Attention Maya Animators - Free SL Rig

Hello!

I just finished up this Maya character rig for SL. Those who have animated Maya characters before will likely find this one to be familiar.

Be sure to read the Readme for important instructions. If you have any further questions, post them here and I'll try to respond!

This rig is compatible with Maya 7. It comes with everything necessary to export BVH files ready for SL. I might release a Maya 5 and 6 version later if I can figure out how to port it.

Here it is:
http://orion.psyjnir.org/goodies/SLRig_1.01.zip

Edit: Now at version 1.01. There was a minor glitch in the Zero-All button. Also updated the readme and cleaned up the outliner.

You are so damn awesome for sharing this with the public. <3

Too awesome! This is going to be a great help to anyone who has struggled with Poser and would like a nice alternative. Thanks Orion! ^_^

Dang, we have a veritable rash of tools for SL animators appearing on these forums!

Great work, Orion! Thank you for sharing this with the community. Tested here at Linden Lab and it works like a charm. I've been meaning to put together a Maya rig for years now, but you did a better job than I ever could.

-Xenon

OMG I dont have to learn that $%^& Poser. Thank you so much! B-D

DOH!! I have Maya 6!!

But I'll be eagerly waiting the ones for 6!! Been trying to get it to work but I'm not that deep into Maya. For now- You are A GOD!!!

Found a copy of Poser on my hard drive one day, & it's got to be the most whacked-out program. The interface is... BLEH!


**Edit**

AH! I see where I may have gone wrong- Did you use Maya's Bones? Or some other way?

When I try to export to bvh, I get ths error

Warning: line 84: fopen: unable to open file "C:/Documents and Settings/My Documents/maya/7.0PLE/prefs/bvhexport_prefs.mel

Reinstalled Maya. Now I get Syntax error when I try to Export it.

Very cool! Now if only someone would do this for 3ds max. Not being a character animator (and not being able to maxscript my way out of a wet paper bag) it's not going to be me.

Over Sleeper,

It looks like you are using the free Personal Learning Edition of Maya. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has been crippled to not allow the export of much of anything useful. If someone can verify that the BVH export script does work with PLE please post.

Xenon

Yea, I use 3DS Max more than Maya. It would be great to have an exporter work with Character Studio Bipeds. Kinda wish I was a programmer now!

PLE doesn't allow you to export. It is blocked so as you cannot use what you develop in PLE for commersial purposes.

Hi there!

First of all, thanks a million for the cool tool! I made an animation using it and it worked fine, till i uploaded it and my character rotated in the world while doing the animation. I went back and made sure i had no keys on the supermover or anything else that might cause it. Now i'm kinda wondering what i did wrong....

If anyone out there can help me out with this i'd really apreciate it.

Hey, thanks for all the compliments!
First off- Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the exporter will not work for Maya PLE. I wish it did, but I can see why they wouldn't want exportation functionality in PLE.

Lidz- I've never observed what you described before. Did the animation rotate inside of the SL Animation Upload preview, or only when you ran it in-game? It could have been an AO interfering with it, I wouldn't know without more information. If you want, I'd be willing to take a look at your Maya animation and try to figure out what's going on.

There was no rotation in the maya viewport and i checked well....i think. When i previewed it in SL i saw the character move but i uploaded it anyways and when i played it in the world the character was definitly rotating.

Last night i tried to make a simple pose, 30 frames with minimal movement , and i discovered that whenever i would put some keys in the rotation of the torso i would end up with a character whose feet slide on the ground. I mean that the character would rotate in the world as if the IK on the feet didn't get carried to the SL engine.

If you would be so kind as to give em an email i can contact you at i would love to send you a copy of the maya scene and the .bvh export so you can give me the best advice possible and we can figure this whole thing out.

You can contact me at [email]sillyfourmi@hotmail.com[/email].


Thanks

Ok, I see what you're talking about. I was able to reproduce a similar effect by rotating the root control downward on X 90 degrees or so, and then rotating it again on its local Y while it was in that position. This looks like some sort of problem with the exporter.

I was able to find a hack. If you key two or three extra frames of the root control in each position, sometimes this fixes the problem and other times it lessens it. I'm going to continue messing with this to look for a better solution. I think for the most part you're pretty safe if you keep the root rotations toned-down. But keeping things toned-down sucks.

I’ve used this rig to produce a couple walk cycles and some animations for a gun with no problems. I think it’s when you start doing dances or anything where the root is dynamic that you’ll run into trouble. :-\

I am a Maya PLE user, but not terribly advanced on the technical side (MEL etc..) but i do know that PLE was shipped with an Unreled (unreal editor) Exporter. so i know there is some export capabilities, i just dont know how to do it myself, or even how to suggest someone approach the problem.

I would really love if someone could look into it and see if it could be done.

Alternatively: is there a known exporter/converter for Unreal Models (.UTX i think) to Second Life? if so i could expot the Maya PLE Model to UTX then convert to something useable in SL. Kind of a hack workaround ... but hey.. im reaching.

yeah i just found this from the Maya PLE info at Alias

"The following MEL commands are not available: system, fopen, popen, fwrite, fprint, cmdpipe, movIn and movOut. "

fopen wont work in PLE so that would be why the exporter fails straight off.

bummer.

ah well

I'm going to try it anyway but dose anyone think that re doing the IK structure would screw anything up? I'm used to working with translating IKs rather than rotating joints. I made one decent animation by FK animating stuff and that took me about 2 weeks...

I've saw a video (a SL U2 spoof video) where the avatars had hand controls and mouth controls. is there any way to incopereate this into the rig?

Ryoku-
You can toggle IKs on and off for the arms. The attributes to do this are under the "root_control."

As far as I know, you can't control the hands and facial expressions through BVH files. It has to be scripted in LSL.

Hope this helps!

Yep no hand or mouth controls via the BVH's/anims.. But inside your poseball script you can do stuff like make the mouth open and pretty much any of the stock expressions. Hand movements apparently are erratic, but done in the same way.

On another note, a HUGE HUGE thanks to Orion Neville for the rig. The amount of times i was ready to throw my monitor out the window because of poser's strange controls and occasional erratic behaviour (still dont know if it was how i was doing stuff or if its just poser, but it always went MENTAL when i was almost finished something and did that last preview). Now if i could work out how to size the rig to about the same as my AV, as well as an easier way to do multi person anims i'd be over the bloody moon

Thanks for sharing this, Orion. Playing with it now. Very cool.

Hey man, I love the rig, but having some problems. I'm doing a sit animation. I set it all up like you said, then basically the position is a sitting one, like a guy pose one leg resting on the other. The only animation I did was make the one leg swing back and forth a bit and rotate the head. Exported the bvh and uploaded into SL. The problem being, the arm positions I had set did not take, they where back to default, and the leg that was resting on the swinging one is now out streight as well, as if I had not touched it. Not sure what I might be doing wrong. If it would help I could send you the bvh and the scene...

Any help you could give would be great,
Anderion

Has anyone gotten this working in Maya under OS X? When I open the file in 7.01 under 10.4.6 Maya crashes. Any ideas?

I was wondering, is there a way to lock the knees on this rig? so that they dont respond to the moving of the feet? i wanted to play with some various animation oddities, like reverse knees, tiny anims, and things of that sort that i cant seem to get to happen with the rig as it stands without modifying somethings on the technical side that is beyond both my knowledge and skill.