Ricky Shaftoe

Thanks for your reply, @Aglaia. Yeah, it sounds like I should buy Avastar or Bento Buddy. I'm still reeling from the $300 price for Cascadeur's Pro license, so I may wait a little bit, lol. But it would be nice to have one of those tools, for the reasons you describe. I also test with the Belleza GenX Classic, and with both Signature GIanni and Belleza Jake.

@RohanaRaven Zerbino Thanks for that detailed and helpful reply. You are certainly right that proportions are a more important metric than just height. I just happen to be working on an against-the-wall sex anim for which height (or at least height-affecting parameters, like "overall height" and "torso length" and "leg length") seems to be the most important variable -- but is also easy for the user to work around, simply by moving one avatar up or down. Yes, side-to-side differences matter: her hands on his hips may end up inside his spleen, or 6 inches off his hip. But those horizontal differences not as much a deal-killer for this animation as height is, since if the genitals don't line up, nothing makes sense. Near the end of the thread you linked (which was very helpful!), @WarmAnimations Lisa had an interesting post as what she sees as crucial shape parameters for women. I'm curious what your reaction is to that post. I may try applying her shape to my testing alt. Do you think the coming puppetry feature will affect any of this?

I have been working on some custom animations for a client, and she pointed me to RNP's suggested shapes for avatars. Those shapes date from 2012 or so, and I wonder whether they are too tall for today's avatars. When I wear the female shape on a female character, I see 2.04m height when I use appearance/edit shape. But threads in this forum suggest an average female height around 1.7 or 1.8m for women. Likewise, when I wear the male RNP shape, I get 2.14m. But threads here suggest an average male height of more like 1.9m these days. Maybe more importantly, the RNP shapes suggest only a .1m difference in height between the average man and woman, which impacts how to pose men and women when you want them touching each other. Maybe I should be measuring with a measuring stick, rather than the appearance /edit-shape screen? I know there are other threads on this subject here, but they're all a bit out of date. Can anyone point me to up-to-date info? I know RNP is an influential and impressive animation house, but I'm reluctant to animate with those shapes as my base. If nothing else, it would be helpful to have some idea of the average height differential between men and women -- are men on average only 0.1m taller than women? For what it's worth, I typically test with a man of 1.95m height, and a woman of 1.70m height.

I can see why women enjoy shopping so much in SL! The choices are much more interesting for my female alt than for me. Even a simple pair of shoes is a hoot. I can apply dozens of tints to the straps, sole, and heel. With my guy shoes, I pick a color and I'm done lol.

@Ayashe Ninetails @Rowan Amore Thanks for your replies. @Ayashe Ninetails hit on the problem: my foot wasn't "pointy" enough, lol. Being a guy, I didn't realize that women's bodies come with five different feet orientation. Or at least, this free Legacy Classic HUD does. Once I changed my foot to the pointiest, steepest, most high-heels friendly choice, presto, all the shoes for TMP fit! One of my friends says my problem is like the "is your PC plugged in?" question, lol. The most basic question to ask a newb. Anyway, problem solved! I even found some clothing that looks nice! Now to upgrade my freebie hair...

It's very kind of you to do this! The ROC and KC Couture options both seem very close, but in every case the demo puts the shoe a bit too low and a bit too far back on the foot. The demos aren't modifiable. Maybe the full-price versions are? Oldest first was a good idea. I see plenty of shoes for "TMP", which I now realize is my body. But as I said above, while the sizing seems right, they're offset on my foot. And I can't edit them to change their position or rotation. Maybe that's a demo limitation?

Good idea. That helped quite a bit, actually. So, any advice on shoes for the free Legacy Classic body? I'm willing to pay up to 200L, say. Free is good too! Just looking for simple black high heels.

For now, my hair mostly hides the issue, but that's not a great solution. Yeah, a choker might be a good idea. Yep, someone upthread pointed me to the notecard with chat commands. That worked perfectly -- once I remembered to take off the body alpha.

