Problems animating a quadruped mesh

[Tyrian Slade]

I meshed a quadruped in blender.  I modelled and rigged it in a quad pose not a T pose.  It uploads fine and looks nice.  So, I went to animate it using Jacek's BHV exporter.  I snapped her skeleton into the correct places for my bones, then I posed it and uploaded. 

I did NOT get what I expected.  SL took the joint positions my altered skeleton is in and added them to the animation positions.  Instead of my quad standing there, each joint is rotated double what it should be.  

I see now that I should have modelled in a T pose, but it's a tad late for that.  Also, it wouldn't have been the right orientation for the verts.  Are there ways to get things working the right way aside from going back and pulling my verts into a T?

Any help is appreciated. 

Tyrian Slade

[Oblong Crumb]

Have you tried BVHacker? You can add a t-pose and make other adjustment for SL.

[Stickman Ingmann]

When creating a base skeleton to work with, if you change the avatar out of the standard t-pose, then standard animations will not work as expected with it. This is fine and normal, especially for a quadruped skeleton that won't be using standard animations anyway.

 

But if you have a bipedal avatar, and you make the arms down at the side, instead of out in a t-pose, all of the traditional animations you try to play on it you'll find that the arms are "lowered" out of the t-pose, and end up sticking through the body itself, as the arms were already lowered in the basic stance.

 

I suspect that the problem you had with Jacek's exporter was that when you repositioned the skeleton to follow your quarduped stance you did so in pose mode, rather than edit mode. In edit mode, you would be repositioning the source of the bones, rather than simply animating them.

 

If that isn't the case, it's possible Jacek's exporter expects a few values that you changed in edit mode, and ignored the changes you made, using some internal values in the scripts.

 

Edit: I am informed that edit mode was used. It's possible that IKs were in place and were not "baked out," though I suspect Jacek's exporter doesn't require this. So it might just be that Jacek's exporter doesn't support altering the skeleton. Might be best to contact her about it.