Animators UNITE!! WE NEED FACES AND FINGERS!!

What I propose we vote for is:


Ok this is my proposal though I’m not going to submit it until I know I have a fallowing on it.

My background in 1st life is of a student of animation and 3d modeling. Its completely possible to edit the current default avatar to have finger and facial animations without messing up the current animations in use rite now. The process shouldn’t even take that long if the rite person where asked to do it. In fact I could do it in a matter of hours (if not faster). Though my experience is in Discreet Maya [formally Alias Maya] I have the tools to do such a thing and have done so to my own characters in the past.

My question to you is will you help?

Ryoku

Expanding the bone structure to control the fingers would probably be doable, but trying to control the face with bones is always messy, that's why rigs generally use morphs for facial movement. The problem is that the animation files we upload are in a format that only covers the bone movement and not morphs.
a better option might be to have an interface in sl that lets us animatebetween morphs along with the bvh files that we uploaded. Currently we can select a face and hand morph while uploading, but having more options available here would be nice.

That's a very good point, and one I hadn't thought of.

There would have to be a whole new thing to upload in order for facial animation to be feasible. BVH only does bones.
Don't I feel stupid.

Is this at all doable, LL?

As for hands, I'm still not 100% sure what the deal is with them, or why, when set to fist, they don't always stay that way...

Just thought I'd thankya for pointing the facial animation thing out.

Food for thought

The idea of animating in sl could be cool. Just a simple keyframe editor, to tag certain hand and face positions with different sections of the animation.

Bones for faces is very doable. True, rigs often use morph targets instead of bones for renderings but with the lower poly count of an avatar face you can usually get by fine with bones.

The problem with allowing us to import morph targets is one of memory. The entire head has 908 verts with most of the verts naturally clustered around the face. Being fairly conservative in just selecting the verts around the face area shows about 520 verts.

The avatar skeleton has 19 bones, so a single face morph takes as much memory as nearly a full second of every bone being keyed at 30 frames a second, which is really a good bit of memory.

So what's the big deal with memory? Memory is cheap and gets cheaper all the time, right? True, but unfortunately the memory also says how long it takes to push a file from the server to a client. That means any animation that includes a facial morph is going to have to download an extra second of full body keys for every morph included.

Incidentally, each hand is 312 verts, so they're nearly as bad as faces.

What about using bones to animate hands and faces? For hands it's 3 joints per finger for 5 fingers. That's 15 extra bones per hand. Multiply it by two and add in the original bones and you've gone from 19 bones to 49 bones, an increase of over 150%, and we didn't even add in any bones for the face.

Now those bones won't be keyed very often so download time isn't much of an issue but a new issue raises it's head; now the client has to keep a track of 2.5x as many bones for every avatar. Even if they aren't keyed their transforms need to be calculated with every frame.

In the end it comes down to this, hands and faces are small areas of the body that require lots of detail. In the sl avatar they take up nearly 30% of the verts of the model. Controlling them is expensive in terms of download time and rendering time. Considering how badly sims lag right now when you start getting a lot of people in one upping the bone count or the amount of download memory probably isn't a good idea.

That doesn't mean I don't -wish- we could do it. It's just that I don't think it's too likely in the near future.

Actually, using a simple keyframe editor within SL would neatly solve the problem of the amount of data that morphs take up. If we are restricted to animating using the morph targets provided by LL (ie. a standard smile, frown, etc.) then the morph targets don't need to be transferred over the internet because they are already stored locally. It would be like building with prims; the vertices themselves aren't transferred, just basic info about what shape to put where.

This isn't as good as fully importing animation created in an external editor, but it's a practical middleground that is actually within the realm of possibility.


Good summary of the issues. This is pretty much what it comes down to; a balancing act between costs and gain. For the amount that full hand/face animation would cost, the benefits aren't exactly worth it for such small parts.

A simple keyframe editor would fix the amount of data that morphs take up, but as I pointed out later that ups the bone count, which poses it's own problems.

I only totaled the number of bones in the fingers because they are pretty well defined. A face would probably need at least 7 bones (jaw, left mouth corner, right mouth corner, left lower lid, right lower lid, left upper lid, and right upper lid) at an absolute minimum, and given that SL doesn't appear to use weighted verts you would really need a lot more than that.

