Need help with base animations [BVH]

[ZM Newman]

Hello everyone.

I'm currently making an plugin to import export animations for SL and the testing stage of "base_animations" (got them from wiki) seems to confuse me a little. These animations define a slightly different skeleton model than avatar_skeleton.xml or any other skeleton's I've found here (and in wiki pages).

The  BVH file defines a different skeleton for animation (beside bone names that mismatch), the initial setup differs. For example, the "mTorso" bone defined in BVH as "abdomen" has no offset relative to parent ("mPelvis" defined as "hip"), while in skeleton it has some offset.

Other offsets seems to mismatch too, so BVH animation applied to an avatar skeleton I'm working with produces incorrect animations.

The question is whether base_animations are obsolete or am I missing some point?

(preview image)

[Medhue Simoni]

No, they are not obsolete, if this is the base_animations I'm thinking of.

I can't really help more, other than there are different skeletons for different functions. A recent example are the collision bones.

[ZM Newman]

The "OFFSET" keyword inside BVH does not seem to be used by SL animations. Otherwise, I don't see how the mismatching bone positions can be sloved. Concerning the bone nams, the SL respects bone names as given in base_anims files. This might be related to historical reasons, I don't know.

 

To the moment original animations can be loaded, modified and exported. The BVH created seems to work fine in upload preview window. It's a bit odd to bind skeleton to animation, when bone names are mismatching, but I've created another skeleton with anim-matching bone names, so this is not of much problem.

 

I'm not sure how to test collision bones animation or fitted meshes. Is it possible to control collision bones with BVH animation?

[Medhue Simoni]

---

ZM Newman wrote:

 

I'm not sure how to test collision bones animation or fitted meshes. Is it possible to control collision bones with BVH animation?

---

No. The collision bones are just for collision purposes, and for fitted meshes. I'm just an animator, and know little about why the bones have mismatched names. I can only guess that SL has some internal system that uses those names. You might want to talk to some1 that has more experience with the different skeletons. Gaia Clary makes the Avastar addon for Blender, and know much more about all this than I do.