RANT - Deformed again. What's wrong with bento animators these days?

[Fionalein]

I was just shopping for bento gestures and trying new ones at a big store (not one of those part time animators) and after trying I had to relog because the animation deformed me again. This is not the first time this happend. Seriously what's wrong with those folks? They should be in business long enough to know folks have more than one shape... but apparently they don't. 

Edited July 3, 2018 by Fionalein

[LittleMe Jewell]

I've not been getting deformed, so to speak, but left in an animation pose after using a 'bento enabled one' - unless that is what you meant by 'deformed'.  I've only had it happen a half dozen times or so, but all within the last few weeks.  I was wondering if it was the pose or something flaky with SL recently.

Edited July 3, 2018 by LittleMe Jewell

[animats]

From a usability perspective, end users should be able to use a "Restore avatar health" option to reliably get everything back to normal. Missing attachments, deformations, missing textures, controls, etc. should all roll back to a safe save point from one simple command. Fixing a broken avatar is far too complicated.

(Of course, they shouldn't break at all. But since that's too hard for LL, at least automate repair.)

 

[Whirly Fizzle]

You don't need to relog.
Use "Reset skeleton & animations"

LL viewer: Right click name tag -> Reset Skeleton & Animations.

Firestorm viewer:
If using context menu, same as above.
If using pie menu, Right click name tag -> Appearance -> Reset -> Skel & anims.

[LittleMe Jewell]

Ahh - I kept trying Avatar / Avatar Health / Stop Avatar Animations, but that didn't seem to be fixing things.

[Chic Aeon]

I haven't had this issue but my alt did. Nasty. 

FOLKS NEED TO TEST!!!!!

And they do not. 

Not new news. 

I don't think this is SL at all. The Bento poses that I get from events all seem to work fine. And I can change my hands to other poses using the Maitreya hud -- all good. So IF it were an "SL problem" I should have seen some issues also (a variety of pose makers give out blogger samples so not just one). 

 

It does make you a bit trepidatious.

 

[Fionalein]

58 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

You don't need to relog.
Use "Reset skeleton & animations"

LL viewer: Right click name tag -> Reset Skeleton & Animations.

Firestorm viewer:
If using context menu, same as above.
If using pie menu, Right click name tag -> Appearance -> Reset -> Skel & anims.

Is this something other than the avatar health "undeform avatar" button which only seems to work for yourself (after changing back to human from feral and using that option I still appeared deformed to all others)?

Edited July 3, 2018 by Fionalein

[Fionalein]

1 hour ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I've not been getting deformed, so to speak, but left in an animation pose after using a 'bento enabled one' - unless that is what you meant by 'deformed'.  I've only had it happen a half dozen times or so, but all within the last few weeks.  I was wondering if it was the pose or something flaky with SL recently.

No, I was deformed, my whole body got stretched. It looked silly. I put "bento" into the header because thanks to project bento animations can now just move the bones around instead of rotating them around joints - and apparently some designers now are to lazy to run some conversion routines to turn position based animations into rotation based ones.

[animats]

14 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

Is this something other than the avatar health "undeform avatar" button which only seems to work for yourself (after changing back to human from feral and using that option I sitll appeared deformed to all others)?

Quote

Ahh - I kept trying Avatar / Avatar Health / Stop Avatar Animations, but that didn't seem to be fixing things.

That's what I'm talking about. There are about half a dozen "Avatar Health" options, and situations in which none of them help. A detached attachment or a failed unsit, for example.

[OptimoMaximo]

The problem is that animators still use joint positions when exporting animations. This is mainly due to the fact that they animate the face along with the body (or other joint positions), which was the reason for LL was reluctant to add joint position animation on the face section of the rig. In case of MoCap animations, this may become a severe complication because the pro tools AKA systems like Maya's/MotionBuilder's HumanIK is a node set up that confuses the Translate Evaluator, exporting values relative to the normalized W term in the joints' rotation quaternion (see the 3D math definition of Quaternion to understand why).

