Bend Shapes (Shape Keys) and Mesh

[superstarfamous]

guys i have some question ,i dont know where i can ask if you know, please forward me to some links or info . The question is : "is it possible to create or use a <<blendshapes>> for face animation or expressions. i dont know , but may be we have some "way" to set blendshapes and name them in blender to be uploaded and recognized in SL like facial expressions for talking and chatting like it morphs on standard SL Avis ?:cathappy:

 

here is some info what is blendshapes (Shape Keys) : click

 

 

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

no morph target support for uploaded meshes in SL at this time. it's still a special case for the built in avatar.

 

[RipleyVonD]

I have wished for Blendshapes for the longest time. And custom skeleton / armatures.

[Astrid Kaufmat]

As they said you'd need extra features that SL rendering doesn't support as it is now, so morphs are still something off , same as for extra custom bones,that surely would solve many rigging and software compatibility iussues.

A morph target or custom bones are a dreams for now, look how few SL gave us about fitted mesh, preferring the short easy solution ( liquid mesh to sliders).

Although there are still a few things you may do, for istance for some mesh characters you could try to  get advantage of  custom animations and moving your weight on alternative bones. Such as a jaw going up and down according to nec movements or a tail rigged on neck or torso for istance so as the avimoves it moves as well, somehow giving you for now a bit of what extra bones should do.

For morphing you could use an alternative solutuion like saving on your disk collada dae in different morph and once in world find a way to make them  swap from one morph shape to another via script I belive though that it's realiable in rezz places  without using RLV or also for no rezz places using RLV and putting those alternative morphs in one of its folders (maybe some more experienced scripters could suggest you another way).

Another alternative for now to morphs would be the old animated textures on a sculptie prim,which some how fakes experessions.For istance those anime heads and their blink scripts( "less laggy" solution for now compared to that mesh swap one).

[Medhue Simoni]

It really shows LL's ignorance of 3D creation that they aren't even thinking of implementing morphs. If they were in any way 3D geeks, they would have realized that if they had just implemented morphs uploads, possibly in a mdd format, they would have solved almost every problem that mesh clothing has, and allowed for so much more versatility in mesh objects. Instead of thinking, or talking to mesh creators, LL implemented that horrid collision bone solution called fitted mesh. It's like they have nobody on staff that ever created anything 3D.

[Nalates Urriah]

I pretty much agree with Medhue.

Of course the avatar does use morphs. The problem is, we can't get all the moreph information and thus we can't weight out creations to use the existing morphs the viewer uses. If we could, the mesh upload doesn't allow us to include that information.

[RipleyVonD]

I can do without Blendshapes myself. But custom skeletons / armatures would have Second Life feel like a more complete building platform. This would attract alot, and I mean ALOT of talented and experienced people, and motivate them to build for Second Life. Also the life that it would give sims and objects would be breathtaking.

If custom skeletons are ever implemented the first thing I would create is a stream of water and rocks animated realisticly with "Materials" Normal Mapping and some fish trying to jump up stream. lol 

[MIstahMoose]

Wait.

What.

Abuse of bones already planned. Watet and rivers in games are just animated normal and spec maps. You can do this in SL already. They look so good in other games due to the extended materials (roughness maps etc)

[MIstahMoose]

THIS IS WHY WE CANT HAVE NICE THINGS

[superstarfamous]

ok,guys, thank you for info and detailed response! looks like we have to wait , may be it will be possible later

i want something like basic emotion keys:smile,open jaw,surprise, e t c 

somethink like :manhappy::mantongue::manvery-happy::manlol::manembarrassed:

yes,scripting for emotions is like an interesting idea, i saw some animated animals,but they`re looks like 8-10 fps stop-motion video :cathappy:

[superstarfamous]

thanks, i was thinking about it before, and you gave me that idea of moving weight on alternative bones, i`ll try that :cathappy:

[superstarfamous]

Do you mean armature for Non-player-character ? yeah it could be great too !:matte-motes-tongue:

[RipleyVonD]

Right, for NPCs, that would be awesome. I can image walking into a store and an NPC greeting me and pointin me to the section for newly added products or something. Like I said before it would bring life to so many aspects of Second Life.

[kayla Mekanic]

It shouldn't be impossible for them to implement. They could make a way where as long as the mesh has shape keys with the same names as the default avatar mesh's, then they can be animated accordingly.

 

For example If these were the names of the SecondLife Avatar face shape keys

 

_smile

_frown

_disgust

 

And you made shape keys for your mesh character doing those same face poses with the same shape key names, I'm sure there's a way SecondLife could get it to work. It would be amazing to have custom avatars that lip sync with voice, along with expressions.

If they ever even make a feature for it that is.

[Montana Corleone]

Yes, bring it to life, and also lag it to death! I suspect that's why they haven't done a lot of things. You might get a load of talented people in, but cut out all those not on state of the art machines and connections. A lot of people globally don''t live in big cities for instance. 

