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Is there a convenient way to create animations in actual 3D animation software?


andknuckles
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Is there any way to use proper animation software to make BVH animations for SL? I'll be blunt about it, Qavimator is way too basic and limited for me; preferably, I'd love to be able to use something more flexible/multi-purpose, such as Maya (or less desirably, 3DS Max) to create and export animations in the BVH format for use in-world with avatars. All the threads I keep finding though either are full of dead links, or deleted posts. I'm currently using a combination of Maya 2016 and 3DS Max 2011 for all of my 3D work, so if there's any way I could use either of these to create my own animations from scratch, please inform me.. I'm absolutely desperate to find out. :(

My apologies in advance if this has been answered before.

Edited by andknuckles
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I don't know much about this but what I do know is that many people use DAZ (with a special Second Life rigged avatar) to make SL animation and that Medhue Simono once said on this forum that Blender was the program to use for it.

It shuold be possible to use any program that can support an avatar skeleton identical to SL's - with or without Bento - and export bvh files.

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2 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

On this page you can find a BVH exporter mel script.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Testing#Animation_Export_Tools

Thank you for linking this, it's probably the most functional thing I've used for doing this out of all my attempts. After testing this out, I've gotten it to partially work.

Working with the default male avatar rig, I made a test animation:

1Mz4VX2.gif

But in my viewer, it plays out like this instead:

R3l82uy.gif

I thought that I might've been using the wrong orientation with the avatar, so I tried rotating it and making a new, simpler animation:

 JeA8QkR.gif

But that just led to Firestorm being unable to even load the animation:

PVq0eHk.png

Not quite sure what I'm doing wrong here, although I do know that my Maya settings are set to use Y-Up by default.

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You will likely have to re-orientate all the joints of the skeleton to y-up, x-right, z-forward, after rotating the whole SL skeleton to y-up, z-forward.

Second Life creator, and creator of the MayaStar plugin, Cathy Foil has a YT video which covers pretty much all of it. Might be worth checking out some of her other videos as well?

 

Also note this post which reports a problem with the 1.6 exporter version (the one from the SL wiki) and Maya 2016. In the post is a link where you can download version 1.5 of the exporter which seems to work for her.

 

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None of the comet scripts seem to work with Maya 2016 at all. I tried running a few of them, and they don't seem to do anything (no error message or anything). In the video, Cathy seemed to be using a really old version of the program (Maya 8.0). I'm assuming this set of scripts is simply incompatible with modern versions of the software. As for the second video, the rig seemed to be already set up for animating.. Would it just be possible for me to manually orient all the joints myself, and if so, how?

Edited by andknuckles
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Well, yes, I posted the second video because of the updated BVH exporter version. The first video did cover the orientating of the joints already. There are no scripts required to do that. https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-0FA96723-0CB3-47E8-8881-37CABF6C4E09-htm.html

I guess you will find much shorter videos, without all the giggling, on how to orient joints on youtube as well.

AFAIK, you also have to do some extra work on exporting/importing the weights of the mesh which is skinned to the skeleton, because meshes need to be unbind to orient the joints.

I know you asked about a convenient way, and this isn't necessarily the case here, but it's all I have to offer.

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7 hours ago, andknuckles said:

I'll pretty much have to re-rig the avatar after changing the joint orientation then?

You can export the weights before unbinding the mesh(es). Do all the orientation stuff, bind all the meshes afterwards and import the weights. It should all work as nothing had happend.

For easy exporting/importing of the weights you may want to check out these scripts.
http://www.braverabbit.com/transferskincluster/

Edited by arton Rotaru
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