Tongue animation

[xLMDx]

Hi,

Quick question. I have animated the face and tongue in blender and exported it into Second Life . Everything is perfect but the tongue does not come out as animated in blender 

*Note* I use a Lelutka head with the lelutka teeth attached .
 

 

 

Edited July 14, 2022 by xLMDx
Re wording question

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

Are you using Avastar or just Blender?

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

Multiple issues might be causing this:

1. An incorrect reference frame in your animation.
2. An incorrect bone movement distance scale in your animation.
3. Another animation playing at a higher priority.

Problem #3 depends on what animations are built into the head and its HUD and how they're scripted. The simplest way to solve it is to increase your animation's priority.

 

As for the other two, if you're exporting an animation using Avastar:

• Make sure you check "With Bone translation".
• If you're exporting BVH, also make sure you check "Add Reference Frame".

 

If you're exporting using Blender's own BVH exporter, it's more work.

If your animation has any bones shifting position (not just rotating), you need to set the scale factor in the export panel to 39.4 (assuming you have Blender working in meters). SL requires that BVH files specify bone movement in inches. When Blender tries to say "stick the tongue out 0.05m" it can't write "meters" into the BVH file, only the number 0.05. Then SL interprets that as "stick the tongue out 0.05 in." and moves it by so little that you won't notice. 39.4  is the meters-to-inches conversion factor and fixes that.

If you have any bones that don't start shifting or rotating at the very beginning, you have to manually add a reference frame. Second Life doesn't play the first frame of a BVH animation. Instead, SL checks which bones change position/rotation between frames 1 and 2 and only animates those. Bones that don't move until somewhere in the middle of an animation need to have their true starting keyframe on the second frame and another keyframe on the first frame where something about them is different. It doesn't matter how they're different as long as it's more than a tiny fraction. (The reference frame won't get played. SL plays a copy of the second frame in its place so things don't look glitchy and the total duration doesn't change.)

Edited July 15, 2022 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[xLMDx]

Hi,

So I currently use Avastar and using bone translation causes the facial animation to deform . So I usually turn it off .

Everything else I will try and amend .

 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

15 hours ago, xLMDx said:

Hi,

So I currently use Avastar and using bone translation causes the facial animation to deform . So I usually turn it off .

Everything else I will try and amend .

"Translation" means "change bone locations". You need to leave translations on to make the tongue stick out. You can't get that kind of motion with rotations.

Animations containing translations often conflict with face & body shape sliders, though. In general, for Second Life, you want to make your animations purely by rotating bones. The two cases where translations are OK are if you're shifting the entire avatar by moving mPelvis (because that's safe) or sticking the tongue out (because you have to use translations for that).

So you need to find out why your animations are trying to reposition the other facial bones. If you have keyframes for X/Y/Z locations on other face bones, you'll have to take them out. If that's not the source of the problem, you may need to delete all the face bones you're not using.

[RohanaRaven Zerbino]