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Gaia Clary

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Everything posted by Gaia Clary

  1. Bond Harrington wrote: My character is facing positive on the X axis, but the Bento avatar base and skeleton, as I have downloaded it from the Bento page on the SL wiki is set to 90 degrees on the Z axis. Do you have a link to the Collada file that you downloaded? I checked the file: https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/sl-sample-content/raw/tip/models/collada/female_2016_08_05.dae.zip The Armature in this file has the correct orientation, so it should work for animations. The mesh objects in that file indeed have rotations of 90 degrees, but this should not matter for your case. Bond Harrington wrote: Would this be causing the issue? If your armature has a rotation in Object mode, then yes. You would fix it as follows: Select the armature in Object Mode in the footer menu of the 3DView: Object -> Apply -> Rotation Do your animation export to BVH
  2. Maybe the problem here is the orientation of the character. Is the character looking towards positive X ? And have you applied rotation before exporting the BVH? @medhue: As far as i know the Blender BVH exporter should work. There was one hickup for a long time that was related to an incompatibility with the exported root bone name. I think that the Bento viewer has fixed something in this area, so maybe Blender's BVH export now works out of the box? I have not tested it though. Regarding Avastar: We have added translation exporting to BVH a couple of days ago. This will become available shortly with our next update. For .anim we are already good to go since a while.
  3. Chic Aeon wrote: Note that unless you ONLY want to make clothes just for you, it would be better to use a "standard" avatar to work from. This sounds like Avastar and MayaStar do not use the standard Avatar... At least for Avastar i can ensure you that we do use the Standard Avatar. We generate the skeleton and the meshes directly from the avatar definition files, in the exact same way like the SL viewer does and similar to how the Avatar workbench was created a couple of years ago
  4. Henri Beauchamp wrote: Many thanks for your (heroic !) effort, but the case you are exposing is not corresponding to the issue Yes, thats right. i mentioned in the first line of my post that this is not an explanation to your issue, but just an attempt to translate chinese to something else. Actually it may be better to move this post somewhere else into our own documentation site
  5. non weighted bones are Henri Beauchamp wrote: Gaia Clary wrote: Also: if a mesh is weighted to a bone that has a joint offset defined, then the exported skeleton must also contain all parent bones in the bone chain which have joint positions defined. This must be done regardless whether the affected bones are used in the mesh or not. This is all Chinese to me ! :smileylol: Here is a small article about Joint Offsets that is mean to be a translation from chinese to something more understandable. But as already stated elsewhere this article does not directly apply to your current issue. Feel free to visit that page, or just ignore it http://avastar.online/fragment/joint-positions/
  6. There have been a few changes in the Bento Skeleton over the past few months. If the broken character happens to be based on an outdated Skeleton definition, then this most probably explains the deformations. Also: if a mesh is weighted to a bone that has a joint offset defined, then the exported skeleton must also contain all parent bones in the bone chain which have joint positions defined. This must be done regardless whether the affected bones are used in the mesh or not.
  7. These are the available foot bones:  The feet bones have always been available and could be animated. I have heard rumours that there is a speciality with the Toe bones, maybe related to the appearance sliders and how the default Avatar's heel height is defined. You may find out by testing a bit :matte-motes-evil-grin: If those bones are not enough for your purpose then you always can reuse other bones from the bento skeleton. But then you might need to put more effort into the animation to compensate the bone hierarchy.
