Animating the hidden bones?

[Tessa Wemyss]

Hi there, I am wondering if anyone knows of a way to animate mFootLeft, mFootRight, mToeLeft, mToeRight, and mSkull?

 

I've done some searching and found a few references to it saying it's possible http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Animation-Forum/BVH-animation-for-all-26-Avatar-bones/m-p/1390891#M1004

but I've yet to find anywhere that goes into detail on how to do it.

 

For instance, my plan is to move those bones and change their parents to the spine instead of the feet/head, and use them for a set of wings.

That means disconnecting them from their usual parent bones, else the wings would move every time the feet or head did. One of the main things I want to find out is, when the wings (and modified armature for the wings) are uploaded, will the disconnected bones still move in relation to the feet/head? or will they move as though they were attached to the spine? (as I'm hoping they will), or perhaps all this is handled by the animation?

 

The next problem I've run into is making the animation.

I've read that in order to get any of the hidden bone animation data to upload to SL, then it has to be exported into the "anim" format instead of the BVH format, and then uploaded using the "Bulk" option, because the BVH uploader doesn't take into account the hidden bones. Also the bone names are different from the mesh armature ones.

I admit I am a little clueless as to how to successfully export an anim file from Blender, as it only allows export of the BVH format.

 

I've read that there was a modified QAvimator that could do it, but I can't seem to track it down on the internet. I know that animating the hidden bones successfully is a long shot, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't possible before I continued with my mesh wings project.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks :)

[freston]

Hi Tessa,

---

Hi there, I am wondering if anyone knows of a way to animate mFootLeft, mFootRight, mToeLeft, mToeRight, and mSkull? 

I've done some searching and found a few references to it saying it's possible

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Animation-Forum/BVH-animation-for-all-26-Avatar-bones/m-p/1390891#M1004

but I've yet to find anywhere that goes into detail on how to do it.

---

Yes it's possible to animate all those bones. I've also heard that it can be done via BVH but I've not confirmed it and in any case it's much easier to just use the "anim" format.

 

---

For instance, my plan is to move those bones and change their parents to the spine instead of the feet/head, and use them for a set of wings.

That means disconnecting them from their usual parent bones, else the wings would move every time the feet or head did. One of the main things I want to find out is, when the wings (and modified armature for the wings) are uploaded, will the disconnected bones still move in relation to the feet/head? or will they move as though they were attached to the spine? (as I'm hoping they will), or perhaps all this is handled by the animation?

---

You can't reparent the bones unfortunately. At least not without patching everyones viewers. What you want to do might be possible though. You would have to create an animation that both rotated and moved the bones so it looked like they where attached to the spine. To animate bone movement you will definitely need to use the anim format.

I'm interested in testing out the idea (see 

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/content-creation/73726-extreme-skinning.html

 and I'm in the process of modifying Avastar to try and make this work. The idea is to create a rigging skeleton that is parented like you want and that drags along the SL bones with it, then the animation is just exported from the SL bones and has the right translations and rotations for the effect. That way it would be easy to animate.

You wouldn't be able to use any other "standard" animation though as those would move the feet and legs and the foot and toe bones will follow them.... so you would have to redo all the AO animations etc and commpensate for .... 

damn, just thought of a way around it

Sorry to go all mysterious on you but I need to try it out first ... if it works it will be very very cool

 

 

[Tessa Wemyss]

Hi Freston, thanks for the reply

 

I didn't think it likely that I would be able to reparent those bones, oh well. Thanks for the info though, at least I can rule that option out now. I'll look into making anims that move and rotate the bones so they're positioned at the spine, hmm this is going to take a whole rework of my AO

 

By the way, I liked the goldfish!

[freston]

I don't think the idea I had in a rush of blood to the brain will pan out

I remembered that the anim format has a contraint system too. I thought maybe the system could also fix the location of a bone which would then work like you wanted to 'reparent' a bone.

From what I can see though this is an IK system so the end of a bone chain can stick to another bone or the ground and the rotations up the chain will be dynamically calculated. Still it might be fun to play with.