Has anyone been able to do anything practical with weighting attachment points to mesh?

[Seven Paragorn]

Has anyone been able to do anything practical with weighting attachment points to mesh?

I've been testing the idea of using the nose, chin and mouth attachment points to make an animated mesh replacement head for the default avatar body. I've been able to animate those attachment points and weight them to the mesh. Except I've hit a dead end, the only way that I can animate those points is to rotate them. If I animate them in blender (location + rotation) and then upload that animation, they rotate like they are supposed to but ignore the locations I assigned them.

The next thing I tried was changing their location in the armature, I thought that since it's possible to modify the avatar skeleton that I would be able to change the attachment points location relative to their parent bones as well. No such luck.

Is what I'm trying to do even possible with attachment points right now?

The only way I've been able to get this head working even a little bit as intended, was to use bones in the existing skeleton to animate it. Using the eye bones to blink for example. The problem with that is, the animation from my AO interferes with the heads animations. My line of thought with the attachment points was that existing animations wouldn't interfere. I'm pretty much a noob at scripting so I don't where to even start with this. I guess I could find lower priority animations for my AO, but that's very limiting in my opinion.

Also I should mention that I've been using the Avastar plugin to do all this. The website mentions that it's possible to animate attachments but maybe the feature is not compete.

[freston]

Hi Seven,

As you've found the attachment points have a bunch of limitations. You can animate them (rotations) like you can for all bones. You can also animate their locations, and Avastar will support this in the next release which we are testing at the moment, the current release doesn't really support bone location animation. 

You can't change their positions in the armatures like the usual bones unfortunately. From what I've seen either nothing happens or your entire armature goes crazy when the attachment point has both weight in the mesh and is in the armature section of the Collada file. I'd call this an SL bug except I don't think LL ever intended the attachment bones to be used in this way. It would be awesome if it worked though - it would give you a bunch more bones that you could use for things like facial animation. At the moment you have to make do with where they are by default.

The eye attachment points are parented to the normal eyebones so when they move, they will move the attachment points too.

 

[Seven Paragorn]

Okay, thanks for clearing that up for me, the fact that it's possible is really exciting to hear. I'll be waiting for the next version of Avastar to try that feature out.