  8. After reading the last few posts i thought it was a good idea to check our own tool as well. This is a hand rig in default rest pose. The Rig is constructed from the definition in avatar_skeleton.xml : However, the skeleton definition does not specify the rotation of the bone roll (rotation around the long axis of the bone). So we are free to set this rotation to whatever is convenient for us. We have chosen to let the finger local Z axis point upwards (towards world Z in Blender). For the thumbs we have chosen to rotate the local y axis by 45° to make finger animations (grabbing) a bit easier. And here is a hand with a relaxed hand pose in Blender (the bones are displayed in stick mode):  This pose only uses Rotation. I have exported this pose to Second Life by using the .anim format (bvh should work as well) and here is the result in Second Life:  So, it looks like all is ok so far. There is one way to get issues similar to the ones reported here. That is when your Rig is not exactly identical to the SL Restpose Rig. At least you must ensure that the Joint Hierarchy is exported exactly as defined in the avatar definition files. Otherwise you get unintentional Joint position offsets. And then you get the oddities like bone end point mismatch and possibly unexpected behavior of the appearance sliders and animations. Here is a small document about Joint positions. Maybe that helps a bit too: http://avastar.online/fragment/joint-positions/
  9. Unless you have a very (very!) old version of blender you find the export options in the Preset selector menu of the collada Presets panel (after you called FIle -> Export -> Collada). Check here for some brief information: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc%3A2.6/Manual/Data_System/Files/Import/COLLADA And just in case ... You should use the SL Rigged Preset. At least do it once to see what export options will be set. From there you can learn what to enable or disable so you can do it manually in the future :matte-motes-nerdy: If you want to work with Fitted Mesh then you might want to take a look here as well: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avatar-workbench/
  10. Face bones and hand bones are fully animatable with standard animation tools. You can import files in .bvh format and in Linden Lab's own internal .anim format (not to be mixed up with the Maya Animation File format that is also named .anim ) As far as i know there is (currently?) no scripting that you can use move the bones around. So you have to make your own regular animations with your favorite animation tool(s). You can use rotation and translation on all bones of your animations. However you must be aware that your animations may become less general useable because of the possible variations in the skeleton (keyword: joint offsets)
  11. 3.) 80000 faces(polygons) in a single mesh character seem like overkill. Do we talk about triangle count or Quadcount? But anyways i do not think this is your issue. 5.) Then your mesh will be automatically separated into sections od 21844 polygons because any texture face may not have more than ~21844 triangles. Drongle McMahon knows a more precise answer though 7.) Unweighted bones are not mapped to a weight of one. They are simply not displayed in the Viewer. 9.) The SL Viewer is the most reliable tool when it comes to importing of Mesh content.
  12. I am not sure if this helps but you could try to step over the following list of questions. Maybe this can point you into the right direction: Do you talk about Bento rigs or the "old" SL Base Avatar Rig? If you use the Bento Rig, do you also use the Bento viewer or the current Release Candidate viewer? How many polygons has your mesh ? (more than 21844 could possibly make trouble, but should work) How many materials has your mesh ? (more than 8 could possibly make trouble) What material has the highest number of assigned polygons and how many polygons are assigned to that material? (more than 21844 faces on one material are likely to make trouble) Have you checked that all your mesh normals are pointing outwards? Have you checked that all vertices of your mesh are weighted to at least one bone? Does the import preview show the avatar in a default stand position when you enable joints in the previewer? Have you imported your mesh with the default SL viewer? And finally... Can you describe with other words what you mean when you say "re equip my normal avatar and outfits" ?
  13. this one might help: http://avastar.online/help/troubleshooting/mav_block/
  14. Teager wrote: Last week, I scaled my entire avatar down to 0.968 and used blender's ctrl+A to apply scale, and did not notice that the scale wasn't applied. Therefore when I use the new update rig feature, which sets the scale of the rig back to 1.00, my meshes come out of alignment with my rig. Can you provide an example (ticket) that shows in which way the meshes get out of alignement? Maybe there is a bug in the update tool. And we do not want bugs :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:
  15. With Avastar Alpha-9 (just released) you can update the Coyote as follows: Open the Coyote Blend file Select the Coyote Rig Open the Avastar Tool Shelf Locate the Rig Transfer Tool Set Rig Type to Extended Checkmark "Rebuild Offsets" to allow usage of Sliders in Avastar Uncheck Rebuild missing bones Call the "Update Rig" function (press the button) If you look closer, then you notice that the Set Bind Pose settings are no longer needed for anything here so the setting has been removed. If you want to test the Sliders: Locate the Skinning Panel in the Avastar Tool Shelf Set the Appearance Control to "SL Appearance" Now you can use the Appearance sliders in Avastar to test the behavior of the Coyote Mesh.
  16. But note: The Avastar integration with Manuellab is still work in progress. Right now the most recent version of our tool has an integration with Manuellab but it might or might not work as the video shows. I have this also on my todo list. So please count it as a "what will come next" information :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:
  17. Tapple Gao wrote: I did have to fight with avastar to export said animation, but once I did, SL has no trouble with it You make me curious :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: If you tell us what sort of fight you have with Avastar, then maybe we can add some tranquilizer. It would be helpful to get your insight right away because we are very close to a new update. [edit]: After talking to tapple in chat i found that Avastar suppressed the export of animations of the volume bones. But actually SL supports volume bone animation. So i removed this limitation (the fix will be in the next Avastar bento update). Tapple, thanks for mentioning this!
