and even impassioned variations on erotic activities that blend into seamless little tales of lust. We’ve never seen Scenes used to such erotic effect as they are here, and the sheer number of scenes and variations as well as their placement throughout the menu system create a rug that in some respects is almost automated, while still being fully capable of operation in the usual, single-animation way. The Scenes system is easy to override, but missing the Scenes deprives you of much of the Stories Rug’s power and enchantment, which would be a shame.
The Stories Rug covers the more affectionate parts of the sexual spectrum with a very generous selection of romantic preliminaries like dancing, cuddling, and kissing, and continuing on through things like foreplay, oral, and conventional sex, all of which are supplied with an extraordinary number of animations. You won’t find much BDSM or rough sex, but that doesn’t mean that what’s here isn’t intensely hot and emotionally expressive. And actually, there’s been a need for an animation suite that covers the more affectionate aspects of love-making and does it with an adequate choice of animations, from first caress up through various forms of foreplay, penetration, and on to aftercare.
The Sories Rug’s Main Menu offers the choice of Map>, Dances>, Relax>, Undress>, Boy-Girl>, Girl-Girl>, 3Somes>, (as well as the usual service buttons for Extras, Stop, and Options), and beneath these Main Categories are sub, sub-sub, and even sub-sub-sub menus, providing a wealth of animations. Choosing any of these categories except Map> takes you to a choice of multiple Scenes for that category. Click on the Map> button on the Main Menu if you want to avoid the Scenes and access the individual animations directly. Many of the Scenes have their own Map button themselves that let you access the single animations within the Scene, giving the user total control.
As an example of how this all works, clicking on Dances> on the main Menu will take you to a submenu offering two dance Scenes: Moonlight (a sequence of 5 animations), and Soul Mate (10 animations). Select Moonlight and up comes a typical Scene HUD with arrow buttons to Start the Scene, to Pause it, to Advance to the next animation, or to Go Back to the previous. There’s also a Map button that gives instant access to all the animations in the Scene and a Kiss button. The Kiss button is an example of an action button, which will play an action without upsetting the flow of the Scene.
More examples: Hitting Relax> on the main Menu gives you a choice of 5 different cuddling and kissing Scenes: Relaxing, Star Gaze, Gaze, Closer, and Adored, which go from casual to impassioned in a natural progression.
Selecting Boy-Girl> will take you to a submenu featuring 9 Scenes, 6 of which are activity-based— CumPlay (cunnilingus), CockSucker (fellatio), Boy on Top, Ride, Rev Ride, and Doggy—and an additional three Scenes called FallingInLove I, II, and III, that are beautiful and sexy little seduction scenes that really showcase Warm‘s ability to sequence animations into seamless, arousing mini-tales of love and desire: kisses blend into breast-play or fondling, oral, and penetration. They’re works of erotic beauty and even come with various action buttons for bursts of emotion and sexual heat.
We should point out that the Scenes on the Stories Rug are not the typical scene you might be used to from other manufacturers, where the lover vault and jerk from one animation to another. The Stories Rug Scenes all have specific themes, and the animations are seamlessly blended. Even when choosing individual, unrelated animations, the transitions are remarkably smooth and graceful.
Scenes aside, to give you a feel for the sheer wealth of animations in the Stories Rug, we might mention that there are 14 different animations for Boy-On-Top missionary; 25 for Girl-On-Top; 32 different cuddles and kiss animations; and 57 animations for Girl-On-Girl. And this is hardly the half of it.
The Stories Rug also gives you some unique and unusual features. On the main menu is an Undress button, which gives you some nice undressing animations. If she’s wearing a RLV relay, you can strip her clothes right off her. There’s also a Pose button that acts like a pose stand for quick fitting of items from an #RLV folder. The rug is Xcite compatible and will supply a Dominatech RLV relay, as well as a strap on as part of its extras. And the rug is quite customizable. We found it a bit large right out of the box, but the size was easily adjustable through normal editing techniques.
The animations are all original and well done, although the fact that most of them are variations on a few basic positions means that the differences in some cases can be subtle. But the quality is good, and, as mentioned, the transitions between positions are exceptionally smooth and natural.
Admittedly, the unusual menu organization takes some getting used to, but the upside of that is that there’s some delightful surprises around each corner, and after three weeks of use, we’re still finding new gems.
We would have liked to have seen more descriptive titles for the animations, a pet peeve of ours, and given the number of animations supplied, that might have been quite a challenge. In any case, the animations are pretty much arranged by increasing passion an excitement within a category, so it’s not hard to tell that “missionary 1” will be a lot more sedate than “missionary 8” or “missionary 23.”
The menu organization also makes coming up with an exact total number of animations kind of tricky, since some sub menus are re-used in different scenes and a strict bookkeeping is beyond us. But believe us, there are plenty. In fact, we’re fairly confident that the Stories Rug contains more animations than any other commercially available piece of sex furniture we’ve ever encountered in Second Life.
At L$4500, Warm Animation’s Stories Rug isn’t cheap, and you’ll certainly want to try it before you buy. But even if you’re not thinking of buying, you should go check it out just to get a feel for what an extraordinary thing Warm has done here, which is to change the fundamental way a piece of scripted sex furniture is used. They’ve integrated a huge number of animations into a series of beautiful and affecting scenes and created a scripted rug that can be enjoyed both actively and passively, which returns to the act of love some of its overwhelming and compelling beauty. The result is a kind of roller-coaster ride of affection and sexual excitement, which to our minds comes pretty close to the real thing.
Humm Magazine 
Finaly someone with the balls to come out and say what needs to be said on the various aspects of existing products in second life. Thank you!
Just a update, FWIW, the above item is now available without the rug, as a HUD you can just wear when you want.