GManB

I want to try to get around the 10 meter movement limitation for animations. I am considering breaking the animation up into segments and playing them serially. If I make multiple calls to llStartObjectAnimation with each segment at the same priority will they play in the order called? Or will they play concurrently, or randomly? Another option would be to time the segments and set a timer when to start the next animation. I would be really nice if there was an event that occurred when a animation ended. All comments and suggestions welcome! Thanks, G

Will it follow undulating terrain as it causes movement over that terrain? Thanks, G

I tried some of the examples given in the Pathfinding documentation. Noticed that they do not seem to work on platforms at altitude. Is there a workaround or will these only function on the actual ground of a region? Thanks, G

Thanks Quistessa! These seem very interesting and possibly make the script much simpler than KFM. I could simply place transparent, phantom objects at points where I want the snake to navigate to and create a pretty complication motion path in a straight forward way... cool.. Thanks agian. G

I am creating a large (13-meter) animesh snake. I will create animations for changing the body in ways that simulate how a snake's body changes as it propels itself but need to use llSetKeyframedMotion (or other) to translate across the ground. I've done a few quick experiments with this organization on a flat surface and it works fine. However, ultimately the snake will have to translate across terrain that varies in height. Do I have to code llSetKeyframedMotion to keep the snake on the ground or is there another way? It seems as though there must be a way given all the vehicles and animesh critters I see moving along terrain with varying heights. My first thought it to make the snake, Physical, and let gravity keep it on the ground? Is this how it's typically done? Thanks, G

Posted this in the Animesh forum and it was suggested that I cross post here. ---------------------------------------- I am trying to animate a star-shaped, very thin, mesh. Shhhh.. it's a present... First, though, I was recently successful in re-arranging 62 joints of the default SL skeleton from the fbx file here, http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Resources_and_Information, into a long single line for a 13-meter snake and successfully imported it to SL and created an animation for it which worked as expected. So, I thought I understood, at least somewhat, how to carefully re-arrange the joints and make things work. I wanted to animate a piece of paper to fold itself into some pleasing shape, a self-creating Origami, if you will. After some animation experiments in Maya I ended up with a thin 10-point start. I used joints to the head, two arms, two wings, four legs, and the tail. Piled, mPelvis, mChest, mTorso, mWIngsRoot, mHindLegsRoot in the center with from joints from the each appendage radiating out toward the points. Pics below. I think the problem is in the skin weights.. If I flood the mesh with a weight of 1.0 from mPelvis the shape uploads and rezzes properly in SL. Of course, this was just a test since I could not animate anything. When applying skin weights for each joint, both automatically with different options and manually, the upload is ok but when Animated Mesh is checked the resulting mesh is deformed. Since the test with all verts given a weight of 1.0 on mPelvis resulted in a properly formed mesh my assumption is that the issue is with skin weights and not due to rearranging the joints and the resulting joint locations. Things I had tried: Making it thick to potentially avoid the 'too thin mesh' issue. Doesn't seem to make a difference. Hand painting all the skin weights. Many different options to the automatic process for binding a mesh to joints available in Maya. Re re-arranging the joints into the same pattern but more closely aligned with skeleton. Using only the 40 joints of each point in the skinning process I am sure there have been others Any ideas, suggestions, caveats, insights, or criticisms welcome. Thanks, G P.S. One thing I noticed is that even in the test with a well-formed the joints don't seem to be in the proper place. This might lead one to think that joint location is an issue but note that with different distributions of skin weights I get differently deformed versions. This doesn't necessarily rule out joint position as a contributing factor but thought it worth mentioning. Mesh and joints in Maya Test with all verts having a weight of 1.0 from mPelvis. Good shape. Mangled versions:

I am working on a project to build a long, large, snake-like dinosaur, 13 meters long. I have successfully modified the Standard SL skeleton using the joints from right toe to right middle finger (18) into a straight line, bound the skin of a test cylinder to them, imported to SL, and checked 'Animated Mesh'. Maya is set to Z-up... I export DAE with Z-up. The cylinder in SL has the same orientation and size as the cylinder in Maya. The cylinder is vertical in Maya and as is the sequence of joints. The toe joint is as offset (0,0,0). I created a simple animation by keying translate values for y of +50, -100, +50. Playing the animation in Maya looks correct. The cylinder moves right 50 units, left 100 units, right 50 units. I create a bvh file using a Maya plugin authored by Samantha Patterso, BVH Export v1.6 Last Updated: 2016-02-12. An inspection of the bvh file in a text editor revels no interesting artifacts. The values all make sense given the animation in Maya. I upload the bvh file to SL. Check Animated Mesh in the Build menu for the cylinder. And put the bvh file into contents with a little script to start it. The cylinder translates up 50, down 100, up 50. I have tried lots of variations and have stared at this for a while but can't seem to understand what is going on. I set the show bones option and I can see the skeleton applied to the cylinder as expected. Head in Z+, facing X+. Any ideas or comments that might give me some insight? Thanks, G