Even at 7 bones you've added over 35% to the bone count, which is not insignificant.

Why would that add to the bone count? Morphing and skeletal animation are two separate things; if you're using morphs to control the face, you don't need bones. In fact, SL already uses morphs for both face and hands, we just don't have a way to control them other than setting them one per animation (and that doesn't really work anyway.)

I agree that adding bones for fingers is a big addition to an already overloaded system (I made that exact point in my earlier posts,) but Tufif's idea of a way keyframe morph targets in-world is an interesting suggestion. Basically, put a little timeline in the upload editor and let us tag different morph targets to different parts of the timeline.

Sorry. I misunderstood your idea. A keyframe editor that uses existing morph targets would provide some kind of control over facial animations while being easy on the data stream. When you talked about keyframing I thought you meant with a skeletal system for the face.

*cough*

they are doing this. Eventually. Or at least they said they are.

Code name Expressive puppeteering. Do a search.

SL's facial animations are all morphs. Hard coded morphs in the mesh. Same with the fingers. Changing this would have interesting results.

SL's animation format is very tight (with only a minimal amount of waste). Adding morph control would be a big change.

LL was showing off puppetiering at SIGGRAPH this summer. I am rather skeptical about it.

I already addressed this in another thread. Don't know where you got the idea Expressive Puppeteering has anything to do with facial animation, but it doesn't. It's a way for people to set poses in-world by dragging body parts around. I've seen LL demo it a couple times, most recently at SIGGRAPH.

http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2006/08/01/expressive-puppeteering/

ADDITION: Okay, I just found the other thread where you mentioned this. From your own link, LL specifically says Expressive Puppeteering is not facial/finger animation.

The line it two-thirds into the "what is it?" section:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/07/13/notes-from-second-life-views-part-i/#more-288

lol I shouldn't have read that info so quickly. Probably to me it just was blah blah blah expressive puppetering blah blah animation uploaded still superior.

You'd think with that name it would be a worthwhile thing like I don't know.. expression.

*crawls back under her rock*

You got my support 100%! A lot of animations look real stupid right now that could be much more effective with finger animation at the very least!

Animation Overriders would be a perfect example.

In 1st Life, the face and hands make up the majority of body language, pertaining to how you judge a person's character (other than thier actions of course); that bringing back the hand anims alone, would make a huge difference!

Dances would look a lot less "robotic" when your fingers aren't spread in the default position. Not to mention using the vast majority of items (in 1st Life would) require a clenched grip, like motorcycles, food, signs, flags, guns, etc.

You can make a clenched grip now, you just couldn't make that grip open up mid animation.
One work around I considered for doing more expressive machinima animation would be to figure out where ni the animation you want the face and hand changes to happen and split it as seperate bvh files. Upload them seperately (costs more) with different face and hand settings, and then chain them together in a gesture. Then whenever you run that gesture it would play all of it together as a longer animation with limited finger and face movement.
It's a pain this way, but it's the best we have right now.

Hiyaz,

I have made very simple facial animations (ie eye-popping), by using two seperate saved bodies, and dropping them on myself one at a time manually.

I could not find a LSL function to allow scripts to change body parts (or clothing), but it must be possible because there is a 'wear' function built into the inventory giving dialogs.

What do you think? llSetAvatarBodypart([type, key]) or whatever.



TD

Boy, you'd think so - but LL hasn't exposed this functionality to the scripting language, though it's clearly there or the interface couldn't support it either.

And unfortunately, while there are several interesting suggestions about how to handle and load face and finger animations, BVH is extremely rigid about what it can handle. Deviating from this standard by mixing morph data into BVH standard format data would mean you'd have import files that no software currently in existence could create. That is a distinct non-advantage.

Also, while facial animation using bones is possible, most animators abhor using bones for that, and for good reason - it's impossibly difficult. Only a very small minority of professional animators can even do it. (Most of us rely on the highly developed mesh morphing tools supported by every major package out there.) Additionally, facial bones, again, fall outside the BVH specification, and you wind up with the same incompatibility problem.