Fiona Branagh

Not grandfathered. I will need to get rid of it by the end of this month so get ahold of me soon, otherwise I'll just get rid of it. Paid up until the 4th. Transfer fee paid by me.

I've been looking through the thread and haven't found a discussion about this, but maybe it's there and I'm just not seeing it. Anyway, I am using the attachment points for the hind limbs, which are paired up with Hind 4 bones. When I run an animation, the objects that were perfectly attached to those bodyparts in the default position, move along with the bones as they should, but are offset to the side quite a bit. As soon as I stop the animation, the attached objects jump back into proper place on the avatar. Any thoughts about why this might be happening for me to look into?

This is the best idea I've heard in ages. No more trying to explain how 'not to break' your object in the docs in 5 different languages.

Exciting news about the extra bone experimentation! Too bad about the neck and spine though. For the most part, that will probably be the area where extra bones are most desired. Definitely let us know if/when that changes, as for many of us doing non-human avatars, it will be a complete game-changer.

Thanks Vir! I appreciate your going over the issues with us. It makes it a lot easier to understand the parameters and pros and cons for our suggestions. I also really appreciate that you folks are willing to give the bone translations a shot. That will make a huge difference and I hope it can be maintained in the end.

I did miss this one, Teager! It's a great idea and would cause no issues (as far as I can figure) so long as it's done before Bento goes live and we have a lot of avatars up for sale with the wrong skinning. I hope it gets priority consideration. I do hope there is a way to get even more neck bones (one is great, more would be really really helpful) but I'll take any improvement especially if the fix is pretty simple. Teager wrote: If the face bones are all parented to mSkull instead of mHead, an extra neck bone can be added for those avatar creators that need it without affecting anything else on the rig.

I know this has been beaten to death on this topic, and for good reason, but I figured I'd toss in my 2 cents also. Second Life CANNOT expect people to get too excited about tools that are inexplicably subpar to the most basic functionality of the rest of the 3D community. I get it when we were building with prims - it was a complete system designed with an obvious reason (so everyone could build.) I'm talking about something that doesn't seem to make sense in its restriction - if we have regular rigging and animation processes, why is the rigging not allowed to translate in animation? I'm kinda excited about Bento because it solves a few problems and I'm already committed to making stuff in SL. If I weren't, and I were looking for fun things to do with my 3D skills, I would take one look at SL and Bento and scratch my head about why this was 'new' and why people would want to sandbag themselves so much with broken animations and expressions. I'm not trying to be an ungrateful, whiny customer here, I'm just explaining how this is going to be seen as proof that SL is behind the times, past its prime, for people who can't hack it with real platforms, etc. And I REALLY don't want that for Second Life. It deserves a much better reputation than that.

As some people have noted, having extra bones in the neck or legs would be extremely useful for non-human avatars. Currently, the necks are not very fluid for long necked creatures such as dragons, and trying to attach prim objects along a long neck fails pretty badly because they don't turn enough with the curving action (they stick out straight due to too few bones to follow.) I completely understand why the new skeleton doesn't have those (at least, I suspect I do: no new bones interspersed in the main skeleton, only add-on bones, so old animations and avatars still work.) Would it be possible to add a sort of second neck series of bones, or a 'crest line' of bones, so we could optionally weight to those while leaving the main rig intact? I'm not sure if that would technically work as I haven't tried to build a rig with those options, but it would be great if we could find a solution at this stage.

Here's the reply I got from Gaia concerning importing from Maya (and other programs) to Avastar. Hope this helps others who are looking to work with .anim files, but build outside of Blender. "Getting models from other applications into blender was a hustle until recently. The Blender collada importer has improved a lot and now it should be much easier to get an avatar transported from Maya to Blender. However this is still not running as smooth as we might want it to be ;( And we are about to improve the transport of model data between Maya and Blender even further for Blender 2.67 So you may want to try out Blender 2.66a first and see if you can get your model into Blender with that. And you can send a report to the blender bug tracker. This will be very appreciated! One last word: Avastar has a retargeting tool which should make it rather simple to get any animation for any rig to be adapted to the Avastar rig, but this tool is still only technically working, it may need some usability improvements. I hope that helped a bit. cheers, Gaia" I'll post back if I can get it all to work.

