Lots of questions concerning Mesh with avatars

[Miraculous Rae]

I have done a lot of reading and seen a great deal of samples already being done with the addition of mesh enhanced avatars. I do have questions to see where the limits are with this feature.

 

I seen that one creator had implimented facial expressions but I believe it was done with scripts as I seen a drop down menu being used. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f38uAjLx6I

Is there any way to have the expressions of the original avatar speak to the new mesh avatars for facial and hand expressions?Or will the old method of huds speaking to animated prims still be needed for such avatars as animals or anthromorphic creatures to give them life?

 

I would also like to know if Avatar stretch/joint displacement will still be a possibility and if it had not been distroyed out right will it be easier to do in programs such a blender during the rigging process. Any thoughts or knowledge are greatly appriciated.

Mirac

 

 

[Feynt Mistral]

Expressions/hand gestures, no.  Those are morph target animations (especially stupid/odd for fingers, but whatever, we don't get finger animations) and we can't make meshes listen to those.  Now also an important point is we can't do mesh substitution now like we could with sculpties, swapping maps around to animate a face.  You will need to attach multiple meshes with multiple UV maps (up to 8 per mesh), and flip through full transparent versions to provide animations.  This will have the end effect of expanding a simple 300-800 poly face to 1k-3k for very basic phonemes and mouth positions until they provide us with custom skeletons to extend the head to include facial bones.

That is unless you do something like reposition the eyes (they're bones too!) and rig the face to those to do animation.  But you'd still kind of be limited to (custom) animations between jaw open and jaw closed, since you'd need 3 working bones to make subtle cheek movements while talking and pronouncing parts of words.

 

Avatar joint displacement is apparently in place, but stretching is not yet.  Or was it the other way around...  We'll get both eventually, just not both before launch I think.  There is still cause for optimism if you're a macro fan.

[Nyx Linden]

Joint displacement works now. Joint rotation and scaling will be implemented in the future.

 

Extending the base skeleton and/or supporting custom skeletons is also a featureset that is desired but is not practical to be included in the first release. Non-skeletal morphs (such as expressions, mouth movement, etc) will not affect rigged meshes.

[Feynt Mistral]

There is something I had wondered though.  There is code in place to affect change on the base avatar's morph targets and bone positions/lengths/scales (see hip width, arm/leg/torso/neck length, head size, etc.).  If we use bones named for the base avatar's skeleton we can get the bone positions/lengths to change via appearance sliders.  Why, then, can't we simply have a hook for the rest of the appearance sliders that says "if you make a morph target and name it this way, this thing will work"?

 

Or, perhaps more importantly, "if you make a morph target and name it this way, your avatar will move its mouth when speaking."  >D

If the option was there, I'd do the extra work to make at least the face animate.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

If I remember correctly, the facial animation in that video was done just by changing the texture on the mesh. The mesh itself wasn't swapped/animated. In the older days of mesh, you could swap out mesh assets in the same way you could animate sculpt maps. But, that code ability has been taken away. So at this point, you'd have to wait for custom bones or do the same texture animation option shown in that video.