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Need help animating a jaw


Psistorm Voxel
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So I've made a fancy dragon av using the SL body, materials and all, and now it's time to animate it's jaw. From what I gathered, I have two options to do so:

* make a new bone/dummy called "chin", hook it up to mHead, and rig to that
* use mSkull instead, and use its rotation to drive the jaw motion

The first one apparently is both impossible and posisble at the same time from what I saw so far, but I couldn't manage. The second approach was easy to rig in 3dsmax, but now it comes to animating.

Problem: 3dsmax can't do bvh natively. There is a script/scene that DOES allow bvh export via a script. Except it doesn't work, since it just tends to ignore whatever animation i throw at it. So I tried blender. Imported - after much fussing - the head with a small marker for the skull bone position, and found out that you can't actually drive the skull's rotation. Tried another scene, can drive skull, but it turns out the skeleton LL provides for rigging isn't actually the skeleton accepted by the bvh importer. So all animations I do on the fitted mesh skeleton actually aren't supported.

TL;DR: The SL animation system seems to be a right mess for my purpose, and I honestly need help so I can carry on and release this. What I need is to have a bone at a specific position on the avatar's head that I can rotate to drive a jaw open/close animation. It sounds simple, but it really seems to be quite difficult. So any help I can get is welcome there. Whether I use mSkull or a custom chin bone, either should work I suppose, but I sadly don't know how.

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Hi, sorry for the late reply. I busied myself with a few other things that needed doing, but got back to it again. I got blender working with avastar, and I thought I had a working method. Rigging the head isn't really a problem at this point, but creating the animations still is.

What I did:

  • imported the dragon head to the blender avastar scene tog et a point of reference for where the jaw sits
  • put the avatar rig into edit mode, showing extra bones
  • moved the skull bone after disabling move/rotation locks to where the joint should be
  • created position/rotation keys for the skull bone at frame 0 and 10
  • did an anim export, range 0-10, included translations, high priority

What I received:
Essentially an animation that does nothing. The skull bone offset isn't reflected at all. The goal here was to make a "closed jaw" base animation using just an offset so that the jaw has a default rest position, and from there on out i could make rotation driven talk animations.

What am I missing? I've seen other people move the skull bone like I did for eyeblink and it worked for them, so it seems like a feasible way (And sadly, I /have/ to move the skull bone, it wont work in its default position and look good)

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Update time.

So I managed to make it work - turns out rigging to mSkull works, you just have to remember to check "Include joint positions" when importing. With the help of another creator, I have managed to get the jaw animation working as well.

That said, I ran into the next problem. Putting on the head with the mSkull offset causes bugged eyes, aka they jut out too far. I haven't modified any other joints other than mSkull, so I have no idea why this is happening. Can anyone give me any pointers whatsoever on how to fix this issue? The weights and all are fine now, but this one issue needs fixing before I can ship it.

Edit: SOLVED!

On a hunch, I thought to mess with the position of the eye bones when exporting, pushing them back just a little. And lo and behold, the bugged eyes are gone. I can fine tune with slider settings and I'm set!

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