liquidlion

That is really very interesting. I was under the impression that we were not able to use bones in that way, and that anything non-standard would break. So, rigging the jaw to that Skull bone, then animating it to open and close, then exporting that animation as a .anim file is the way to go? I assume I can set that animation to trigger under certain parameters (IE, the user typing in public chat!) Would this not override any AOs the user already has going? I predominantly work in Maya and Zbrush so learning yet another entire package for this is a little intimidating -- I wonder if it's possible to replicate these effects in Maya. (Or... outsource the jaw work exclusively!) Thanks for your response!

Hello all, Working on my first commercial av release. It is an anthro avatar of an otter. Here is the head, sans texturing and normal map: The head is about 2500 tris, rounding up. It will be slightly more with teeth and a mouthpocket but I'm aiming to be as polyconservative as I can. I want there to be a talking jaw that flaps around when the user types in public chat. Many anthro avs do this, and they mainly accomplish this by slicing the head up like a ventriloquist's doll more or less and having the jaw be its own separate object moved by a prim with a script. I however want to know if there is a way to accomplish this without slicing the head up at all -- and have it squash and stretch just like any other CG object in a game. From what I am to understand, the Jaw bone in the SL skeleton does not move and so it's useless as a rigging point for this. I understand the Chin and Mouth attachment points are similar in that they are designed to be static and cannot be moved. Has anyone successfully made a one piece mesh head with a moving jaw for SL? If so, exactly how was this accomplished? How do I go about this? If it's impossible to do, where do I go to voice my desires for this? Thanks so much for any help. As an aside, I have seen this thread, and this one, as well as this blog entry but they are all somewhat vague as to precisely what terrifying black magic voodoo must be done to get this working correctly.