yet another free animation editor

Those people aren't keeping up to date. Only being able to use poser is so last week! We have two excellent free SL animation editors now, such as the one in this thread. Scroll back for the download link.

*drools*

Thanks for this incredible piece of work Sadly, I'm a Mac user, but I still appreciate your incredible efforts

a new version of slat is available at sourceforge. (it looks like attachments are still disabled in this forum)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/free-bvh-editor

new features:

a pose palette, where you can select a pose and paste it into your animation, and put your own poses into the palette. you can load and save palette files, which might help organize your poses. on the other hand, you can put up to 24000 poses in one palette, though i haven't tested more than about 40 poses at one time.

an xz plot, which is sort a birds-eye view of the hip horizontal translation. take a look at xz_demo, screens F1 F2 and F3, which show the same animation from different camera angles. especially the one on F2, with the xz plot (the egg shaped loop) and the normal plot of hip Y rotation: those two plots work well together for animations that move around a bit. note that you can scale the xz plot and the normal translation plots independently.

a joint selector, which controls which joints are affected by copy, zero, and blend operations. you could use this to splice the leg motion from one animation with the upper body motion from another animation. that's mainly what xz_demo is: my runner's legs from the old demo, together with SL dance1, and a little tweaking.

slightly improved camera controls. not as nice as those in SL, but a little better.

your old projects should work fine, with maybe a simple setting here or there. let me know if your old projects don't work or are very difficult to use with this version. you can email me the symptoms, and the project too, if you like, to "r b 7 6 5 4 3 at y a h o o dot c o m". thanks for any feedback, especially the negative kind. lol. i'm serious - if you can identify a semi-repeatable bug, i want to hear about it, either in this forum, or via email. (any bugs that are not repeatable are your fault. lol. i'm kidding. of course i am.)

fixed a few bugs, and added some new ones.


as usual, you can get the source code as well.

oh, by the way, gwyneth, this *was* a drool free thread. you can just clean that up.

p.s. i've found out the hard way that i don't see the really hilarious bugs until i upload a file, so don't be surprised if this version, 1.004, quickly becomes 1.005, 1.006...

Been playing around with your animation editor and having fun. Still trying to sort out things like being able to find the ground and make a pose that is laying down or sitting on the floor... but otherwise overjoyed that I can work on animations without having to have/learn Poser.

Looking forward to any updates.

Many, many thanks...

Great stuff!!! I'm really excited to knock out some detailed animations!

Dynauld

thanks dynauld and thorn.

as for the ground or floor, at some point i will add that feature, but for now you can accurately control that aspect as follows. first, if you have release 1.004, and the xz_demo project is intact, load it and press F3. on that screen, the camera is zeroed, so you are looking straight at the avatar, and there is a line marker across the screen that represents ground level. the single plot on that screen is the y axis for hip translation. you can drag any plot point up or down to place the lowest foot on the ground, in the air, or beneath ground level.

if you don't have that project, just click on 'zero camera angles' in the anim menu to make sure you are looking directly at the avatar. as for the line, i created it by clicking on 'new line' in the markers menu. you can then drag the line around by the left end, and change the length and angle by dragging the other end. when you add the default first frame, make sure that the feet in that pose are just touching the line that represents ground level. then, in all the other frames, body parts that you wish to be in contact with the ground should just touch the line, and other parts should be above it.

at least that's how i think it works. i haven't done much experimentation with lying, kneeling, etc., so it's quite possible that this method needs some refinement. one thing that might affect your results is whether or not your avatar has similar bone lengths to those in slat. if you are particularly taller or shorter than the basic model, you might find yourself floating in the air, or embedded in the ground. in those cases, unfortunately, trial and error seems to be the fix. by that i mean, in slat, you would put the default pose just touching the line, and all poses that are more or less erect just touching the line, but kneeling, sitting, or lying poses will have to be offset above or below the line by some amount that can only be found by experimenation: making an anim, uploading it, and looking at the result. this tedious and inefficient approach can't be the best we can come up with, i would think. earlier in this thread i proposed a way to attack this problem by having someone create some type of measuring pole in SL where you could determine the height of your hips, and then enter a scale number into slat which would fix all your animations once and for all, at least for that height person, but no one responded to the idea, and i haven't had time to research it, so for now i can't add much more info.

and, yes, there is a new release in the pipeline, probably due out in a week or two. or three.

thanks for the feedback,

rod

ok im back. i was thinking about what you said, about lying down: my next SL adventure will be as rolling man. i just roll through town. ok maybe that's sick. lol

ok

bye

rod

It would be great if we had an update to this from Rod.

Just sayin'.

It looks great, and I'm looking forward to making some dance anims. I uploaded a test anim today, and found a problem:

Nothing below the waist animates.

I thought I just had the perterm settings wrong, or had misunderstood which setting ment the anim takes over from the normal actions. I then saved the anim with everything perturbed and nothing perturbed, and with them all the legs are stuck in the normal stand anim, regardless of the priority given to the anim.

So what I'm asking is twofold:
1) Do you check the boxes for the joints you want to control or the joints you don't need to control?
2) Is the priority setting for anims high first or low first? Which has priority ofer the other, 1 or 4?

Sorry to sound like a noob.

I'm trying to do something fairly simple: have the avatar spin around on an axis. So I set up 30 frames, and set keyframes at 7 15 and 22 for a fairly smooth division. No matter what I do, the avatar spins in one direction then at some point snaps back in the other direction; it won't do a complete rotation.

Something I'm missing here? Is it possible to have the scales go from 0 to 360 instead of -180 to 180? That seems to be the problem, when the avatar needs to go from -180 to 175 for example it snaps around in a near complete circle, completely what I don't want. I've tried 'fix bvh 180 problem' but that doesn't really seem to do anything.

Apologies if this is a FAQ but I couldn't find the answer.

I think so. I've only had the app open for like 3 minutes and I'm ready to uninstall poser. I always considered poser to be "a bit of a laugh". I'd boot it up, put people in silly poses with dolphins in their ears or something and be done with it. I have done some anims in poser too but nothing too deep. What always gets me down about poser though are these three "features":

1. Super-long mega-extended hyper-drawn-out boot time technology
2. Irritating interface system with integrated confusion
3. Gargantuan never before seen memory footprint of hugeness

Your app however will allow me to create simple (or possibly complex, dunno yet) anims without any of the above features.

It would appear though, that if you want to compete with the big boys, you'll need to add some huge pauses on boot, lose a few menus and pack the human genome project into ram at regular intervals. Please don't though.

Big fat props from the Dave

Rod,

I am having some difficulty using the copy from sel1 to sel2 function....

If you get the time, could you possibly give an explanation ofhow it works?

Also, I couldn't quite get how to save a pose to the pallette and recall it?

I do LOVE your tool, though. Thank you soooo much for making it.