Hhmmm... lol... I knew that. But, the snake is a single object in Maya and I assumed it was a single object in SL. However, I see now that since it has the 24 shaders the upload process splits it into three links. This is good news!! I was a bit concerned but it's good since each link has only 8 faces! Thanks!! G

I am creating a large (13 meter long), snake-like dinosaur for a sim being developed by a museum to potentially serve as a virtual exhibit. (FYI .. LI or texture count is not an issue for this project because the principals want high resolution and accurate details in the models). I have UV mapped the snake into 24 UV tiles and in all but one there is only one UV shell. Additionally, I have given the shell(s) in each UV tile an instance of a shader (just a simple lambert). The results in an object in SL with 24 'Faces'... I know that prims/objects are limited to 8 faces but this seems to work. I have 72 texture files (color, normal, roughness for each UV tile). When I have the Select Face option checked in the build menu I can select each of the 24 faces and correctly apply the three map files. All seems to work fine. Is this expected behavior and the limitation of 8 no longer applies? Does this just happen to work and problems could occur down the road? Maybe the limitation of 8 is only if one wants to address the faces programmatically? Should I consider breaking the model into three objects, each with 8 UV tiles and shaders? Thanks, Greg

Thanks so much RoxyCyn! I ended up doing pretty much as you describe. And, yes, what was causing the problem was that a script within an object, a hud, in the contents of the main object wasn't set properly. The hud wasn't able to attach to an avatar playing the game because of the script in it wasn't set properly. Actually, I don't know what it should be only that it works will full perms on that script. Since I'm creating this game for someone else to put on the MP I will give it to him all full perms anyway so it's not a problem. But, it would be good to know the minimum permissions a script in a hud needs to attach to any avatar. Finally, it's good to know from your note that just checking everything is about the best we can do! Cheers, G

I am not blaming SL/LL at all. I love the platform and want it to move forward. https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14711/453245/venture-capital-in-xr-silicon-valley-vcs-weigh-in-on-where-they-see-traction Tons of VC money going into XR (especially eSports, e.g., Zwift got a almost half a BILLION dollars last Sep). The primary differences, I think, between all those other XR systems are that in SL/LL the users create most of the artifacts ourselves and there is a thriving marketplace to motivate internal innovation. But, I feel that once the outside world starts to understand that uniqueness and the external biz model we'll get competition; which, to date, as mentioned above, is pretty lame. However, with motivation the competition will improve and likely be able to start from cleaner architectures and (potentially) code bases. G

Yup. Products don't improve unless customers demand better by either pushing limits or simply going elsewhere. XR (X Reality, new-ish term that attempts to encompass all the various realities, VR, AR, CR, etc) will play, imho, a huge role in humankind in the not too distant future. One of the groups with which I am working is trying to use SL for educational purposes. (see Science Circle) So, there are demands on the platforms that provide any form of XR. Older platforms like SL can come along or not. Tech waits for no platform. G

I agree. The dinosaur model I am building will be for educational purposes. The sim will contain accurate representations of the flora and fauna of a particular time period. Everything not a specimen, e.g., sidewalks and benches, will be textured conservatively and with parsimonious use of resources as is typical in games. The specimens need to have higher resolution because students will be inspecting them closely (or, at least, that is the hope as we attempt to use SL for educational purposes). G

Don't get me wrong, I really admire the creators that can get good looking artifacts with a low poly count and few textures targeting general use cases. The two pieces I mention were requests from the customer for that level of detail. OTOH, I could possibly learn some more about how to get good detail while keeping the uv shells small and contained in one texture file. Given the 1K texture size limit in SL I find that with even the sharpest textures I can make the uv shells need to be fairly large to get the sharpness I prefer in the final object. I was unaware that the standard viewer limited use of vmem. 768Mb (less than 100 MB) seems awfully low given the average vmem available on commodity gpus. Any idea why? I am new to the 3d modeling world but my experience so far via instruction videos is that 2k textures are minimum today with most creators pushing 4K and above. Yes, there is always downward pressure on resource consumption and, of course, the gratuitous squandering of resources should be avoided. G

Yeah, I get it. I tend to cut up my models to make many UV shells, make them large, and use UDIMs to get higher resolution. Then spend a lot of time matching the UV shells to minimize the visibility of seams. I know the models load more slowly the first time but it's really not that noticeable. I like the look of high resolution, i.e., not fuzzy up close, textures on the objects I create. For example, on a teak bench swing I made I uses 22 base color textures and 22 normal maps. Yes, a lot of textures but the result, imho, is worth it. Luckily, the swing wasn't rigged so the textures came in with the upload. I am working on a dinosaur model for a sim now. A large snake-like thing. It's 13 meters long and the model will be life-size. I haven't even calculated how many textures I will need to get the skin and scales to look good all over. Initially, this model will be static, but the sim owner would eventually like it rigged. Thus, my question. btw, I feel the same about the clothing I am beginning to create. But, I can probably get away with a half dozen or so texture files per garment, so more manageable, but still. It would be so much easier if the textures came in with the object, especially, the normal maps. I would appreciate any comments on how I might do things differently as well to streamline my work-flow. G