Questions, Questions and more Questions

[Draycko Aeon]

G'day SL! I am quite new to using Blender and have managed to make a Furry head. I was was planning to animate it so that I could add a moving jaw without having to seperate the jaw from the.. head mesh.. giving a seamless look, as well as, hopefully, nicer jaw movements.

The questions I wanted to ask was, how should I go about doing this?

-Is it better to texture or rig first?

-would I be able to add expressions?

- would Blinking eyelids also be something i'd be able to add?

 

[Nalates Urriah]

AFAIK, you aren't going to be able to do that. There is no jawbone in the SL armature that you can connect to for the jaw animation.

Currently that type of animation is done by using texture transparency. Each frame of the animation is the mesh in a different position/shape. Each position is painted with a material, up to 8. So, that means lots of polygons. A script changes the face transparency in the order needed to make it appear to move.

[Monti Messmer]

Eyelids usually separate parts and animated with a script; same should apply to the mouth.

Monti

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

Blinking eyelids can be either done by having animated textures on the eyes that contain the eyelids and their different looking states (hence how it has been done for a looong time on furry eyes) -  the textures are animated by script in that case.

The other way of doing it is to animate the 'non rigged' eyelids by a script to move up and down / by using local ROT and EULER.

 

Expressions for these faces would have been done by including all of these facemodels in the same model, which would blow it out of proportion in polygoncount and bring up also other problems. So that is nothing i'd suggest.

 

the best is you have the jaw and the eyelids being non rigged attachments which will be moved by scripts.

 

i've seen someone rigging a jaw to the unused ear bones, but this solution requires a lot knowledge and also there is no guarantuee that this will continiue to work inworlds. As they are changing and fixing things that behave like they aren't supposed to. 

To answer in addition your question what to do first : rig  and make your skins / weights work correctly first. Upload it as many times to the Beta-Grid until everything behaves correctly.

Especially while the ongoing weightptocess you might have to remove a whole half of your model several times, or replace polygons, or might find areas where u need to reduce the loops or egdes or add more.. this would break your UV layout all the time and by that require you to redo the texturing as well.

 

[Rahkis Andel]

I think you should go for it. It's been done and although Codewarrior is right that there is no guarantee "hacks" so to speak will continue to work in the future, assuming this is for personal use, who cares?

Of course, I wouldn't recommend marketing something that could potentially break due to future updates.

Asides from that bit of encouragement, in a real production pipeline, texturing and rigging can sometimes happen all at once depending on the size and scope of the team's responsibilities. Working alone, you could interpret that as "there's little difference which I do first".

In my experience, rigging should happen first. It's often while perfecting your skin weights that you realize "Wow, I really wish I'd added an extra loop here". Anything that can change the topology of your mesh will alter your UVs and therefore potentially break your textures in the process.

Textures are not the kind of work you want to have to re-do.

[Draycko Aeon]

Thank you very much for the reply and I apologize for not responding sooner. I guess I'll have a go with that 'Texture tranparacy' method. Of course that means I'll have to find a Scripter since I can't write Scripts... not even if my life depended on it!

Anywhos-- Cheers! All of you that replied to my post were a Big help!

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Draycko Aeon wrote:

G'day SL! I am quite new to using Blender and have managed to make a Furry head. I was was planning to animate it so that I could add a moving jaw without having to seperate the jaw from the.. head mesh.. giving a seamless look, as well as, hopefully, nicer jaw movements.

The questions I wanted to ask was, how should I go about doing this?

-Is it better to texture or rig first?

-would I be able to add expressions?

- would Blinking eyelids also be something i'd be able to add?

 

---

Yes, you can animate your jaw! If you buy Avastar for Blender, you will get the default SL avatar with all of it's bones. The SL skeleton actually has, I think, 5 bones that are not used at all. 1 of those bones is the m_skull bone. I used the skull bone to animate the jaw of my Lycan avatar.

 

As you can see in the image, I didn't even move the bone's position. As long as I didn't open his jaw too far, it doesn't look too weird. I like to keep the default bone positions intact when I can, as it just works and looks better with motion capture. You can adjust the weighting to help to create different expressions also, but this is limited. For instance, I weighted the eyebrows a little to the skull bone also, to make him look more angry when his jaw is open.

In Avastar, you have the option to export animation in 2 different formats for SL. 1 is the normal bvh, the other is an anim file. Anim files allow you to export those extra bones on the skeleton. So, if you do animate the jaw with the skull bone, then you want to export with the anim file option, which also allows you to set all the setting you need. I know I sound like a shameless Avastar promotor, but I view it as a must have if you want to make avatars or make mesh clothing. The SL viewer now imports anim files, so technically it is now supported.

The way I did blinking eyes is I made an eye lid in the main mesh and gave it a separate face. It was directly infront of the actual mesh eyes, and I used a script to change the transparency of that eyelid face and turn it on and off randomly.

[Medhue Simoni]

Oh, and...... If you do use this technique, your avatar will likely work with my next update to my furry AO. It's quite popular, and I figure I'll update the AO with my own avatar, and animated jaw animations. So, it will work with the old scripted jaw avatars, and with whole mesh avatars that use the skull bone to animate the jaw. IMHO, it coud be a good standard for all mesh avatars that need moving jaws.