Bone Machine

I would like to open a dissucssion on the subject of bones, animaiton support and peoples opinions on the possible methods of implimenting them.

I know a bit of information on the subject in personal study of 3d. since bones and animaiton are connected implimenting one could open the door for the other.

I feel that the topic needs to be discussed to see what people think of the topic so we might recomend a plausably sucessful feature sugestion which grabs the attention of the good folks at LindenLabs.

It might help if you clarify your suggestion, which currently doesn't make any sense to me. For instance, Second Life already supports animation, so I'm not sure how "implimenting one could open the door for the other".

Although I would dearly love to have a more flexible and capable animation system, we already have the ability to create custom animations for SL.

So... Having said that, what am I missing here? What exactly are you suggesting?

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well i started off with something that looked like an intimidating 3 page rant going into detail about my "vision" if you will on the subject. i guess i over simplified the post ^^;

well the thought is that objects on the grid need better animation support. if we had the ability to create our own bones we could create our own animations for objects other than our avatars. the animations could supliment our existing avatars without screwing up existing default animations since they would exist seperate from the original skeleton or as just an other attatchment.

more over, if we where given the ability to create bones WORLD objects could be animated in a less chunky fasion than is currently employed threw scripting.

I suggested something very much like this. There are implementations out there in scripting land which will produce a rather smooth animation based on imported animation data, but it's a hack. It'd be much better to have actual bones to bind objects to. This would allow the creation of automatons, or better yet it would allow us to crush our human avatars into as small a ball as possible and just import a sculpted prim body replacement with proper animations.

do you think you could point out some landmarks which take advantage of this? I think i'de like to see some of these in action ^^ probibly where i end up spending a lot of time lol

but yes, if we could get more people everyone could fine a use for them.

bones can also be used as a building resorese instead of having a parent pivot prim we could use bones and duplicate around instead of the hundread prims we have to delete...

I've got one such hack:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtJO0ZKMlw

It implements (fakes) a single chain joint hierarchy. I'm only doing 1 rotation per joint (11 of them) and no translations for each sway of the sign.

the video, still looks a bit choppy though. more than likely it was the fault of the capture process ^^;

what kind of scripting does this use?

The keyword is "bones", and the hint is that he's not talking about avatar animation.

Ryoku, you can check out my reply under the "REAL Modelling for..." thread.

Saijanai, that thing is just awesome, an inventive way of faking it The only problem is that damned 0.2second delay

well that .2 second delay is what kills the animation experiance for me. its like playing a game when it drops frames, its painfuly noticeable and mostly unavoidable.

at current the .2 delay is unavoidable. like many videogames that drop frames you can fix the problem if you tweek apropreately, in this case it would the implimentation of bone driven animations, not the scripting hack...

I did read your other post I have to say it is true. joint constraints arent currently supported, unless SL starts from scratch and rebuilds the world we probibly wont have the animation support desired. though its nice to dream...