Animation Engines

[PeterCanessa Oh]

Over in the wanted forum there was recently a request for an animation engine.  3 of 3 responders (including me) recommended nPose, which is a pretty good result.

Just to be fair to its competitors, however, are there any full-function alternatives you'd recommend?

[Void Singer]

MLPv2 is still popular and has better documentation (although I think it's a bit over scripted)

xpose is still around, but it's commercial license

there used to be another commercial one, but I think they've folded

[Katarina Foxtrot]

Hi I recently made an animation GIF. but do not know how to change this to the bvh. Could someone please tell me how I can do this? Many thanks in advance.

[Rolig Loon]

Ummm.. A bit off the topic of this thread, but anyway .......  Converting it to BVH may not be possible.  At least if it is, I don't know of a way.  The only option that I'm aware of is to convert your animated GIF to a multiframe TGA file that you display with llSetTextureAnim.  You can do that with the Peregine system >>> http://www.peregrinesalon.com/anim/index.php

[Renegade Gray]

The AnimTron :matte-motes-grin: but this engine is only available in VAW products not as a stand alone engine. Atleast for now

[PeterCanessa Oh]

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Katarina Foxtrot wrote:

Hi I recently made an animation GIF. but do not know how to change this to the bvh. Could someone please tell me how I can do this? Many thanks in advance.

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Unfortunately we have to think of (at least) three types of animation in SL.  I'm asking about avatar animation although you're right, I didn't make that clear.  "Animation" in SL/LSL can refer to:

Texture animation: Textures are pictures and pictures are graphic files and GIFs are pictures.  Unfortunately GIFs are not textures because they aren't a supported format for upload (http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Uploading-assets/ta-p/700165).  Almost any graphics application that can load the GIF will let you save it in another format.  To use it as an animated texture (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetTextureAnim) however you will have to completely re-make it.  SL animated textures, in the sense of showing an animation rather than being moved themselves, must be created as a grid of animation frames.  That is, rows and columns of individual cells, in sequence.  I do not know of any program that could take an animated GIF and do this automatically.

Prim animation: Physical or non-physical changes 3D-object position, rotation, size and/or other features.  There are a LOT of functions for dealing with this as objects in-world are pretty much what SL's about.  All object-manipulation like this is done by LSL scripts (programs).

Avatar animation: BVH files, as you mentioned.  These detail positions for each part of the skeleton for each frame of the animation (or at least key frames) and the transition between frames.  Unfortunately that's a lot more information than a picture in GIF or any other format can provide so you can't make avatar animation files from graphic files.  You need animation software such as Maya (expensive but very powerful) or QAvimator (http://www.qavimator.org/ free but only really useful for SL) for that.

[Void Singer]

and for amusement, when I saw the title originally I thought it was going to be about prim animation scripts... since one came up recently in the server forum

[Katarina Foxtrot]

Thanks for your reply