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A few questions about animating in second life


hskirk
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Hi!

Okay, so I recently graduated with a degree in animation and would like to start up my own animation business here.  However, I wanted to know a few things about the avatar mesh and which programs to use. Currently I use Maya to animate rigs, but it seems the hardest as far as importing in your mesh. Is there a detailed link on how to animate in Maya for Second Life?

Also, it seems like if I want to move the avatar's hips (been testing it in a couple of different programs), it moves the whole body. Are poses such as popping your hip out not available? My last question is I can't seem to animate the fingers. Now from watching animation videos, it seems you don't animate the fingers at all. I am guessing you can do it in world? Just want to make sure because if I want to actually make it look like they are grasping something, a fist, etc. is possible in here.

Thanks!

 

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Hi hskirk,

 

unfortunatly I can't answer all your questions as I'm no expert in animating - but I'll give it a try:

the hip defines the position of the avatar, so your observation is quite right. I guess you can make your hip popping out if you carefully design the movements of the other body parts so that the center of gravity stays about the place it was before the animation started. Several animations can be superposed and the hip is the common reference for all those animations.

AFIK the position of the fingers for a given animation is chosen by the animator at the time of uploading and one can't change it afterwards. You can upload your animation twice, one with your hand relaxed and one with your hand as a fist though. If you play those animations in sequence it might resemble a grip. But sometimes SL has the trend to spread out your fingers without regard to the setting at upload :-( I'm happy to be a furry with paws ^^

 

Have fun

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I can't help you with Maya. Hopefully someone else comes along..

The only way to animate your hands is to select a hand pose when you upload your animation. Just try uploading some anims (use the beta grid for free uploads) and try selecting the different hand poses. The hand poses don't completely stay as selected though. Sometimes they will get overrided by another animation or sometimes they just change for some unknown reason. I would just test it all out on the beta grid and see how hands behave. Face expressions work the same way too.

As for hips, it does move the entire avatar when you move the hips. So if you were to make a pose with the hips swung out the left, you'd have to slide the hip's position to the left so that the feet remain where they were.

Animations aren't just played from the inventory. They are usually called through scripts. I'd also get familiar with SL scripting for animating avatars in things like poseballs, animation overriders (AOs), and vehicles.

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You don't upload a mesh with the animations, it's just a bvh file. The hands are animated with morphs, that you choose upon uploading the animation. The hips can pop out. Maybe you aren't using the right rig. There was just a thread here in the animation forum with some1 else using Maya. Chosen gave a link to a Maya rig for SL. The hips actually have 2 set of controls. 1 is positioning and the other is rotation. Plus, the first frame needs to be a Tframe and is for positioning the avatar also.

Here is a link to the other thread with the link to the Maya rig. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Animation-Forum/Maya-Animation-Script-Rig-Model/td-p/1592715

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