Abu Nasu

I am more than cool with that, Heb. As a matter of fact, it tickles me pink. You said that you quit dev on your own project because of SLAV et al. I did pretty much the *exact* same thing. Just for giggles, I did a quick peruse of my old stuff. A lot of it is starting to come back to me. There was something about type-casting in Max that I was having a problem with, so I did a text dump of all of the LLM files using VB. From there I had zero problem reading into Max. I still have the original, straight-up raw text dumps of the LLM files. Makes me wonder if I should offer them up to the community or something (I think I did once along time ago, but I can't remember for sure). I think I am going to head in the direction of resurrecting. Dig back in from the very beginning and ride it all the way through.

Looks like two major hurtles. :sigh: The first being SLAV rig. This I know would be no big deal. Just basic pre-animation data and some re-arranging. Even manipulating the pivot points of the bones and vert weights is not a problem. The only hard part would be the semantics of it. The second hurtle, the new one, is now the mocap files for MotionBuilder. I did some poking around and it looks like MotionBuilder friendly mocap files have all joints have ZYX as the order of rotation. This is a completely new can of worms. I have more poking around - and quite a bit of thinking - to do. The possibility of me bowing out has become very real. Hard to say right now. In the meantime, take Ichago's advice. The math required is already there in BVHacker and Poser. Or something else that you know works.

I thought I was being smart, but I was being stupid. Now I have *zero* fbx support. Heh. But I won't let that stop me because I'm in full-on battle rage mode. My tenacity and deviousness know no bounds. Limits? What are those? I live for these kinds of fights. The immediate goal is now to get me the information that I need. Screw max files, fbx files, 3ds, obj, and all of those. I will write my own MS exporter for the SLAV output, get it to you, you run it, and get that raw data to me. Big ol' regular low-tech text file with all the information that I could ever want to kick nuts. If you are still in, know that it will take some time. I'm gonna have to learn MS and MS file I/O all over again. Take lots of notes and all that. And hopefully MS hasn't changed so much that you won't be able to run my scripts. However, if you don't want to do this, I'll understand and walk away. Challenge accepted?

I was hoping that you had a way of getting BVH out of Max other than my exporter. Kind of a bad assumption on my behalf considering how somethings went back when I was developing it. Okay, time to get a little long-winded with my thinking. I had assummed that you are using SLAV because of the custom avatar things. Tinies and non-human, absolutely. Mesh things work fine because verts are verts. All that is really needed is position, UV and possibly weights. Another assumption. I assume that rotation order is preserved between Max and MotionBuider. Shame on MotionBuilder if it is so heavy-handed as to say, "Use XYZ all the time!" I highly doubt that is the case. I'm willing to bet that rotation order is preserved, even when exporting BVH from MB. Yes? More big assumptions on the way. Now, even though I can't use SLAV, I did notice that there are XML files in its directory. For example, avatar_skeleton.xml does have bone information in it, like position - but not rotation order. Strictly for avatar appearance reasons and bone rotation order is not needed. If you create an SLAV rig in Max, I highly doubt that proper rotations are in the bones because that information is not in SLAV's directory. Max will default to XYZ. I believe that if you change SLAV bones order of rotations in Max, then they will be preserved the rest of the way through. If you change them properly, then you will get a final animation that is proper. Make a script that will change the names of the bones and order of rotations. Run it as soon as you create an SLAV rig. Put it in a toolbar or something. Then you should be good to go. Do the default female with SLAV (free in trial and should be okay). Save the Max file, upload it, and I will see if I can open it (Max 8). If I can, then I'll do the script. I seriously want to kick this one in the nuts... but in a good way.

I don't have MotionBuilder and I'm not going to try to get a trial. And I can't install SLAV because apparently it doesn't get along well with Max 8. Looks like I'll be flying mostly blind. I have been running this through my head quite a bit trying to figure out how to trouble-shoot this with the least amount of pain possible. And I think we (you) need to start with SLAV. Get SLAV rig into Max. First thing to check is the order of rotations of the bones right in Max. Select a bone, Motion > Rotation > Euler Parameters > Axis Order, and see what it tells you. If they are all the same, say XYZ, you might get lucky and be able to fix all of it right there. If I remember correctly, the axis order actually has to be backwards from what the LL BVH files say. If an LL BVH file says ZXY, then tell Max to use YXZ. The next step is to get a working SL anim out of SLAV and Max sans MotionBuilder. Once you manage that, then try adding MB at the end of your workflow.

