Work on Animated Mesh announced.

[Lucia Nightfire]

Vir Linden announced that work has begun on animated mesh in the Content Creation user group today. Here is a video of the live stream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IStlohQHg7M

This single feature, if done right, will greatly improve experiences and commerce. Secondlife will definitely become more "lively" once it is implemented.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

is their a transscript, that video is hard to follow

[Medhue Simoni]

 

[Lucia Nightfire]

15 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

is their a transscript, that video is hard to follow

No, that UG doesn't maintain transcripts as the moderators are using voice.

The other UG's haven't been keeping up with transcripts lately except for the beta UG.

[Medhue Simoni]

I don't quite understand why Vir doesn't like the term NPC. If LL allows us to animated objects, then everything that any NPC has ever done in any game is possible here in SL. So, NPC is the right term. I don't understand what limitations Vir thinks there is.

[arton Rotaru]

3 hours ago, Medhue Simoni said:

I don't understand what limitations Vir thinks there is.

I guess the term Non Player Character is the limitation. You can certainly do NPCs with this, but there are plenty of other use cases for animated objects as well. For example, I wouldn't call a rigged up hydraulic excavator a NPC.

Edited May 12, 2017 by arton Rotaru
typo

[Oz Linden]

We're wary of the term "NPC" (whether expanded or not) because it seems to be understood very differently by different people. What we're working on isn't an automated avatar, which would imply a great many other things that have nothing to do with animation at all. We are excited about seeing what our talented creators will do with what we are doing though.

[Medhue Simoni]

35 minutes ago, Oz Linden said:

What we're working on isn't an automated avatar, which would imply a great many other things that have nothing to do with animation at all. We are excited about seeing what our talented creators will do with what we are doing though.

Got it!

[Lucia Nightfire]

Use case determines the best nomenclature and this truly has a broad range of uses, especially outside the norm.

Other than humanoids & creatures, this can be used to create orgnanics, machinery, and even players you control in mini-games.

An example of the latter: A creator can make a soccer field with animated mesh characters and have the player sit in the stands while using experiences to control their camera perspective to follow defenders, midfielders, goalie, or whoever has control of the ball and control what they do. The "NPC's" in this case have effectively become playable characters, heh.

[mikka Luik]

hard to get excited when all in vox. nothing to refer to, terrible thing, text - you can save and refer back to innit.

[Loki Eliot]

Isn't automated avatar a Bot? and we already have those. 

I'm very excited about having animated mesh objects. I have a tonne of scenarios that this could be used for, from smoothly animated goblins that you have to bash, to monsters that climb out of the ground. Complex mechanical machines that could smoothly clunk and clank into motion, magical doorways that could appear as tree roots uncurl, Static characters that greet you can be given life to beckon you in. If used with the Experience Tools Force sit feature, creatures good smoothly reach out and grab you. All those horror regions at halloween could have zombies that reach out at you and move smoothly not in a jerky stop motion way. If easily implemented this feature could end up being my most used feature in future.

My hope is that instead of having to code complex scripts of moving a bazillion separate objects every second that put strain on server side, i'll be able put a simple animation in a mesh object and script it to play that animation in a greatly more efficient manner while also looking super smooth and modern.

The amount of work that i have to do just to make an animated creature is mind numbing. Animating a rigged object would greatly reduce the work and anything that makes things quicker to build in SL needs cake & hugs thrown at it!

[HarrisonMcKenzie]

That's really neat. Better looking animals, simple programmable NPCs for scenes, the ability to make flowing curtains, or even real store mannequins.

[Rhonda Huntress]

Flexi-mesh hair.

[shutup and take my money meme goes here]

[Lucia Nightfire]

Worn flexible mesh hair/cloth may have to be it's own animal as it would need rag doll physics to work correctly, but there have been several times creators have shown us unorthodox ways of making things seem like they're defying the odds.

Being allowed to attach an animated mesh object is one of many things we're going to have to fight for as it was mentioned support for it isn't initially considered.

The pet market, though, really demands for it since most pets have the option to be worn on the shoulder, by your side at your feet or flying around your head/body.

If animated mesh can be attached it will have to have a flag letting all rigged mesh links know to rig to the internal skeleton and not to the wearer's skeleton.

[Medhue Simoni]

40 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

The pet market, though, really demands for it since most pets have the option to be worn on the shoulder, by your side at your feet or flying around your head/body.

Maybe, because of how important pets are, we can get LL to allow us to attach 1 animated object, and 1 only. It's also worth mentioning that Vir talked about vehicles. So, that means we can sit on the animated object. This would be a way to allows a pets to sit on your shoulder, without attaching it.

Edited May 16, 2017 by Medhue Simoni

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 minute ago, Medhue Simoni said:

Maybe, because of how important pets are, we can get LL to allow us to attach 1 animated object, and 1 only.

I had an idea similar to how item space is alloted in some games.