I'd sure love to get it to happen! The main thing is, I don't have time to work out a user-friendly, or even unfriendly, .anim editor/converter. I know where my skills are and backward engineering that stuff to work as a stand-in and pileline between programs ain't among them. I've been working for months to try to find workarounds with little success. At this point, I'm basically waiting for word from Avastar or other coders who want to build such a tool. If they do have something to say on this, I hope they go ahead and post here so it will benefit everyone. I have no desire to keep tricks and tools just for myself.

You can already upload in .anim or bvh to SL through the main viewer. The problems are these: 1) The .anim uploader doesn't ask you for any options, like loops or priority values. You will have to have it all in the file already. This requires editing your .anim files directly or using a GUI oriented toward SL exports. 2) You still have to get something to export the animation in a SL-friendly .anim format. Apparently they vary a lot. Avastar is designed to export to SL specifically, which is why people mention it on the forums. I don't know what other programs do, and if anyone does, they should feel free to jump in.

Kayla is asking about being able to animate the bones that ARE included in the SL rig (eyes, skull, toes) but cannot be animated with .bvh files because they are culled out upon import to SL. This is an issue I am working on myself, and from what I can see, you have to find a way to create your animation in .anim format instead of .bvh. I have found this to be tricky; for example, I can export an animation from Maya in .anim but SL doesn't seem to be able to use the files once they're imported (they import, but do nothing.) At the moment, it appears that I can use Avastar but I will have to reskin, reweight, and reanimate my rigged mesh in Avastar instead of being able to import it as complete from Maya (I may be wrong about this, we'll see what the Avastar folks say.) If anyone knows of a .anim editor/converter that isn't Avastar, it would help a lot of people to know about it (especially if it could work with programs like Max and Maya.) Nothing against Avastar at all and I will probably use it in my pipeline one way or another, but it would be nice to just go directly to SL for a lot of this.

I've been struggling with this for a few weeks... so I figure I've tried the obvious things (I hope?) and not so obvious, before asking for ideas here. Problem: I am using a quad avatar, custom mesh/offset joints, in Maya 2013. Animations requiring the hip to move seem to be off, as if the hip were facing in the wrong direction (example: when I see the hip from behind in Maya, it tilts properly down to the left then right for the walk. In SL, the avatar tilts forward and back.) Info: I am using the only BVH exporter I can find for Maya, which is listed on these forums. All the other joints seem to be behaving properly. I bound the mesh to the SL skeleton without rotating or moving the skeleton's hip in any way, or importing it into a scene. All the other joints were put in the right position without rotating anything (only translation.) Question: Any thoughts on how to fix this? I don't have the option of not animating the hip, which is going to be really important for a lot of motions. Thanks in advance!

Thank you! Sorry I didn't notice this response for a while. Should definitely come in handy.

Along these same lines, has anyone come up with a converter for Maya animation to SL? You would think that the .anim would be directly applicable, but it doesn't seem to be. SL happily uploads a Maya .anim, but the file does nothing, so I assume SL can't really read it (and there's no input for priorities and so forth, which might be because it assumes it will be in the file somewhere already, and nothing in my Maya workflow has assigned those values.) BVH exporters from Maya result in errors with the root not being named 'hip'. Obviously, renaming the pelvis bone would be a bad move so I'm not sure what it's asking for there. Previously, I've done all my animations in Poser but I really would like to work from Maya, where my mesh is nicely rigged and workable in so many other ways. Besides, moving the rigged mesh to another program hasn't been exactly a simple concept either. I'm sure I don't know a fair amount of useful information concerning this stuff, but I do spend a lot of time trying to figure it all out and at a certain point, I just gotta ask to see what's already being done out there.