ZM Newman

Hello, friends. I would like to introduce you a "yet another" digital asset creation suit: ZModeler3. It was recently equipped with Collada DAE import/export plugin and a Biovision BVH animation load/save feature, so in general it could be used for creating your own meshes for SecondLife. The mesh core of the application supports upto 4 UV channels per vertex, upto 4 bone weights per vertex, tangents for bump-mapping, two per-vertex color slots. Also, one "morph state" is available (but not used in DAE import/export), since it's reserved for "Damaged/Deformed" mesh state condition. Rendering core includes a set of common-purpose shaders with a heavy set of configurable options for a varity of scenarios you need. Model rigging and animation testing includes bonesweight Paint/Reflect/Copy/Smooth tools, Inverse kinematics for posing, and animating of skeleton and binded rigged meshes. Only one active animation playback at a time (multiple animations can be loaded and binded to scene, whilst only one is played at a time). The modeling toolset is kinda poor, but has most of commonly used tools to create a low-poly models with the reasonable and well-controlled polycount. UV Mapping includes planar projection and unwrap methods. UV layout can be saved as "UV atlas" for painting skin in external application; Normal/Bump map and Ambient Occlusion maps can be rendered for a given UV layout. Application is Shareware with 14 days free fully-featuring trial license available. To activate application license, an account should be created ( https://www.zmodeler3.com/account ) and "installation code" (known as "Platform ID") is submitted to obtain and manage platform-binded licenses. Full license price is quite affordable and ranges from $4.5 USD (when ordering 30 days) down to $2.9 USD/month (when ordering 720 days license). I'm always ready to help on ZModeler forum (http://forum.zmodeler3.com) when any questions arise. Forum registration or guest-posting requires "sort captcha" solving where "Perspective" and "User" viewport modes are 3D. I would be glad to answer questions on this forum too if you have any. Also, there are several video tutorials you can check to get an overal impression about the application: http://www.youtube.com/user/ZModeler3/videos

The "OFFSET" keyword inside BVH does not seem to be used by SL animations. Otherwise, I don't see how the mismatching bone positions can be sloved. Concerning the bone nams, the SL respects bone names as given in base_anims files. This might be related to historical reasons, I don't know. To the moment original animations can be loaded, modified and exported. The BVH created seems to work fine in upload preview window. It's a bit odd to bind skeleton to animation, when bone names are mismatching, but I've created another skeleton with anim-matching bone names, so this is not of much problem. I'm not sure how to test collision bones animation or fitted meshes. Is it possible to control collision bones with BVH animation?

Can you make an export into DAE so we have a fitted mesh skeleton (and/or avatarmesh) in *.dae format please?

Hello everyone. I'm currently making an plugin to import export animations for SL and the testing stage of "base_animations" (got them from wiki) seems to confuse me a little. These animations define a slightly different skeleton model than avatar_skeleton.xml or any other skeleton's I've found here (and in wiki pages). The BVH file defines a different skeleton for animation (beside bone names that mismatch), the initial setup differs. For example, the "mTorso" bone defined in BVH as "abdomen" has no offset relative to parent ("mPelvis" defined as "hip"), while in skeleton it has some offset. Other offsets seems to mismatch too, so BVH animation applied to an avatar skeleton I'm working with produces incorrect animations. The question is whether base_animations are obsolete or am I missing some point? (preview image)