Aglaia

You can dowload it on the SL wiki: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Resources_and_Information in the section "Current Content & Resources". But they warn that the female one is broken. (lol) Better resource, the avatar workbench, that is provided for free by the Avastar team: https://www.avalab.org/avatar-workbench/ The avatar workbench even comes with basic meshes. But these meshes didn't fit my needs, it is way too low poly for making accurate and sensual animations in my opinion. But it is still super useful for the rig itself, so you can definitely use that.

I took some female and male models on the web and skinned them to the SL rig. Sadly i cannot share them since they are not under a licence that would allow me to share them. For sure, i think that Linden should provide some good female and male skinned mesh models for builders.

Yes, this is what i figured out afterward. A friend of mine sent me a program that can export a json from a .anim file and i noticed that it keyframed all the fingers for each frame of the anim. However, using this program in the opposite direction (json to .anim), i was able to remove all these additional fingers keyframes and just kept the very first and very last, as it was in blender, and it worked well. This is what i will use for my next anims. This is nice. But i prefer some "stand alone" anims that don't require an additional anim and script, because if i share these dance animations, i would like that people can use them in their dance AO or dance machine, so i cannot force them to use a specific device that would play fingers anims in a separate anim with a script for launching them. But that is still a nice and useful feature of Bento Buddy 🙂 And yes i get a lot of fun doing this!

Very nice!

I have removed the video to replace it by a new one that fixes the problem mentionned above. I wanted to just edit my first message to replace the video, but it seems that i cannot edit my message (i guess there's a limited time for editing a message?) so i will repost the video here. The animation is now 40 FPS instead of 20 FPS, so much smoother. It looks likes it stills shakes a bit sometimes on the video but this is due to the video, not to the animation itself. By the way i made another one:

Blender or any other software able to make animations yes. But if it is your first animation, you are not choosing the easiest one. What you want to do is more difficult than other kinds of animations because: Meshbodies breasts are skinned to PEC_LEFT and PEC_RIGHT volume bones. If you translate these bones in your anim, they wont't come back to their initial position. You have several ways to work around this. Easiest way is to use rotation only, but it will look less pretty than a translation of the breast. Other solution is to have your animation make the bone come back to its initial position, but this will just be the initial position of this bone in the rig that you are you using when making your animation. Which means that it will deform the breasts for people who don't have the bones at the same locations (ie: different values of breasts size/cleavage/buoyancy in the shape editor). Most of these anims result in breast deforming. Sometimes the anim creator propose different versions to work around this. Have the hands right under the breasts will be difficult. It will work for the rig that you use for making your animation, but people with other arms lengths / breasts sizes won't have the same result, they could have their hands go through the breasts, or too far of them.

The wecam motion capture stuff is just an example of what Puppetry can do, but Puppetry is much more than that. Puppetry is: Possibility to generate animations from a LEAP plugin Streamed animations Inverse kinematics It is very promising and could be a game changer for the animation system of Second Life.

No need to create multiple animations: just adjusting automatically the avatars positions / rotations. In an AVsitter furniture, so far it can be done manually: users can adjust their x, y and z postions in the Pose menu. So the goal would be to make this adjustment automatic. The scritps could get the avatars heights and, by some calculation, automatically adjust the positions. A script can also get some other parameters like leg length, with the llGetVisualParams function. Knowing legs length and avatar height could help to automatically adjust adult rated animations. Now, making such a system is easy to say, but harder to make. This would be a big project that requires some research. It could be either a fork of AVsitter to add this feature, or a whole new sitting system. In both cases this is something that will require some research. It is hard to know how efficient such a system could be without spending a lot of time in research and tests. It would also require that the furniture builders follow some conventions dictated by the system, like using some given female/male avatar shapes as models for making the base positions/rotations. That said, i think that right now, we better just wait for the Puppetry project to be released. Puppetry should bring some new possibilites regarding to this stuff.

If i understand well your situation: when you create a gesture, you don't see your animation in the list so you can't select it? If so, just relog. I've noticed that animations and sounds that just came in the inventory don't appear in the anim/sound selector of the Gesture edit. Relog fixes it.

If the animation is made for being used with a given tail, it might not work well if using another tail, if this other tail doesn't use the bones in the same way (same positions / rotations). Same problem as with mesh heads : a smile animation can look good with some mesh head brands, and ugly with some other ones. Only fix is to ask the animation creator to make several versions of their anims, for each mermail tail brand.

