Can i make animations in blender without avastar?

[Bee Hazelnut]

Tried looking through the forums for this answer, but there is a lot of pages. i simply want to know if its possible to create animations without the use of avastar? if so can i be redirected to help on how to setup. or get a quick run down on what i need to do to setup.

 

thank you 

[OptimoMaximo]

Try this one 

Someone made a tutorial after discussing how to make it work without avastar. It's really some way down on this very first page in the forum. 

 

[Chic Aeon]

 

6 hours ago, Bee Hazelnut said:

Tried looking through the forums for this answer, but there is a lot of pages. i simply want to know if its possible to create animations without the use of avastar? if so can i be redirected to help on how to setup. or get a quick run down on what i need to do to setup.

 

thank you 

I am pretty sure that you can do the same thing the video did (change orientation)  ---- when you EXPORT the bvh file.  We did that in Sansar successfully anyway (the changing the orientation on export).   I use Avastar for animations in SL.

Here is where I think that would be.  I have NO idea which orientation would be correct but a few tests should tell you.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Chic Aeon
put in wrong screenshot

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

13 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I am pretty sure that you can do the same thing the video did (change orientation)  ---- when you EXPORT the bvh file.

Changing those in vanilla Blender never made a difference for me.

[Chic Aeon]

1 minute ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Changing those in vanilla Blender never made a difference for me.

Were you applying rotation and scale before export?  Exporting from object mode?  Just wondering why it worked in Sansar. Not caring to experiment for myself and its been awhile since I was doing things this way .     Maybe someone that is still doing it this way will chime in.  :D.   And of course as the video says downloading the avatar with the correctly named bones.    There WERE several steps (not mentioned in the video) that needed to be done before exporting.  Of course if just changing the avatar in the file works, then doing that and saving a start up file would be easy as long as you weren't too cemented in your thinking about those rotation directions and lettering :D.   

 

There is a gal in Opensim that has been exporting from Blender for years.  In Cloud Party someone made an online converter to change the orientation -- the same "Maya as default orientation" issue.  

 

 

 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

21 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Were you applying rotation and scale before export?  Exporting from object mode?

Probably and yes. It was well over a month ago and I don't really remember. I do know it was across multiple versions of Blender in the 2.7 and 2.8 version lines, including experimenting with the BVH export Python file to see how its code changes over the years might affect things.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[OptimoMaximo]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

 

I am pretty sure that you can do the same thing the video did (change orientation)  ---- when you EXPORT the bvh file.  We did that in Sansar successfully anyway (the changing the orientation on export).   I use Avastar for animations in SL.

Here is where I think that would be.  I have NO idea which orientation would be correct but a few tests should tell you.

What you're pointing at, here, is called rotation order and has nothing to do with orientations. Rotation order is the "importance" given to an axis during evaluation in the playback, and it works in reverse. The last axis in the list is the first one being evaluated while the first is the last. This to prevent wobbling motions when using ruler rotations and the main rotation axis isn't calculated for first. 

Eta: it's never been clear to me why this would ever be an export preset though. That same dialog could be found in the properties panel as well as in the N panel and its sole purpose is to set the evaluation mode for rotations inside of the 3d application. 

Edited July 14, 2020 by OptimoMaximo

[Chic Aeon]

50 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

What you're pointing at, here, is called rotation order and has nothing to do with orientations. Rotation order is the "importance" given to an axis during evaluation in the playback, and it works in reverse. The last axis in the list is the first one being evaluated while the first is the last. This to prevent wobbling motions when using ruler rotations and the main rotation axis isn't calculated for first. 

Eta: it's never been clear to me why this would ever be an export preset though. That same dialog could be found in the properties panel as well as in the N panel and its sole purpose is to set the evaluation mode for rotations inside of the 3d application. 

So is there nothing like THIS for a bvh file anywhere?  That is what I was thinking of.

 

Adding a bit off topic.    

 

I have never been able to get a bvh file to export using Avastar (2.79 Blender). I can only export using anim file  and that works perfectly and super easily. BUT of course there is no upload preview for that file type and all the upload choices are done in the viewer in the Avastar pane.    

 

 

Edited July 14, 2020 by Chic Aeon

[OptimoMaximo]

6 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

So is there nothing like THIS for a bvh file anywhere?  That is what I was thinking of.

Nope. Fbx handles the actual orientation of the world the object sits in. Bvh is a hierarchy with axis listed and the numbers in the document body resemble the rotations those same axis perform in that same order. If your animation has a wobbly motion in the scene, those numbers would be a certain set of values, while changing the rotation order in your scene and thus eliminating the wobbling from your animation would result in different numbers in the bvh body. 

By definition, bvh files don't have a parent world orientation as well as a joint orientation. It's assumed that these data are known upon decoding in order to make it work, but a general standard to avoid confusion and the need of translators is to base everything on the default Maya orientation, y up and z forward 

Edited July 14, 2020 by OptimoMaximo

[OptimoMaximo]

18 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

 

I have never been able to get a bvh file to export using Avastar (2.79 Blender). I can only export using anim file  and that works perfectly and super easily.

Bvh export in Avastar is broken since ages, it was still Avastar 1 when it stopped working. 

[Bee Hazelnut]

On 7/14/2020 at 8:15 PM, OptimoMaximo said:

Try this one 

Someone made a tutorial after discussing how to make it work without avastar. It's really some way down on this very first page in the forum. 

Thank you, i will view and try this out 

 

[Bee Hazelnut]

This worked but not for the bento rigging. the fingers and eyes/eyelids came out completely warped when uploaded to SL.

[BinBash]

On 7/14/2020 at 10:18 AM, Bee Hazelnut said:

Tried looking through the forums for this answer, but there is a lot of pages. i simply want to know if its possible to create animations without the use of avastar? if so can i be redirected to help on how to setup. or get a quick run down on what i need to do to setup.

 

thank you 

I'll save you some pain.  You won't easily be able to export your BVH and have it compatible with SL.  There are manual ways to do it, and I won't get into the technical details here as I'm sure nobody really wants to know, except a few of us, so the easy solution is to use a tool that works, and for your particular purpose that would be for BVH.  I do have such a tool that supports volume bones and Bento (if you want to call it that, it's just a skeleton) for translation and rotations supporting all bones and done correctly.

If you want to actually do it manually I can point you in the right direction but I don't want to drone on about it here, most people just want the job done and don't care how it works.  You can contact me if you like.

\o