Animated attachment

[Consaidin]

I think this belongs here? Im curious how animesh hair works. Presumably animations are made for when the avi turns/walks/runs etc. But does it have its own AO, or some sort of scripting process that triggers each animation whenever the avi performs each movement? Anyone who can elaborate?

Ive seen scripts on the MP that apparently mimic your avatars movements on the animesh attachment—if so, would it be just a matter of setting the right deformations for your mesh? Sorry if this is the wrong place for this!

[Jenna Huntsman]

All it needs is to detect what state of motion the avatar is in - so, it needs to detect if the avatar is walking, jumping, flying, falling etc. Nothing too major, scripted AOs do this all the time, then activate the appropriate animation on the animesh attachment.

[Quistess Alpha]

5 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Nothing too major, scripted AOs do this all the time,

indeed not too hard, but there are a good number of caveats that make "object animation" different than avatar animation:

1. The object needs to have the animesh flag set (it's one of the checkboxes in the build window) and the lsl functions are llStartObjectAnimation and llStopObjectAnimation.
2. Object animations need to be stopped by the script even if they're non-looped.
3. llSetAnimationOverride() isn't available in an object-equivalent version.

 

[Consaidin]

Thanks guys! That'll be next on my list to experiment.🤖

[Quistess Alpha]

19 hours ago, Consaidin said:

Im curious how animesh hair works.

Somehow I missed that it was about hair specifically when reading the first time. AFAIK the only the only hairs that are set to animesh are imitations of a medusa/gorgon (lots of independently moving 'snakes') as animesh attachments are limited (basic members can only attach 1, premium 2, and prem+ can attach 3?) and resource intensive for observers (not something you want to wear to a shopping event if you're nice)

The main techniques for adding movement to are flexi-prims, alpha-flipping/texture animation, and bento-rigging;

Flexi has really gone out of style and a lot of people look down on it as being 'old' because when it was new it got heavily over-used, but when used sparingly I think it can add a lot of life to a hairstyle. MAGIKA has a really inexpensive fat-pack of all their old sculpt-flexi hairs, which are worthwhile to examine as prime examples of it used well (some of them more than others, it's a BIG pack)

alpha-flipping/texture animation have different technical implementations, but both work on the same principal: you model 3~5 different positions of the hair (from what I've seen usually just a single strand) and make one of them visible in sequence, so it appears to be 'moving' (video is after all, just a sequence of still images) Personally that usually comes off as a bit stiff and corny to me, but to each their own.

The last option is just to rig your hair to the bento wing bones which gives you many of the advantages of animesh, but with the downside that unlike animesh it wouldn't be resizeable or repositionable, and people with wings wouldn't be able to use it.