Animating Mesh/ Mesh Deformers

[C4th Clawtooth]

hi guys. recently purchased a mesh avatar that has smooth jaw and blinking animations. and for the life of me I cant work out how its done.

 

full mesh avatar (not the SL base mesh)

facial animations/morphs controlled with in world animations ( as in uploaded animations)

Any ideas?

link below for the avatar in question
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Demoness-DEMO-SciLab/5249070

 

 

[C4th Clawtooth]

hi guys. recently purchased a mesh avatar that has smooth jaw and blinking animations. and for the life of me I cant work out how its done.

 

full mesh avatar (not the SL base mesh)

facial animations/morphs controlled with in world animations ( as in uploaded animations)

Any ideas?

link below for the avatar in question
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Demoness-DEMO-SciLab/5249070

 

 

[Sassy Romano]

Usually by re-purposing bones such as toes and the skull bone for example

[C4th Clawtooth]

ahhhhh... that sounds like a good place to start.

[Medhue Simoni]

I just made a mesh avatar with a moving jaw and blinking eyes. The jaw got weighted to the skull bone. The eyes are rigged with the SL eyes and should move around. I made it blink by creating eyelids over his eyes, and then using a script to make that eyelids visible when he blinks.

[Psistorm Voxel]

I would like to know how you managed, because lately I've been trying to do the same and it was more than a bad trip. I tried max - nope, can't export BVH at all - and then tried blender, nope, the SL skeleton isn't actually the one you animate with. Oh there's an export script from 6 years ago. Nope, that one's broken. Also nope, you can't actually move the end bone for skull into position where the jaw joint should be at, either and drive its rotation from there.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm frustrated, since this is blocking me from releasing my work. So if you could give me pointers as to how you did it and how I can get a jaw set up myself, that'd be much appreciated. There is as good as zero documentation out there, but I've seen other people do it as well.

[Medhue Simoni]

Hey Psistorm,

I use Blender with the Avastar add on. Avastar gives you the whole SL avatar with all of it's bones. I'm not sure if you can move the mskull bone, as I didn't move it, I just rigged the jaw to it, and it just happen to be in a position that didn't look bad unless I opened the jaw to extremes. Here is a video that I made about Avastar. It's not my best video but it shows kind of how I used Avastar to make my Lycan Avatar.