How about 1 animated mesh consumes 5 or 10 attach slots?

Some will be ok with that, some won't, but it is an interesting solution.

[Medhue Simoni]

On ‎5‎/‎14‎/‎2017 at 6:26 PM, Loki Eliot said:

The amount of work that i have to do just to make an animated creature is mind numbing. Animating a rigged object would greatly reduce the work and anything that makes things quicker to build in SL needs cake & hugs thrown at it!

Really, with 110 bones to rig, and account for when animating, it's probably going to be more work to create many of these animated things. The quality and versatility tho far outweighs the extra work.

Edited May 16, 2017 by Medhue Simoni

[Lucia Nightfire]

2 minutes ago, Medhue Simoni said:

Really, with 110 bones to rig, and account for when animating, it's probably going to be more work to create many of these animated things. The quality and versatility tho far outways the extra work.

I would still rather do animations versus who knows how many dozens of alpha cycle mesh phases, lol.

[Medhue Simoni]

I remember talking about animated objects back when bento was released. I was saying that Bento is HUGE, but if LL did animated objects, it would be even more HUGE. The info is trickling thru SL as we speak. That content creation video has 3 times more views than any of the past meetings. Even as the meeting was going on, people were hearing about it and passing the live stream around. By the end of the meeting, there were 35 people watching on the live stream, with more coming as I was ending it. Animated objects is HUGE!

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

8 hours ago, Medhue Simoni said:

Really, with 110 bones to rig, and account for when animating, it's probably going to be more work to create many of these animated things. The quality and versatility tho far outweighs the extra work.

 

Since they changed the rules on uploading rigged mesh to get around the bento rig having more bones than the uploader allows and made it so we now only have to include the bones the mesh are weighted to, hopefully the same will apply to animated mesh and creators will be able to choose a suitable sub-hierarchy and ignore the rest of the rig, (for example, if I wanted to make a simple four legged creature I would be able to use the bones of one hand and re-position them so that I can rig the legs to the finger bones and the neck/head to the thumb bones).

[Loki Eliot]

12 hours ago, Medhue Simoni said:

Really, with 110 bones to rig, and account for when animating, it's probably going to be more work to create many of these animated things. The quality and versatility tho far outweighs the extra work.

We won't have to weight every single bone? i can see myself just using the tail bones for a tentacle or sumfin. It's not like you have to worry about all the facial bones when rigging bento wing attachments. It should be way simpler rig a mesh object if you don't have to worry about Fitted mesh and facial bones. Rigging a bento avatar still wakes me up with knightmares but i don't think a simple animated object using the bento skeleton has to be as frightening.

Flexi-mesh hair.

[shutup and take my money meme goes here]

Im not sure it'll be as good as a flexi physics prim, you'd get a kinda constant blowing in the hair. I can see it ow people stood in a room with their hair constantly moving  as if there are 100 industrial fans blowing in multiple directions. :-p

 

Edited May 16, 2017 by Loki Eliot

[Rhonda Huntress]

27 minutes ago, Loki Eliot said:

Im not sure it'll be as good as a flexi physics prim, you'd get a kinda constant blowing in the hair.

As long as it is not blowing out of my chest when I turn my head, it's an improvement.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

As long as it is not blowing out of my chest when I turn my head, it's an improvement.

Unless the animation for the rigged hair and the animations in your AO are compatible and both are scripted to work in unison then chances are it'll still be poking through your avatar, since there'll be no way for the animated mesh object to detect where your chest or any other parts of your avatar are positioned.

[Medhue Simoni]

1 hour ago, Loki Eliot said:

We won't have to weight every single bone?

No, but I'm sure you'll find yourself using more and more bones. With any kind of living creature, you are going to reach that max bone limit of 110 very quickly. It does kind of help that volume bones(fitted mesh) won't be included, as adding them makes you have to pick and choose which bones you have to have. That is, if you want your avatar to be 1 solid mesh, or most of it.

[Medhue Simoni]

5 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

 

Since they changed the rules on uploading rigged mesh to get around the bento rig having more bones than the uploader allows and made it so we now only have to include the bones the mesh are weighted to, hopefully the same will apply to animated mesh and creators will be able to choose a suitable sub-hierarchy and ignore the rest of the rig, (for example, if I wanted to make a simple four legged creature I would be able to use the bones of one hand and re-position them so that I can rig the legs to the finger bones and the neck/head to the thumb bones).

Yeah, of course we can use whatever bones we want, however we want, but I'm not sure I'd advise anyone to do what you described. In order to even do that, you'd need to create a whole new rig with the correct hierarchy, to control the bento bones you want. If you just used the normal human skeleton, making it into a four legged creature skeleton, the default hierarchy would still work for you, without any tricks. Anyways, I'm sure your example wasn't meant as a serious way to do something, but to stress your point.

Edited May 16, 2017 by Medhue Simoni