Yes you're right, i've had problems with FPS and i had to reduce it drastically to make the file smaller and i don't know yet how to reduce it properly. I had to reduce from 64 FPS to 20 FPS. This is something i have to work on. - The animation is 32 seconds. - The original animation, right after exported from Cascadeur, was 64 FPS. It was very smooth in Cascadeur, much more than on the video. - It was one keyframe per frame. So 64 FPS meant 64 keyframes per second. - 19 bones are involved in the anim (torso, arms and legs). So for each second, that was 64 keyframes for 19 bones... (i also keyframed the fingers but just one keyframe at the begining of the anim + when she rolls her ams so fingers are neglictable in this anim) => At the end, my animation was 2 MB. Which was way too big, since the limit for SL is 250 000 bytes. So i opened it in Blender to reduce it drastically. I have resized it in the dopesheet and changed the FPS untill i got a file less than 250 000 bytes. At the end, my file was only 20 FPS, which is too low, and explains why it is not smooth. I have to see how to do this in a more clean way. I am pretty sure that it is possible to delete keyframes in a clever way : i would be surprised that Blender would not be able to remove the "less important" keyframes, i mean the ones for which there are just very little variations along periods of time. I didn't take the time to find a better way, i was exhauted after these 2 weeks of work on this anim, but this is something that i want to work for the next dance anims i will do. PS : for the mocap i use Rokoko Smartsuit Pro II with Rokoko Studio, but this has no importance here : i use Rokoko just for making the keyposes (1 key pose is 1 keyframe) then i import the key poses in Cascadeur where i do all the job.

Yes, easy. Take a model that is skinned to the SL rig, export it as .fbx. Then import the fbx in Cascadeur (File > Import fbx/dae > Model). If your model is a humanoid character, Cascadeur will open the "Quick Rig" tool. Here you just have to drag and drop the bone names of your model (mPelvis, mChest, etc) on the Cascadeur shape, and Cascadeur will do all the job. After that you get your model in the Cascadeur 3D view and can animate it. When you're done with your animation in Cascadeur, export it as .fbx (File > Export fbx/dae > Scene). Since we cannot import fbx into SL, you have to convert it to either .bvh (using Blender) or .anim (using Avastar or Bento Buddy in Blender)

Hi! I've tested a new workflow (at least new for me!) that i wanted to share because i think it is very promissing. I made this dance using Rokoko mocap outfit + Cascadeur 3D. With the Rokoko mocap outfit, i just do the key poses. Then all the rest is made by Cascadeur 3D. If you don't know Cascadeur 3D yet, it's really worth to have a look at it. It is a kind of physics engine that handles gravity, that can make your character bounce, jump, have their knees bend before and after a jump, compensation movements, etc, it is really amazing. So in a few words : the key poses are made in mocap, and the transitions between them are made with Cascadeur 3D. So this is my first animation using this workflow. There's still a big room for improvement, for sure, and i'm far to be fully satisfied: arms are not really animated yet, the head neither, not all transitions are smooth, but this is a base that i want to keep working on!

To be honnest it was not really convenient to make a dance. Rokoko is very bad for tracking feet. This is not a reliable solution for making dance. So now i use Rokoko just for making key poses, then i switch to Cascadeur 3D to make transitions between the key poses.

Sorry for the late reply too! Yes, see my answer below

Hi, Sorry for the late reply. I exported from Rokoko to .fbx using the "Standard Newton (Default)" setting. Then i opened the fbx in blender and retargeted to the SL rig (NOT the Avastar rig) with the Rokoko blender plugin. Anotion option that i tried later: you can stream directly from Rokoko to Blender, which is very nice, because you can live animate your own avatar if your model in blender is the same model as the one you use for your avi in SL, but it lags a bit.

Recorded with Rokoko Smart Suit Pro II then retarget to Avastar rig. Very minimalistic, but so much fun to make!

Thank you! Yes, i had watched the Maradona video, among many others, when i worked on the first animation 🙂 Well the principle of this stuff is actually simple : rigging is one thing, animating is another thing. These items are just a combination of both rigging and animating. In the Juggling Balls, the first ball is rigged to wing left 1, second ball to wing right 1, third ball to wing left 2, fourth ball to wing right 2 and fifth ball to wing left 3. I also use wing root for moving the whole set up/down/backwards/towards with another set of animations.

Same principle as the first video, but now with up to 5 balls:

Hi, i hadn't seen the new replies to this topic 🙂 I've kept experiencing VR a lot and love it more and more. I'm convinced it is the future of metaverses, including Second Life. Now i'm not going to talk again and again because everybody has opinions, and i think we just need facts. What we need first is a SL VR viewer. What i mean by VR viewer is a viewer with a floating user interface that can be used with the VR controllers. It doesn't have to be full of features: an interface for sitting on objects and answering to dialog boxes would be a good start. Not a big deal. Years ago, before Sansar, there was even a VR mode in the SL viewer. This could be brought again in the current viewer. Even if it is super limited, that would be enough to see if people use it and what are their feedbacks. If VR becomes popular, some sim owners will start to make content optimized for VR, with lower poly stuff, and rules to respect for visitors (ie: ejecting those with too complex avatars or heavy scripts). That will be done in a natural way. All we need is a minimalistic VR viewer to use SL. The Firstorm VR mod is just good as a curiosity right now: it is hard to setup, and witthout a proper user interface, it is almost unusable. (still happy it exists)

@xLMD What do you call "physics" in an animation?

Thanks for the tips 🙂

Hello, When you bake a texture in Blender Cycles for using in SL, what params do you use to use? Do you have any tip or advice? I always spend hours trying different combinations, i can't find any general rule or guideline to follow... Any tip welcome, thank you! I'm talking about this feature of Blender:

Obviously yes. There's a JIRA about it: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-228287

You can also go in Advanced > Show Debug Settings and look for FSMaxAnimationPriority and set the max priority to 6: you can now upload BVH anims with priority up to 6.