Yeah, I'm still kicking around and keeping an eye on things. Waiting for a challenge that I can sink my teeth into. Compared BVH provided by LL and the output from my own BVH exporter just to illustrate. Both show rotation order something like this: JOINT rCollar CHANNELS 3 Yrotation Zrotation Xrotation JOINT rShldr CHANNELS 3 Zrotation Yrotation Xrotation JOINT rForeArm CHANNELS 3 Yrotation Zrotation Xrotation The rotation order is different for quite a few bones (limb hierarchies). Not only is that interesting (and a pain to keep track of - don't get me started), but all bones should have local Y as the up. I've never used MotionBuilder and I doubt I can find a trial for my dinosaur machine. But I imagine that there has got to be options or preferences somewhere to re-arrange rotation orders. Hmm... looks like MB can do Python, which might be a place to look. Or BVHacker as mentioned by Dilbert. I'm a very hands-on kind of guy and I don't take "no" for an answer from software. But the best I can do right now is hopefully get you going in the right direction. Other than that, wait a bit more to hear more chimes from folks. Edit: Okay, even though I can't help as directly as I would like to, my curiosity is getting the better of me. Would you mind posting one of your wacky MB BVH files so I can take a peak? Pretty please?

Just opened one of my old Max anim templates for SL from when I did the BVH exporter. When I look at the axis in local space, the main for the arms is X and the main for the legs is Y. Haven't done this kind of work in a long time and I've never used MB, so I'm not sure if that tid-bit will help. The only other thing I can think of is order of rotation. Nitty-gritty. I say open a known working and a wacky in a text editor and compare them. Look for corresponding lines that look like this: CHANNELS 3 Yrotation Zrotation Xrotation In theory, it shouldn't be too difficult to manipulate them rotations, or swap certain axis, to straighten things out.

"However, the thing I remain confused about is how the directions of X and Y (R and G) are set in the tangent plane. Without that, the diagrams could be spun around the normal without changing anything. What decides which direction is the X axis here? My guess would be that it's the U and V axes of the UV map. So I want to know if that's true." I think what you are looking for is the TBN matrix. Tangent, Bi-normal, Normal. It correlates local object space with uv space and eventually into world space. This is how I am able to do faux lighting effects with normals maps right in Photoshop. Not sure if that will answer this particular quandry, though.

I bought a medium Bamboo sometime ago. I'm not super serious and it suites me fine (so far). My only real gripe is the pen. Way too light and it feels like a plastic straw. Very annoying and makes for feeling the buttons near the knib a real pain as I have a tendency to rotate between my fingers as I draw. My fingers then feel for the knib buttons and they are in the way wrong spot. I do know one guy that was very super serious about his digital art. He took on a second job during the summer doing landscaping just so he could get the biggest and baddest Intuos (we barely saw him at all during that summer - blood, sweat, and tears to get it). He did, in fact, get a much bigger desk to accommodate. I think he went with an L-shaped desk, but I don't remember for sure.

When doing something like this, all matIDs are in mapping channel 1. This can get confusing since you usually only want to see one matID at a time for unwrapping. Hide all matIDs except the one that you are currently unwrapping. When you bring up the Edit UV (Unwrap UVW) dialog, there should be a drop-down to select which matID is visible. Use that and keep it all in mapping channel 1. Goes a long way to keeping the confusion level down. One thing to watch out for is to make sure that your UV chunks are properly broken up.

First thing that I ever built was my glasses. Some tori and some boxes. No idea at the time how to hack them smaller, so they are kind of big on my smaller shape - comical actually. No lenses and flat black. I just don't feel right without glasses, even on my avatar. When scuplties first appeared, the first thing that I made them was better glasses. Much better shape and lenses. Then I did some basic texture work for myself. Made myself a grungy skin and ran around as a jungle boy. It was in my jungle boy "Lord of the Flies" guise that I made my second little build: a gas can. Pure red with GAS written on the side with a yellow handle and yellow nozzle. Again, comical. While I was building it in a sandbox, I was zoomed in a bit and still getting used to making things with primes. Someone came up to me that I couldn't see in my current camera state and asked me about it. I said that I was making a gas can so I could set fires and cook critters that I caught. When I was done, I looked around to see the person that I was chatting with. That was when I met my first furry. I thought that it would be awkward at first considering our conversation, but it was all good. I might have to go jungle boy again and shake people up like I used to. Chasing furries around with my spears. One time I walked into a first-aid station all grunged up and said that I had a boo-boo. Poor nurse didn't know what to do. I also have a Fake ID that I made and used to flash to get into clubs. Not so much the first build, but the first handful. Good times.

Strange things indeed. I highly doubt DevIL has anything to do with the Preview problem. It really shouldn't. Now, from what you've said about it being sometimes and all that, I can't think of anything in particular at all. So, I am perfectly fine with chaulking it up to quantum mechanics. It either is or it isn't, but you don't know until you look. Ah, but the real strangness is that this is the second time typing this post. Apparently, while typing a sentence or two about blaming quantum mechanics, I crossed the event horizon that causes my computer to reset. Hmmm...

There was a question asked right before the forum changed again. Looks like we have stickies again, which is good news. I did test MCH with an old demo of Painter 7 and the preview was all black. However, once I committed MCH, all was fine once I got back to the working document. This means that working with MCH might be blind depending on your host. I honestly don't know if this is due to non-compliace of FilterMeister or non-compliace of non-Photoshop hosts. The app in question was The Gimp, of which I have no real experience with. Claire the Awesome did show how to get The Gimp to use MCH, but I do not recall if she said that the Preview was working properly. That's all I got.