DreamCrawler Martin

Jira was opened years ago and its on the first post. The rest should go in the "how big the impact of fees are in your life" thread for those wanting to discuss about that instead of finding a solution to the topic.

Bumping this post because creators in Europe are still forced to pay the extra commisions of paypal to convert Dollars to euro. A commision that paypal claims to be "free" but they set their own inflated exchange rate of a 3.5% Transferwise is the only way we could use to convert money to euro without paying massive commisions

Hello! Do you have any adittional information on the Linden scripting the .anim exporter on his free time? Id like to ask to see how his coding goes, would solve me a big problem if he had something done already

Gaia, After reading your last message I just tested with your lastest avastar version with the intention of reproducing the same issue when parsing a BVH with translations made in blender Yet again, for me, blender avastar BVH export does not seem to include translations. Or if it does, it gets, somehow, ignored by SL. I do the exact same animation from my previous post (with the 5 steps) on the bento angel. I export as BVH, and nothing, only rotations. I export it as anim, and rotates and translates perfectly. Could you please please please have a check? Its probably me (again I'm not quite good with blender) but I would like to try to reproduce this same issue from a different source other than maya, to discard its not a bad BVH exporter in maya.

Hello! thank you for replying I did as you recommended, reduced the framerate to 15 fps, reduce the frame length to 50 (no need to specify the FPS in maya, the bvh exporter will just reproduce all the frames in the timeline, all you need to do is specify the frame speed in the BVH after exporting). So in this 50 frame animation I reproduce the issue as basic as possible: 1 Add mFaceJaw, mFaceLipCornerLeft & mFacelipCornerRight keyframes on frame 0. (Both rotation and translation, all 3 axes, 6 curves) 2 Go to frame 25 and Rotate mFaceJaw bone to open mouth. Then rotate & translate both LipCorner bones to give the avatar a nice smile. 3 Keyframe all 3 bones on frame 25 (both rotation and translation, all 3 axes, 6 curves) 4 Export a 50 length animation in BVH format. 5 Result: Once in BVH uploader preview you can see the issue: Jaw rotates correctly until half of the animation (frame 25) but the mFaceLipCorner bones keep translating until frame 50 (end of animation). So much lower framerate, just 50 frames total, just 3 keyframed bones. Issue still reproduces when uploading the BVH. I know using blender with .anim format solves it. But it literally stops any maya user to animate.

Hello Cathy, thank you for answering. I bought your mayastar. Can not use it directly, since i use custom mesh models, but it solved the main issue with the info you gave about the scale difference when uploading models vs animating, aka solved my maya to SL workflow. Thank you for the great work! So yes I am creating them with Maya. I already got closer to the exact issue, seems its the BVH parser not processing translations from a BVH correctly. I have changed the framerate as you suggested: 15 FPS, directly editing the BVH. Animation is 50 frame total. Bone movements (rot and trans) from 0 to 25. After parsed, rotations stop at frame 25. Translations go on until frame 50. It really seems to be SL Client's BVH parser issue (because the parsing is done client sided, right?) I am not a big fan of blender. But made that same animation test with avastar template. Found out you cannot export translations on BVH format on avastar (makes me wonder why). If you export on .anim file everything works fine, translations stop where they're supposed to. But again i need to animate on maya, there are so many tools i use so using blender would limit me too much.

I might be wrong, but i believe that is the way is supposed to work, in fact, its always been like that: Previously your limbs and head would return to its normal state (the internal SL animations every avatar has) because there were animations controling these bones underneath. But the additional bones do not have these underneath animations. So lets say you play a closed fist animation. The animation is not looped and ends, but for you, remains closed. Other avatar arrives and sees you. He sees you open-handed. you see yourself close-handed. Why? Because that avatar does not know which animation you were playing to close your fist. Solution? Many. Again, Its not an error in short: 1: Wait for second life to decide if they want to add "underneath" system animations for facial poses and hands, which anyway would be a bother for custom avatar meshes, since they would be returned to wrong places. I really doubt second life will do anything about this. 2: Do it the pro way: Create your custom, underneath rest poses. 2 frame, loopable animations (remember they are two frame because you need the 1st reference frame). Animation must loop on the 2nd frame, with your rest poses. Upload them with minimum priority (1? 0? cant remember). then play your non loopable animations (with higher priority) and voila! Your hand or face will return to its default place when stoped, and both you and other avatars will see you as you should. Again, I might be wrong, but i have a real feeling this is not an issue but the way its supposed to work.

Hello! I have been creating avatars for a long while now. If you want a suggestion: forget about 3DSMax. You will be able to export the rigged models, but there is no workflow to export animations from 3DS Max. Believe me, I looked for it for years as a big 3DSMax user i was. Nobody has scripted a good BVH export plugin. I gave up. Started using blender at first, which I dont really like, but it was the only workflow I could use to animate my avatars. Daz & Poser will let you animate their default models (no reference of your avatar on it) with very limited and basic tools IMHO. Now I am working on Maya. had to learn it from scratch, but am really happy I started using it. Just be careful to learn what a transform node is, and how to avoid them when building meshes and rigging. There are scripts for maya that allows you build and export animations from it. So if you want to do 3DSMax level animations (or better): try Blender with avastar plugin, specific tool for SL building and animating Or try Maya with Mayastar, a series of templates and plugins that will help you on the rigging and animating process. Specially with an scale issue, where you need to model your mesh in CM, but export the animations in a different scale. Otherwise the model will look 100 times larger than it really is. Mayastar fixes that issue automatically. In both cases you can work without them, but for starters I'd go by the hand of one of these two options. Blender Avastar creator is Gaia Clary and mayastar is Cathy Foil (correct me if i am wrong) Best of lucks with the animations!

