Creating Animation for the new Rigged Mesh based Avatars - new or old bone names

[SatguruS1488312156]

It looks like that the Rig used for creating Rigged Mesh based Avatars cannot be used for creating Animations for the same.

I created a .bvh animation file using the same Rig which was used for creating the Mesh Avatar but got an error message while trying to upload it.

The error message was

Unable to read animation file. Incorrect root joint name, use "hip".

I then manually edited the .bvh file , replacing all the new bone names with the old ones and was then able to upload the animation.

Can someone confirm if this is how this is supposed to work?  Is this documented somewhere? Would this change in future?

It is surprising that one can't use the new bone names for animation too.

 

 

 

[Dilbert Dilweg]

What program atre you using to model and rig with?

you might look into this little tool http://www.bvhacker.com/

[SatguruS1488312156]

I use blender.

How would bvhacker help?

For just changing bone names bvhacker might be an overkill

[Coaldust Numbers]

The rig used for creating rigged mesh cannot be used for creating animations for the same, that is correct.  The code that handles transforming the BVH format into the internal format is blissfully unaware of anything to do with mesh.  It's quite old (and buggy), so predates mesh.

 

Your experience uploading a 'abnormal' skeleton is normal.  Well, you either get that, or the client crashes outright.

 

This is how it's supposed to work.  To the extent that anything is documented about the animation system, it is documented.  I've listed the names of all the bones the BVH uploader accepts (see the leftmost column in the table on https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Suggested_BVH_Joint_Rotation_Limits ). There are other bones, which /can/ be animated, along with the attachment points, but you can't do that with the BVH uploader.  You have to do cute things with modified clients and third party tools.

 

I am reluctant to say "it won't change in the future", because, for instance, the behavior of alpha sorting has changed several times, and is now seemingly random/unpredictable, breaking almost every HUD in Second Life.  I think it's unlikely Linden Lab will /intentionally/ change this, given it would break all animations for all mesh avatars.

 

Perhaps it will be less surprising that you can't use the new bone names if you keep in mind that the animation subsystem existed long before mesh did.  If that doesn't help, the only solution may be to stop expecting things to work in a rational way.  They usually don't (e.g. in animations hip joint motion is relative, but all other joint motions are absolute; LSL has lists as a basic data type like many modern programming languages, but unlike any other language with them built in, they can't be nested; LSL, a non-joke programming language released in the last 10 years doesn't have arrays or references; the client already displays normal maps and 1-bit alpha, but users are unable to use their own textures for this; the Lab says there is too much group chat traffic, which is supposedly why it's laggy, but doesn't give group admins the ability to turn it off in groups that don't need it...).

 

[SatguruS1488312156]

Coaldust, Thanks for the clarifications.
Found your page at
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Suggested_BVH_Joint_Rotation_Limits
to be very informative .
Nice of you to have taken the time and effort to put it up.

Wish Linden would put in some more effort into their documentation. With them it is like "we will build all these great tools for you but will not tell you how to use them. You have to figure them out yourself"

I dug some more and found few more interesting pages

Joint Names
http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Joint-names/td-p/810861

Linden Skeleton Definition
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Avatar_Appearance#Linden_skeleton_definition_file

Speculation on animation changes
http://blog.nalates.net/2012/02/14/sl-animation-changes/