How to move Blender Rigged Mesh (*NOT* clothes) object

[Restless Swords]

I believe you can rig and "animate" mesh object parts in Blender, and I know you can import an overall Blender object into SL.

- and I even know how to script move an overall object (mesh or prim) and its individual linked elements

- but HOW can you "flex" a single mesh object (or linked element)?

- For example, the mesh "weasles" you see moving around, their body+neck+head is one mesh prim, but flexes

  (as does its single mesh piece tail)

NOTE: this is for non-attached stand-alone objects, *NOT* for clothing attachments.

i.e., in other words, how can I make standalone mesh objects that flex and move the way rigged clothing moves, and the way those weasels flex their bodies and tails etc.

 

 

Edited April 3, 2017 by Restless Swords

[arton Rotaru]

14 minutes ago, Restless Swords said:

NOTE: this is for non-attached stand-alone objects, *NOT* for clothing attachments.

i.e., in other words, how can I make standalone mesh objects that flex and move the way rigged clothing moves

 

 

Simple answer, you can't. Since standalone objects have no bones which could be animated.

[Restless Swords]

3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Simple answer, you can't. Since standalone objects have no bones which could be animated.

somehow (i don't know how) that seems to not be true.  if you go to OpenCollar and look closely at the Weasels moving there, they are a few Mesh prims.  their head-neck-body is one mesh piece, and flexes.  their tail is one mesh piece, and flexes.  Or at least it sure looks like they do.  watch one just standing, watch his neck-head-body, and his tail.  Maybe the blender animation does not use bones in the SL sense, but somehow those weasels (and some other animals I have seen) truly seem to flex.

 

 

[arton Rotaru]

Unfortunately it is true. There is no way to animate mesh like you can do with rigged avatar attachments in Second Life.

The Weasels you are talking about aren't mesh, they are sculpted prims which swap the sculpt map by script to load the body in a slightly different pose.
(Rapidly swapping sculpt maps like that is considered bad practice though, which is why it has been disabled for mesh assets. During mesh beta it was indeed possible to swap the mesh asset just like a sculpt map)

With mesh a rather similar approach is often seen, where the mesh object is made of a dozen (you name a number) meshes of the same object with slightly altered poses. Swapping the Transparency between those to have some kind of animation. (Obviously also not the most efficient approach, since you will have to carry the polycount X times rather than having just one mesh.)

Then there is the method you outlined, by rotating/moving child prims/meshes. Which is also my prefered method of object animation. Although, this has it's own set of drawbacks indeed.

Maybe one day we get a proper method to animate objects properly in Second Life? We just shouldn't hold our breath.

Edited April 3, 2017 by arton Rotaru

[Restless Swords]

yes, I went back and looked at the OpenCollar weasels, they are not quite as nice as some other animals I have seen, and it is quite possible there is some sculpt map reloading taking place.  Also, I think their "breathing" may be accomplished by scaling up and down the height+width of their body object.  I *hate* animals that have many different sub-elements is slightly different positions and then transparency switch -- I saw one yesterday like that which had an LI of way over 700 and took forever to rez.  Yes, it looked nice and real but that is totally ridiculous.

- I have seen some animals using the position-rotation changes which look lifelike, very smooth movement, but I suspect they might have a significant script load but don't really know.

So in the end, I agree with you, we need some way to properly animate obects (like animals but also other things).

 

[arton Rotaru]

Yeah, smooth fluid pos/rot changes require very tiny steps, which sends a ton of partcial object updates to the viewers.

[Klytyna]

8 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Yeah, smooth fluid pos/rot changes require very tiny steps, which sends a ton of partcial object updates to the viewers.

There is also the fact that the script commands used to animate child prims come in two flavours, the normal ones, that have a built in 0.2 second delay which limits you to 5 frames a second for your animation, or the 'fast ones' which do not have this built in delay but which have a warning that they might not execute in the order you send them, so your animation can glitch up.

That's why people did those sculpt-map-blitters and multi-object-alpha-flickers in the first place, and even then you can often see one of somebody's 40 'tails' flicking on or off out of sequence, or flicking on and staying on so they have 2 'tails'.