Hello bento creators! I recently started updating one of my avatars (a werewolf) to bento since it got broken with the update (who was supposed not to mess with any previously working avatar. but oh well). So got it rigged with bento skeleton and the model is working well on SL.Time to build the animations: Right now I am building complete expressions: Smiles, frowns, growls, etc etc. They move the whole face. And here comes the issue/strange bug. I succesfully made an snarl expression and a few others. Also got the tail animated, hands moving properly etc etc. So the rig is properly done, and the BVH's are exporting as they should. Then i got into an smile expression. 350 frames. The bug/issue/strange behaviour is: Eyebrows, ears, eyelids move as they are supposed to. Jaw, lips, tongue: Moves MUCH slower as it should. In fact, it does not even finish the 20% of the whole movement by the end of the animation. These are the tests I have done: Exporting the whole 0 to 350 frames of the animation: I get the slowest result. Everything moves well except of jaw, tongue and lips. Exporting just 0 to 250: that part of the animation goes sightly faster. Exporting 0 to 150: The short piece of animation moves faster, most likely as it should. Is anybody else finding this issue?

Is there any information about the animation limits we will have to deal with with our bento animations? I need to know if the bone number per animation limit is the same or has it increased? Same goes for the file size of the animations. Because with all the new bones we can create for sure separate animations for the hands, face, etc.... But if we want to do single animations with hand/body/face movement that needs to be synced, that would need a looooot more of bones per animation. And yes, we can split them in multiple animations, but we all know animations on SL do NOT sync well.

This guy wich avatar's name I'm not going to say here have attempted to obtain a free copy of one of the items I sell by this method: He IMed me saying that his girlfriend accidentally deleted the folder asking me for a copy of the item. I only sell items on marketplace, and i keep all the records to track and give support to my customers. Hes not on the list. Not as buyer nor as recipient of a gift. I asked him if he was using an alt, or if someone gave him the item as gift and said that he forgot the name of that "**bleep**" that gave him the werewolf. The question is: What can i do to report an scammer like this? Is it legal to use the Logs of his scam attempt? I reported him as fraud but havent got an answer.

Wow people talking about me in the forums! Now I feel like someone! hehe Omg, Jack, I would forget about secondary skeletons. I've read about using the attatchment bones and animating them, but it sonds just like a pain!! In my case I do classical and old styled script based animation. I just try to keep the mesh low-poly-enough and the scripts smart and lag-free. In fact my meshes have lower prim number than most other mesh furry avatars around. About the seams, the werewolf was my first attempt with that method. Also, I modified the uv-maps to be able to use default clothing. Seams are mostly gone in my 2nd project, the werelion. And the neck-chest fur... I just love it on werewolves!

Thanks for the quick reply! My specs: AMD Athlon X2 Windows Vista 32 SP2 Nvidia Gforce GTS 8800 3GB RAM Using Both Second Life client (most recent version) and Phoenix Firestorm 3.3.0.24882 (most recent vers as well) Upload Mesh: On upload options I Tick Include skin weight and Include joint positions, then I "Calculate Weights & fee" and "upload". I dont click on anything else other than those options. I havent build LOD yet, I just let second life client generate the rest of LODS. What I just do is export from 3DSMAX into DAE, then in SL. High: Triangles: 10937 Verts: 8310 Medium: T: 3455 V: 2690 Low: T: 1105, V: 870 Lowest: T: 397, V: 340 Upload fee L$ 38, Land impact: 34.390, Download: 34.390, Physics 8.640 And the error I get is in the same way you get disconnected when a sim crashes: Screen goes grey, and small window to read chat or quit client. And only on crowded places, on sandboxes I wear the mesh flawlessly and everyone is able to see it. Am I using too much Polys? Oh, using different 5 textures in total, 512x512

Hello! I'm testing a new rigged mesh. Works smoothly on not crowded sandboxes. But if I go to sims with more than 5 or 10 avatars, I find myself not being able to walk, and finally it disconects. The render weight is 29468. I tried with Second Life viewer and Firestorm, both last versions. Please help. Thanks in advance

The mesh looks perfect if rezzed on the floor, but when i wear it, normals flip. It is a rigged mesh, and yes it has all bone information (included with the DAE editing method). Exported using 3dsMax 2011 with latest autodesk collada. Any hint? Thanks in advance

My rigged mesh looks great, perfect sized when I rez it on floor. When I wear it it looks GIANT, titanic, so big it would fit a whole sim. I've double checked the units setup: I'm using metric system, and avatar has got 2 metters tall in 3dsMax. In fact it shows 2 metters when rezzed on the floor. But you wear it and Voila! HUGE mesh! Perfect looking, but huge. I'm using 3DSMax 2011 with method explained on wiki explained here http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Exporting_a_mesh_from_3ds_Max. Anyone having this problem please help