Couple Poses with Blender and Avastar

[Amphei Jierdon]

Hi, 

 

I already have made some animations and  I think I understood the basics. But atm I am planning to do some couple poses mainly for SL photography. 

 

My problem with this is that I would like to use my own avatars for this and there I especially have difficulties with sizes and exact positioning. I know how to export a shape from SL to Blender. However I do not really understand how the shape affects the armature, how the armature affects the mesh, and how after positioning the male and the female mesh it all is exported back to SL and then a kiss lets target lips to lips and not the forhead. 

 

Has anybody got some useful hints like video-tutorials? 

[Resi Pfeffer]

My answer may be a bit late and i cant teach you how to get the perfect couple animation/pose, but....
I think, the only way to match your lips while kissing is to change your hover height and/or adjust both of your body length.

Perfect posing alignment has always been an issue in SL. Being the small one, you only can choose kissing the collarbone of your partner while you stand on the ground, or you kiss his lips, while you hover 1 feet in the air like a fairy.

What you could do is, to make an animation just for you and your partner, due to your body proportions.
You stand on the tip of your toes, while he lowers his neck and head towards your lips.

[OptimoMaximo]

The shape-animation relationship is one of the things most animators struggle to grasp at the beginning. However, the concept is very straightforward, i will use an example to try and explain it.

Let's take an arm, from collar bone to the wrist. Then you make a pose, and measure what world position each bone (head and tail)has. This set of data refers to this pose on this character shape. Change character shape, and you will see that each involved bone gets a different position, even if the pose uses the same keyframes. Theoretically, the pose is the same, but the result will be different in terms of visual (world) space. Therefore, if your first pose on the first character made him/her touch a table's surface perfectly, the second character won't, even if the keyframes were the same. This happens on a single arm, now figure how many bones the avatar has, and each one of them adds its own on top of the previous and next one. The various shape offsets propagate and accumulate towards a final, new bone positioning. This is true also for movie productions, where the animations that are used and shared among multiple characters need to be edited to fit a specific character, rather than another. This leads to the conclusion that a "universal" animation that fits every shape in SL can't exist. What you can do is to make a study on what the average body shape is, and try to work towards a best approximation using that average shape. Imprecision will still occur, but this way you try to minimize it starting with a shape that is seen around more commonly than the default male and female avatars.