  18. Tapple Gao wrote: How many bones, exactly, did bento add? ...I counted 107 new bones (31 body, 30 finger, 46 face), 15 new attach points, and 0 new collision volumes. Did I miscount? i believe that's right. Here is another document that may be better readable than the avatar_skeleton.xml file :matte-motes-nerdy: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/the-sl-skeleton/
  19. Vistanimations wrote: Hi Cathy, Thanks for your tips. Now i tried to learn blender with avastar, and it seems that in local bones rotate well. I followed a tutorial to make retargeting ,but the finger bones do not appear in the "guess mapping". Maybe someone knows or can help me The new bento bones are not yet added to the map guessing function of Avastar. We will add this as soon as the current issues with joint offsets are all fixed.
  20. Blender's preferred orientation for rigged characters is with arms pointing along the x axis and the face looking at the negative Y axis. Many of the mirror functions for weight painting, bone editing, modelling, animating, etc... are mirroring along the X axis, like for example in the Mesh Edit options in the tool shelf, where you find the "X mirror" option but no Y-Mirror option... On the other side the SL character's preferred orientation is with arms pointing along the Y axis and the face looking at the positive X axis. This makes it somewhat tedious to use blender with that orientation. For Avastar we have chosen to use blender's preferred orientation so we do not have to fight with blender when it comes to symmetry operations. So you can work all the time in blender's preferred orientation. Avastar transforms your models into the SL rotation during export. Forcing Avastar to work in the SL orientation is doable to some extend, but you will loose a lot of functions then, so it is not working nicely. If you really want to keep with SL's orientation in Blender then you will probably be more happy with using the Avatar Workbench or any other Basic Avatar Rig that uses the SL orientation out of the box.
  21. I am very sorry if my post leads to confusion. But it all boils down to: Possible workaround for distortions on the head: Before you start editing the joints, please preset the Avastar skeleton to the SL Restpose (the white stickman icon in the Appearance panel) and then go ahead. Does this fix your issues? Please note: In the final version of the tool you should be able to edit your joints independent of the sliders. BTW: importing back the collada file to blender must match the original model. Otherwise the collada importer is broken and needs to be fixed :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:
  22. Hi, All; Avastar-2 is still in heavy development and we still have trouble with the slider support for joint positions. However i created a preliminary document for "working with joint positions" in Avastar. When you follow this document you should be able to avoid most of the the issues that you see on the face and especially on the lips: http://avastar.online/setting-up-joint-positions/ The document has been created with the most recent development version of Avastar from today. However it should also work for Avastar-2 alpha-6. I hope we can provide something more user friendly soon.
  23. Here is why sometimes a bone looks different in Blender and in the SL viewer: Here is a modified version of the Bento head. I mainly moved the mouth bones forward and i rotated the nose bones by about 45 degrees upwards. Finally i edited the Tail location of the Jaw bone. This is the result in Blender: when i upload this mesh to SL and enable the Bones viewer, then i see this:  When you inspect the 2 images closer then you can see the locations of the joints match. But for the purple bones the bone ends differ. The reason why there is a difference between Blender and SL is bloody stupid :matte-motes-mad: The exported Collada files do not contain information about where the bone ends are. In the SL Viewer the joints and the corresponding bone ends are just shifted to the offset location. So for bones which have no connected children the "bone" rotation never changes in the SL viewer. But the most important news is: it does not matter how the end point bones are "rotated". And this is because apparently all scaling happens relative to the Avatar's coordinate system. About the lip distortion I have no idea how this happens. Can someone prepare a simple demo head that shows the issue and publish the blend file somewhere? (or use the avastar ticket system if possible)
  24. The SL Viewer enables the rigg options if it sees that all imported meshes have the 21 main skeleton bones rigged. See here for details: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/the-sl-skeleton/ Also did you use the operator preset "Second Life rigged" when you exported from Blender using the default Collada exporter? You find more about this in the Blender wiki: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc%3A2.6/Manual/Data_System/Files/Import/COLLADA
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