Animations distorting avatar mesh

[xigaro]

Hi! I hope one of you animation wizards can help :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

I made a piece of furniture and purchased some full perm animations. Me and my friends thought it worked great. But I had a customer complaint on the marketplace "how awful some of the animations spiked and contorted the thighs and legs horribly!"

Not great!

What causes that distortion? Should I be shopping around for different animations, or is there something in my script I can do, or...

I really want to make sure customers don't have a bad experience with it.

Thanks :D

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Without actually seeing what is going on I can only guess at a couple of possibilities,

Animations that are not custom made for a specific avatars are made usually by using the standard SL avatar mesh.  If your customer has an avatar whose body or body parts, such as legs, are way out of the normal size range it can have this effect.  There really is nothing you can do about it apart from trying out animations before you buy them to make sure they don't distort avatars in a normal range.  Of course your customer may think they are within the norm, so I would suggest you go an ask for a demonstration of the problem and also find out if it happens to everyone that sits or just certain people.

Sometimes SL just goes wonky for people,  What may be a problem today may go away tomorrow.

Lastly, I wonder if she has a mesh avatar created by someone that she is wearing.  I don't have much experience with this but possibly it could be a contributing factor.  Animations are made for with the stand SL avatar and it is possible a mesh avatar is not compatible and needs special animations.

Perhaps someone who makes animations full time in SL can shed more light on what is going on if none of the above is the answer.  It would be helpful if you could obtain a picture to post.

[Medhue Simoni]

As with Amethyst, I can only speculate without actually seeing an example.

 

Here are my thoughts tho. The SL avatar is a low polygon model. Low poly is not smooth, although it might look smooth in it's defualt pose. The Weight mapping on the SL character is not great. There are Jiras about this with plans to redo the Weight maps in some areas like the butt and shoulder areas. When a pose or animation bends an area to an extreme position, the flaws in the Weight Mapping and from the low poly model show much more. With a pose it can be very noticable. With fully moving animations, or mocaps, it will be less noticable. Here is the jira that talks about the weight mapping problems https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-1800. I have no idea why LL has not implemented the fixes yet, tho they are only minor.

Another thing to consider is that the user might be using a Mesh avatar, which might not be well weight mapped either. Mapping weights on a mesh avatar is not an easy task and a bad mapping will show in these extreme bends. When I say extreme, I don't mean outside what the normal RL human body can do. Humans are extremely flexible and way more than most rigging on any 3d character can truely handle.

This doesn't all mean that a pose creator or animator can't adjust a pose or animation in a way that could lessen the distortion. Plus, the SL avatar has a bunch of body morphs, to make all the different shapes we can have. These morphs stretchout or pull in those weight maps and vectors. So, with the combination or pose, bad weight maps, and morphs, there is a huge amount of room for distortion.

[xigaro]

Thanks both for your ideas My customer kindly sent a screenshot of the problem:

[Maeve Balfour]

Yah, that's pretty much as already mentioned - limitations of the SL AV when it comes to certain degrees of posing. I've had this kind of issue when animating / creating poses - the SL AV just doesn't have enough geometry or sufficient weighting to allow for "elegant" results. The leg spike effect in your posted image is a symptom of that. The classic "flat buttocks" when sitting in certain ways is another result of it.

Unfortunately, it's a fact of SL we all have to live with - the AV is probably never going to be changed, so we have to work around it's limitations like your example here.

:matte-motes-smile:

[xigaro]

That answers that, thanks all for your help