Creating an arm and hand/finger static pose...advice needed

[Thecla]

I need to create a variety of static poses for holding things, and I would like the poses to only impact the arm, hand, and fingers, and leave the rest of the user's default stand pose or whatever undisturbed. I've been looking at tools to do this, and want to know what people think is the best ones to use and the best workflow. I'd like the arm/hand pose to be Priority 4.

I have AnyPose that allows me to save out animations. I'm looking at the Fate Pro pose app for the hand/fingers. Do these work together and if so, is it a good combination of tools for this project or are there ones better suited to what I want to do?

Thanks so much in advance for your help

[PheebyKatz]

I make everything offline and import it now, but I used the Animare setup for my first static poses. I always had problems getting it to only work on the selected joints though, and could never get that to work.

I currently use Blender with the Avastar addon, and it's the easiest thing I've ever used for making animations, but it's not an inworld tool and it costs a pretty penny, comparatively speaking. As for whether AnyPose can save poses made with another tool is beyond me, but I wouldn't think it would work, unless AnyPose just reads your joint positions and saves them (as opposed to saving the positions as set in AnyPose itself or something).

I know we have people here who can answer this better than I can, but hey, it's a start, right? I'm sure once everyone wakes up you'll get better answers.

[RohanaRaven Zerbino]

To make partial body animation, you need all other joints to be ignored, not animated at all. My best guess is that AnyPose is exporting the entire body keyframed so you would probably need some external tool to get rid of unwanted keyframes on the rest of the body. Other than Avastar/Mayastar, I have no idea what tool could do it.

As far as I've seen, Fate Pro is dealing with finger joints only, and - if I understand well - it would export only finger joint keyfames. Again to compile arms and fingers into one animation you would need an external tool that is capable of such a task, and again, I have no idea what other tool than Avastar/Mayastar could do that.

But having Avastar/Mayastar and knowing how to work with them eliminates the need for any other tool, and investing time and money solely for compiling two simple poses into one would be bad time/money management recommendation.

[Thecla]

Many thanks to both of you. I've toyed with purchasing Avastar on several occasions, maybe now I'll take the plunge. Aside from the poses I want to do now, I'm sure I'll find uses for it in future.

Last time I looked at Avastar I was concerned about it's update schedule. Blender is at 4.0+ and Avastar only claims to be compatible with 3.1. I would hate to buy it only to shortly have it break because it's not being updated.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

On 1/31/2024 at 3:06 PM, Thecla said:

I need to create a variety of static poses for holding things, and I would like the poses to only impact the arm, hand, and fingers, and leave the rest of the user's default stand pose or whatever undisturbed. I've been looking at tools to do this, and want to know what people think is the best ones to use and the best workflow. I'd like the arm/hand pose to be Priority 4.

Well, I suspect most in-world pose creation tools are going to do whole body poses, which is not what you want.

So Blender/Avastar or Maya/Mayastar.

You need an external application that can export only the bones you want, rather than the whole skeleton.

As for priority, you didn't say what the anims are needed for, but priority 4 might not be enough, stuff like a waiter-holding-a-tray pose, you'd want that to override the pri 3 and pri 4 AO's, so you'd want that as a pri 5 or 6.

Basically, uploading pri 5 or 6 anims means using something that can export in SL's own .anim format, rather than .bvh.

So you're back with avastar/mayastar.

 

[RohanaRaven Zerbino]

 

18 hours ago, Thecla said:

Last time I looked at Avastar I was concerned about it's update schedule

Don't worry about that, work with Blender/Avastar you feel most comfortable with, you really don't need to follow all those Blender updates for SL anim purposes.