In a tool like Maya's HIK, the process required to have clean exports is to split the body from face animation using animation layers and exporting two different animations to be played back in parallel. Time consuming and cost ineffective. This latter could even be neglected, but the time required (and the knowledge they show to NOT have) is an impediment to flood the market with new releases to milk the users as kettle.

9 hours ago, Fionalein said:

(not one of those part time animators)

Well, a pro would have known this issue and wouldn't have been so adamant in requesting joint position animation on face rigs at all costs to begin with. The same result could have been achieved via rotation just having the joints being offset off the mesh surface, but when i pointed this out in the last meeting i took part for the Bento Project nobody listened. Nobody considered that FaceRig(face slider + animation) = trouble, which is the reason for Collision Volume bones at the time of creating the SL skeleton. Never ever use joints for both Rotation Matrix and Scale Matrix.  But i was the unaware one and "the ignorant fool" 

Never took part to those meetings ever since, it's pointless.

EDIT: oh and before someone comes out with the usual "but you could have contributed a working example to show this", my answer is always the same: i don't do work for LL for free. They should have hired a real professional rigger/animator and PAID for. I'll just swallow whatever the community's "pro" come up with and work (around) within the given limits.

Edited July 3, 2018 by OptimoMaximo

[Fionalein]

Just a question from someone who still works with BVH, the anim format can support rotations and transpositions at the same time, right? Because usually I don't get deformed, so apparently it is working for some.

[OptimoMaximo]

5 hours ago, Fionalein said:

Just a question from someone who still works with BVH, the anim format can support rotations and transpositions at the same time, right? Because usually I don't get deformed, so apparently it is working for some.

Yes, .anim format allows Rotation, Translation and scale (on the mPelvis only) data animation at the same time.

That was the whole point of using BVH in the first place. Joint position was initially thought and seen as a "shape shifting" mean and only rotation should ever be accounted for, during skeletal animation.

the internal .anim format export/import is a workaround to avoid the BVH upload window in SL. That window translates the BVH file into a .anim format, but the compression method it uses is so lossy, that at some point anyone would want to circumvent it. Great power comes with greater responsibility, both of which require greater knowledge. The shape sliders on the SL avatar rely on joint scale to reposition the joints, it's not an actual location change, reason why the scale can not (and should not) be animated.

The upside of .anim is that you can get lossless animation import, without that lot of jittering anyone experiences from BVH imported animations.

The downside of it is that you must be more careful. Working on a specific shape other than the default Male/Female avatar in their neutral state brings a floating point accumulation error that the LL shape adjustment fix can't really manage properly, unless you're wearing that same exact shape inworld too, or you're doing a non human character set of animations with embedded joint positions in the mesh. Not to mention that .anim format can animate also Collision Volume bones and attachment points.

Always remember, that owning a device to record MoCap Data and being able to transfer such data to the SL skeleton doesn't automatically make you a professional animator. These things are easily done following a series of steps in a procedure. An animator is the one that knows how to avoid what is called "skeleton collapse" at runtime, which is what you're ranting about.

[Wubwubthebutterthump]

I was just trying to make a BENTO animation, and I found this while googling the reason why my avatar gets incredibly deformed when using my animations... It looks just fine in Blender, but whenever I export it it just turns into a mess. Please don't be angry with us, it's just REALLY fricking hard to get them working properly. 

 

By the way, yes, these are the same animations... Still searching for a way to fix this.

 

 

[OptimoMaximo]

You're uploading a BVH, which means that if you're using joint positions, ALL joints are going to snap to the default avatar bones locations. Plus, if i'm not mistaken, BVH from avastar is borked (i don't know whether they fixed it, but last time i checked it was). So your best bet is to use .anim format to begin with. Which may not work if your avatar is custom and rigged arbitrarily (not derived from the default with add-on features built on it)