Even with media enabled, the Styles part of the HUD didn't work. But these chat commands do. Using them, I finally got BOM enabled. And I had to remove my body alpha after that. (Right?) I like that one! Also the shape that came with it is cute, lol. For now, I'm wearing this skin. It includes face and body? I'm always confused about whether I need more than one "skin", like a face tatoo. I have had a bit of an issue matching the Genus neck to the Legacy Classic free body. So far best results with the Slink option in the Genus HUD. Is that the best choice?

Thanks for all those helpful suggestions! i appreciate the help!

Thanks. I couldn't get the Styles section of the HUD to load. I'll try again. Thanks for the other suggestions as well! Good leads. I appreciate it.

I'm trying to create a passable female alt without spending too much money. I'm willing to spend a couple thousand L if need be, but I plan to use her just for animation testing, so she doesn't have to look fabulous. I do want her wearing mesh. But I'm having trouble understanding what skin(s) she needs to match her free Genus head to her free Legacy Classic body. For now, I'm just wearing an old Redgrave body skin. I have BOM turned in the head HUD. I can't find a BOM setting for the body -- maybe it doesn't support it? People point me to Not Found and say there's a free body skin there, but the only ones I see cost $375L -- I'm happy to pay that, but I'm not sure it's the right thing, and it turns my face gray. Likewise, I saw some Genus face skins there, but there were no demos available try, unless I'm missing something.

Thank you so much, @Aglaia! You are my hero! It’s wonderful that you have donated your time so generously to this community. 🙂

Hi Aglaia, Thanks so much for taking the time to help. I know you've got more important things to do than offer free help to animators like me! Your post on shape keys has gotten me a lot closer to where I need to be! But I'm not quite there yet. I can rig the model in Cascadeur, and it works pretty well there. (I had one odd glitch with elbows bending the wrong way, but I was able to sort that out. I think. Long story.) Unfortunately, when I export back to Blender, the resulting exported file is not divided into channels -- it's just one giant "Female" channel, containing the pelvis and other joints. Your .anim explort plugin can't cleanse this file because its format is different. To try to fix this, I did figure out how to extract layers 3 and 13 from the workbench file. (I just had to right click on them to turn their visibility on, doh.) These are the layers that contain "male" data. If I just export these two layers, it works great in Cascadeur -- but again I can't cleanse it with your plugin after re-export to plugin. Next I tried making a "clean" blender file like your avatar.blend -- just the bones and the mesh, no cameras etc. This gets me closer to the separate channels your plugin needs, but not close enough. I'm unable to reproduce exactly the very spare hierarchy you have in your avatar.blend file for females. I get extra junk cluttering it up that I can't remove. I'm trying to read the Blender documentation to help me with this, but gah. I'll keep trying. I'm hampered because I am not very good with Blender. I do appreciate your help. I'm getting closer. Worst case, I'll learn how to write my own plugin to cleanse the file.

HI all, I'm trying to extract a male bento skeleton and mesh from the Avatar Workbench, but I can't seem to do so. The documentation says there's a male figure in the file, but I don't see it. Am I missing something? Alternatively, could I modify the model somehow? If I broaden the shoulder joints, narrow the hip joints, and make the model taller, is that enough? I'm not even sure how to do this. FYI, my ultimate goal here is to import a male bento rig and mesh into Cascadeur for rigging there. (I think I can manage the rigging of finger bones and other body parts in Cascadeur, thanks to @Aglaia's excellent guide here.) At this point I don't really care about eye or mouth or face animations -- just fingers and the male body. Thanks!

Thanks for your reply, @Aglaia! OK, I'll try adding a genital "tail" to the basic rig. You've already uploaded a rig with fingers; presumably I can just modify that? If not, making my own fingers seems easy enough, now that you've walked us through the process of doing the basic rig. For male genitalia, I can see why it's increasingly necessary for us to animate them. Users increasingly expect the animator to, uh, angle things correctly, lol. And the Ruckus Physics-C shower demonstrates other interesting possibilities, lol. I'm surprised Cascadeur doesn't support facial animations. I may ask in the Discord whether they expect to add that feature. But adding them in Blender sounds like not a big deal. I generally don't love the facial expressions I see in SL, but maybe I'm not paying enough attention. In most cases, is it even necessary for us to animate breasts? Doesn't SL's built-in physics make them move anyway? In most cases, wouldn't that suffice? In some cases, admittedly, we might want to animate a woman or partner moving or lifting the breasts. In that case, I guess I'd amend your basic starting blender file by adding a pair of breast meshes, but would I also have to add a couple of breast "bones" or joints in Blender? And then rig these as "rigid bodies" in Cascadeur? I can see why this process might be giving you trouble, and I might just focus on other things for now, but please let us know if you find a workable solution.

