Mesh avatar creation/animation problem

[Shushie]

UPDATE: This doesn't happen on the official SL viewer... But I'd still like to fix it, since Firestorm is a very common third party viewer.

 

So! I'm working on a full mesh avatar, everything was going great! I get it modeled, textured and rigged! Get it into Second Life, works perfectly.

 

Then I go back into blender and use shape keys to create multiple eye states, for a blinking animation. Get that into Second Life, rez it on the ground, pop a script into it I wrote a while back- works great!

 

But then I wear the avatar, everything works as normal except for when the blink occurs! My avatar quickly pops up into the air and back down again, seemingly each time the timer event is called.

 

 

     timer()
    {
        // Show/hide the eyes starting from the top lid down (downward blink)
        integer i;
        for(i = firstEye; i<=(num_of_prims-(firstEye-1)) ;i++)
        {
            // Show blink prim really quick and hide it again!
            llSetLinkAlpha( llList2Integer(blinkPrims,i) ,1,ALL_SIDES);
            llSleep(blinkSpeed);
            llSetLinkAlpha(llList2Integer(blinkPrims,i) ,0,ALL_SIDES);
        }
        
        // Show/hide the eyes starting from the bottom lid up (upward blink)
        for(i = num_of_prims; i>=firstEye ;i--) 
        {

            llSetLinkAlpha(llList2Integer(blinkPrims,i) ,1,ALL_SIDES);
            llSleep(blinkSpeed);
            llSetLinkAlpha(llList2Integer(blinkPrims,i) ,0,ALL_SIDES);
        }
        
        // Show the current 'first eye' that the user has set (top lid by default)
        llSetLinkAlpha(getLinkNum((type+(string)firstEye)),1,ALL_SIDES);
    }

 

 

When creating the rigging, I moved around some bones in the default armature, but I applied rotation, scale and location. Other than the weird popping up thing, it works fine.

 

Here's a pic of the rig:

As you can see I've change the skeleton, widdened the legs, scaled it down, moved things around. Works fine for the most part, but reacts strangely with the script.

gif of problem:

 

https://gifs.com/gif/r0VpVk

Any ideas? :O

 

[Medhue Simoni]

As your update says, this is a Firestorm issue, and that being said, you should file a jira with the Firestorm team.

 

But, me, I'm wondering, why did you make a different mesh, or making it blink in such a way? With Bento, we now have eyelid bones, and you could easily make the eyes blink without all this trickery.

[Pirschjaeger Fassbinder]

I had this problem before with an old bento head I made that used "alpha flipping" for the blinking. I tried this head again on the latest release client (has bento support) of Firestorm and it still works. I am not sure if it will work on the current version of the viewer, I cannot test my avatar head on that verison because it has bento bones in it. However, I think the trick was to separately upload one mesh (export only one blender object) with joint positions and then upload the rest (the other blender objects that make up the avatar) without joint positions. I have since switched to using the bento eye bones myself, but it was a bit of a challenge to get it to look right.

[Shushie]

I downloaded a bento skeleton last night, but the armature looks different than what I'm used to working with. I sort of got the jaw moving as I wanted it to though.

 

If you have a link to any tutorials, that'd be really helpful though! <3

[Shushie]

Thank you! This worked perfectly. I only need the joint positions on one of the objects. So I just seperated the head and tail into seperate objects, and uploaded these with weights only (no joints). Then, uploaded the main body with weights AND joints.

 

Works! Woot!

[Medhue Simoni]

I have some tutorials on the subject of Bento, but......... at this point, they would be somewhat confusing, as Avastar's bento version is somewhat still in beta. If you want to see what is possible, or have extensive experience to deal with the problems, then I give some clues as to how to do things. Just search for Medhue Bento on Youtube.