Yay more problems! Animating in Maya on mac, hip won't move in game

[BigFetus]

So, this is the skeleton I'm using to try to animate. http://abbloch.com/slmaya/skeleton.ma

I'm using a script for exporting as a BHV that I found on this forums, but I can't find it now, or I'd give a link to the post.

Well, basically, my issue now is that in my animation, the hip moves around. The character jumps up and back, the hip twists some, jumps forward. The arms, legs, body, and neck move around and such too. But, when I upload the animation to SL, one of two things happens. Either the hip just stays still the entire time and only the arms, legs, body, and neck move and twist, or the hip twists the entire body to float and lean to the left about 45 degrees for about half the animation, then the other half of the animation it returns to the neutral position while everything else moves around it, still never actually moving the hip.

I've tried renaming bones. I renamed them all based on a hierarchy I also found here on forums, and it didn't help. I've tried only changing the mPelvis to hip, and that's when this started. Before that, I couldn't even upload the animation.

 

Any ideas?

 

[Medhue Simoni]

I've never used Maya, so I don't know how much help I'll be.

What I do have some understanding about, is that the SL skeleton and animation system has some unique properties. Mainly, the hip/pelvis has 2 sets of settings. 1 sets is strictly rotational, and the other set is positional. Possibly, those 2 sets of settings are flipped.

First things first tho, you should make sure that your 1st frame is a Tframe(meaning all bones set to zero), and then make sure there are no bones in the 2nd frame that are set to zero. Then try to upload the animation. You can also get Qavimator for free. I don't generally use it, but if I ever have a problem with an animation, want to mirror an animation, or want to optimize it, I drop it in Qavi to make sure it will work in SL right.

It might also help if you post about this in the Mesh Forums. Those guys have more experience in Maya, rigging and the SL skeleton.

1 last option might be to drop the bvh into Poser, which will reconfigure the bvh skeleton to the 1 in your scene, that being the SL skeleton. After you import it, you can just export it as another bvh.

[BigFetus]

I did make sure the first frame was in a T-pose. I'll check again on the second fram part though. 

Sadly I can't use Quavimator. It freezes up when trying to save, and I saw a lot of other people having the same issue for Macs. 

As for the two sets being swapped, I could see that being an issue, but have no idea how to fix that. I'll see if I can dig something up about it.

 

Thanks again

[Medhue Simoni]

Well, technically, a bvh file is just a text file. If you open it in a text editor, you should be able to see the whole hierarchy. I've never edited a bvh like that tho and it does look quite confusing.

Mac, yeah, not alot of free options of Mac that I know of.

I'd post this in the Mesh forum if I were you. I know of at least 2 people there working with maya and trying to rig. I know that is at least 2 or three threads specifically about Maya, rigging, and the skeleton.

[Ichago Dougall]

I'm not familiar with Maya exporting of animation. What I can say is that your hip/pelvis needs to record translation as well as rotation. Second life uses the hip bone as the root of your hierarchy. Make sure that it is at the top of it, unparent anything above this bone wise. It also could be a scaling issue. If you have access to poser, try and export from maya and then import to poser and let it scale automatically, then export with scaling auto. This will fix any scaling issue you might have. Then add a tpose in bvhacker and such and upload. Hope this helps.