And just to follow up, the rig with fingers worked perfectly for me in Cascadeur, as did the animation exporter. I was able to make a quick jumping animation and upload three different iterations into SL, all in the space of 20 minutes or so. Gotta love that auto-physics feature in Cascadeur! So, thank you so much, @Aglaia! I can animate again! I think you said that in the future, you might be able to upload a more complex bento rig. If you do, I'll be first in line to try it! Thanks again.

This is wonderful, @Aglaia! As you know, you already helped me figure out how to use Cascadeur with the basic SL armature (and Blender 3.5). But this new workflow will greatly speed the process by auto-cleansing the unneeded channels from the animation. Also, I do look forward to trying the fingers! I used to animate full-time before Bento arrived, but I got burned out and stopped. So I have never have animated for bento. Eventually I’ll want to try a full-bento rig including naughty bits for sex animations (a tail for male genitals? volumes for breasts?).

Well, I'm very close! Your cascadeur file works beautifully. The rig seems perfect. But I suspect I'm not exporting properly from Blender. The animation does upload into SL, but when I play it in world, nothing happens. And the exported file is just 2K, which seems small, though it is just 5 or 10 frames with only 2 keyframes. I tried looking at the .anim file with notepad but couldn't read most of it, though I do see the various joints are in there, so something did export. Maybe I'm not highlighting the right thing when I export the file from Blender? Do I need to highlight anything? Nothing? Everything? I just upgraded to Blender 3.5, by the way. I followed your instructions to clean the file in Blender. Having to do that for every test anim would be a major headache, as I usually make dozens, so I can see why you wrote a custom importer. Maybe I'll try to figure out how to do that. Er, python scripting is not my strong suit, but maybe I can learn? Also, is there a way to designate priority level for the animation before committing it to SL? Or is that available only for .bvh files? My .anim file is priority 4. Finally, "Greedy me" wonders whether you might have a bento version of your cascadeur file available, but I've never animated for bento before, so I'm in no rush.) Thanks again! I feel I'm VERY close to the big breakthrough here.

Wonderful! I've downloaded all three files, and I'll give it a try now. Thanks!

Off to try it now! Thanks so much!

Oh glory be, thank you so much, Aglaia! Please take your time -- I can wait a few hours, lol. I really appreciate the help! And having ready-to-use Cascadeur and Blender files would be glorious! Thank you!

@Aglaia Thank you for that fantastic post! I am so excited to try this out; I will spend the afternoon following your step-by-step instructions. I am *so* grateful to you for taking the time to post all this. And yes, I will message you about that plugin to export to .anim. That sounds simpler than trying to fix a .bvh file. I've neer uploaded an .anim file to SL before, only .bvh, but if .anim works just as well, that sounds easier. I do have a couple follow-up questions: 1. SL still needs a T pose in frame 1, yes? To ensure the model is in the T-pose in Cascadeur after using the quick-rigging tool, I've found it's necessary to turn off "auto pose" while rigging. (Someone on the Cascadeur Discord suggested this.) Do you do that as well? Otherwise frame one has the model with arms in more like an A pose. 2. Also, thanks for the info on matching bones in the quick-rig tool. My main question about this is: is it necessary to rename them? I notice that bvh files say "hip" and "chest", not mHip and mChest. But I'm guessing the bvh-generation algorithm removes the leading "m". Thanks again! I'm so excited to try this -- TODAY!

Did you ever get Poser working with SL? I animated for years here with Poser, and I'm debating whether to jump back in -- and whether to upgrade to Poser 13. I obviously don't want to spend the money if it doesn't work.

I made animations for years using earlier versions of Poser, up to Poser Pro 10. I'm thinking about upgrading to 12 or 13, especially as 10 has become somewhat unstable on my PC. Do you know if there have been any improvements in Poser that might help with animations for SL? E.g., a better physics engine?