Animation of hands and fingers in second life is it possible

[UTechStudent]

i'm currently working on a virtual world for my university. This world consist of an avatar capable of performing Sign language and other movements of the hands and fingers. I have done modeling in blender 2.58, tried Daz studio and Poser but none of the the bvh files uploaded from these software works, only animation done in Qavimator (you can't move the fingers in this software) works. I read on a website that second life doesn't support the movement of fingers. Can someone verify if this is indeed true.

[Chelsea Malibu]

It does NOT support finger movement outside of the default hand positions such as Closed Fist, Pointed Finger, Open Hand, Peace Sign, etc.

[Cerise Sorbet]

Hi, it is true, SL avatar hands are filled with cartilage, there are no bones in them past the wrist! The hand postions we can use are hard coded morphs.

It is possible that we will get custom skeletons in the future after mesh, but nobody is promising a schedule for that yet. If they do happen, they probably won't be available on the current standard avatar, only on attachments, though those attachments can be complete replacement avatars.

For now you would have to settle for hand attachments made of prims, and use scripted prim movement  and rotation to move the joints, or swap out skin and transparent textures on colocated hand parts.

[UTechStudent]

thanks been trying for while now. Do you know of any other virtual software that can do it

[UTechStudent]

thanks been trying for while now. Do you know of any other virtual software that can do it

[Stroker Serpentine]

Second Life does not allow for finger or facial animation. This is my biggest pet-peeve with SL. Of all of the policies, practices and programming implemented over the years...Prim Tax, Private Estates,  Age Verification, Sculpties, Adult Content, Linden Homes, Child Avatars, Tattoo Layers ...one of the first programs to get cut was avatar puppeteering. Cube Linden (Kyle Machulis), Ventrella Linden (Jeff Ventrella) and Pathfinder Linden ( John Lester) are all huge proponents of expressive avatars, and (had) the chops to bring them to SL. Unfortunately for us, they are no longer with Linden Lab and the project has been shelved.  Puppeteering

It's not uber-graphics that will eventually produce the "SL-Killer". Expressive avatars with full skeletal manipulation and facial emotes will draw residents from SL just as SL did from There.com.  Unity, Real/ UnReal and Crytek  are all over full manipulation skeletal/ facial rigs. They are producing real time drivers that support either interial, optical or sonic motion capture as well as Cyberglove input  and Ultra Wide Band tracking. They have to, Game Developers demand it on behalf of their customers. In the very near future, static avatars, level bosses and NPC's in online games and virtual worlds will be replaced with live characters that emerge from the user base, or, are professionals recruited by the developers. Microsoft is banking on this with Kinect and the release of the Kinect Developer's KIt just recently. It is now the #1 selling game interface of all time, far surpassing Wii Fit.

If there is one substantial game-changer in the virtual world industry, it's avatars. They are often the most overlooked as well. When people start thinking of their smartphone as an avatar, then they begin to see the critical necessity to make effective and diverse forms of communication the number one priority. Companies such as Animazoo of the UK and Moven of the Netherlands are producing interactive inertial capture systems that "avatar-ize" humans for remote location training, customer service, entertainment and research. Why send a precious life into deep space exploration, when a pseudo-sentient being (avatar) can do the job more effectively without the risk and expense of using humans. An avatar CSR can reach dozens of customers simultaneously from the comfort of their home. Avatars can consolidate our entire online presence into one encapsulated interface.

One of the reasons your post jumped out at me UTech, was the project you're working on for your university involves sign language. I lived in St. Augustine Florida in my teens and one of my first girlfriends was deaf. The Florida School for the Deaf and Blind is there (FSD&B). She was an avid surfer and fellow beach bum. I learned ASL  ( American Sign Language  ) from her and still retain quite a bit after many years of non-use. I had high hopes for the puppeteering program within Linden Lab because it would have inevitably led to user access of the SL skeleton. Which in turn would have given the userbase the freedom to create in real time instead of playing back static recorded files. We would have been 5 years ahead of the Kinect Kurve by now and have a full library of international and ASL languages as well as the possibility to sign in real time. This will always be a dream of mine, to sign using an avatar.

I hate to say it UTech, but you may be better served to create a virtual world using Unity or Open Sim. I don't see LL revisting puppeteering anytime soon. Rodvik had better grab the reigns quick, Linden Lab's competitors are tooling up and avatars are their #1 priority. Followed closely by user-generated content. There was a time when the communacative potential for Second Life seemed limitless. I hope we haven't sailed that ship yep.

[Stroker Serpentine]

I had a thought to try and produce retargeted animations to use the entire SL skeleton as a hand. The SL rig has five appendages just as a hand does. I've seen body to hand morphs done before in other digital animation features. The Spy Kid's "Thumb-Thumbs" come to mind. The current SL skeleton could be meshed (yay!) and textured in Blender/Maya to achieve a realistic rendition of a hand, using arms and legs to behave as fingers and the head as the thumb. It would require some tricky weighting and keyframing to keep from deforming the mesh, but in theory I think it could work. Two avatars could then be animated by a chim/hud to behave as choreoraphed pair hands. Bones is Bones.

Currently, we cannot attach other skeletons to a base rig, but It wouldn't require a lot of re-engineering to be able to do so. I agree totally that there is no reason we shouldn't have the capability to create entire heirachies of attachment types (wings, tails, genitals, hair ) that can be individually animated. I had hoped that SL would have had that ability long before now.

[Medhue Simoni]

Stroker, incase you missed it, LL has said that custom skeletons are 1 of the prime things that LL wants to work on after the intial release of mesh.

[Stroker Serpentine]

LL says a lot of things. It only took 4 years to get mesh after it was announced at SLCC:matte-motes-impatient:

[Medhue Simoni]

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Stroker Serpentine wrote:

LL says a lot of things.

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Ain't that the truth!:matte-motes-big-grin-squint:

[UTechStudent]

It was a project my universtiy was thinking about. We wanted to use second life has a learning aid for hearing impaired individuals. Tired Open Sim but i couldn't upload .bvh files that contained fully ridged models. i believe that the avatars in open sim are aslo static incapable of advance moments of the hands 

[Medhue Simoni]

I'm not all that familiar with sign language, but I would think you could also do something even a bit more interesting. Maybe, create a hand mesh, you can even rig to a normal hand so that you can pose it easily. Then you would upload each mesh hand pose, and combine them all together to make 1 object. You would make all the hand poses transparent, then when the right word is typed in chat, you have a script make the right hand pose visible. I'm sure this would take a crazy amount of work, if it is even possible. Imagine tho, a set of mesh hands floating infront of you as you type giving the proper sign for each word you type.

Just some ideas.

[UTechStudent]

sounds like too much work lol. thanks will look into that

[Horseman Schnook]

Perhaps a different approach.

Get a scripting guru to help do it via texture map switching.

i know there is a limit per prim but you can use one texture for all the hands and i have done this.

Just a thought.