[Medhue Simoni]

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Montana Corleone wrote:

Yes, bring it to life, and also lag it to death! I suspect that's why they haven't done a lot of things. You might get a load of talented people in, but cut out all those not on state of the art machines and connections. A lot of people globally don''t live in big cities for instance. 

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I'll just point out, that by not implementing something like Blend Shapes, LL has produced a situation which is vastly more data and laggy than just doing those things with Blend Shapes. See, you aren't going to stop people from doing things, and they don't care how much data it takes to produce that affect. They just want it. By not giving the creators the proper tools to do these things, people will just do them however they can. For instance, you could use blend shapes to create realistic looking animations, without a custome rig system. Instead, people are uploading many different instances of the mesh, and then turning the visibility of them all on and off, which is vastly more laggy than just doing it with blend shapes. The same thing is done to animate facial expressions on furries and such, when blend shapes are like made to do that.

[kayla Mekanic]

I highly doubt shape keys for custom meshes would create more lag. All shape keys do is move the existing verticies on a mesh to a different spot. Unlike what people do to animate mesh by having duplicates of that mesh to alpha switch them! What people are currently trying to do is creating a lot more lag, and I think shape keys would end that. Like I said, it'd be a lot less lag than the current method people are using.

[Gaia Clary]

I recently worked on a shape key copy tool for one of our blender addons (Sparkles). This tool actually is capable to copy shape keys from one mesh to another mesh with similar shape but different topology. I wonder since a while if this idea could be applied to Second Life as well:

idea: copy shale keys from defautl Avatar

So first it is important to know that the SL Avatar has all its shape keys distributed with the Viewer. Because of that it is not necessary to send the shape key data of the avatar over the network.

Now lets say we had a shape key copy tool that would work similar to what i made for Blender. Then the mesh creator does not need to create the shape keys, but the sl viewer would create the keys on the fly when needed by doing a copy from the existing Avatar shape keys.

I know this is not a perfect system, but maybe it could be helpful when combined with fitted mesh and classic bone rigging. And while i type this i just got another idea :smileyhappy: ...

[Gaia Clary]

Actually you need to provide one additional mesh for each shape key, so you can quickly get a huge amount of extra data. For example the SL Avatar has about 130 shape keys. In Blender this sums up to something like 40 MBytes of data. I am sure this could be reduced drastically by a better data house keeping, but nevertheless you would have to provide 130 meshes to create a replica of the SL Avatar with shape keys...

[kayla Mekanic]

Linden Labs should just make shape keys a feature, period. If not in Sl1 then maybe SL2, since I hear it should be a more "next gen" secondlife. Then again it'll be a completely new grid lol

[kayla Mekanic]

Also I believe that Sl could handle it in a way where you export a single mesh from blender with it's different shape keys, then it should automatically use them? If they have the right names of course.

[Gaia Clary]

In Blender each shape key is a full copy of the original mesh but morphed into a target shape. That is what i meant before when i mentioned "i am sure this could be drastically reduced with a better data house keeping" because most of the mesh data is redundant (especially for keys that only change a small portion of the mesh).

However there is one way how it could work efficiently:

 

• The creator could send a mesh with all its shape keys to the SL Server.
• Now whenever a user is changing his/her shape, the necessary shape key data is sent over to the user's viewer, where he/she can adjust the shape in the appearance editor.
• When the appearance is saved, then the shape is baked into the mesh and now all is as it was before. No shape keys needed while running around with your avatar

The only issue that i see is, that editing the shape potentialy moves a lot of data from the server to the viewer. But maybe that can be optimized... another idea pops up...

[Medhue Simoni]

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Gaia Clary wrote:

I recently worked on a shape key copy tool for one of our blender addons (Sparkles). This tool actually is capable to copy shape keys from one mesh to another mesh with similar shape but different topology. I wonder since a while if this idea could be applied to Second Life as well:

idea: copy shale keys from defautl Avatar

So first it is important to know that the SL Avatar has all its shape keys distributed with the Viewer. Because of that it is not necessary to send the shape key data of the avatar over the network.

Now lets say we had a shape key copy tool that would work similar to what i made for Blender. Then the mesh creator does not need to create the shape keys, but the sl viewer would create the keys on the fly when needed by doing a copy from the existing Avatar shape keys.

I know this is not a perfect system, but maybe it could be helpful when combined with fitted mesh and classic bone rigging. And while i type this i just got another idea :smileyhappy: ...

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Oh, you should just assume I've already played with whatever you've put out. I could actually kiss you, because I'm already using that feature on the main character for a game I'm making for tablets. It was getting crazy working between different programs that the artists like, and bringing that all together into Blender for the final character, but that new feature just made all of our lives alot easier. Thank you!

Also, as soon as you released that, I immediately thought of how this could make fitting clothing to avatars, whether in SL, or LL's new world, much easier.