Export Bone Length

Hi,

every avatar has different size and bones. To create an animation, it is necessary to know these dimensions and I understand that they are included in a bvh file. (Right?)

How can I find out the bvh-dimensions of an avatar? Does any tool or viewer exist to export shapes into bvh?
(And does any tool exist to export animations back to bvh?)

Thank you
Doris

Hi Doris

Don't know why no1 has answered yet and I hope you see this. Ok, the program I like to use to edit animation does not allow me to change the avatar height. Height in an animation only becomes important when the avatar is sitting on the ground. Or atleast most of the time. So, they trick is to adjust the T frames hip height so that it moves the animation up or down within SL to adjust for different avatar size. Yes, I know its a real sucky process which leads to giving LL way more lindens becasue of trial and error, but as far as I know, it is the only way. Plus, if you get and inworld height checker, then you can gauge your T frame heights using this.

Oh, I myself have already forgot this..

I'm not talking about height only, also the different lengths of the arms cause problems when you try to touch something. Let's say you try to touch your own nose: with one avi your hand is too far away from your nose, with the other it ends inside your head.

As for your worries about wasting L$s to upload, you can use the beta-grid to test. It costs also L$, but you have enough of them and they are not worth anything (you can't buy or sell them)
And / Or you can use the Emerald viewer where the preview of the animation is done on your real avatar (instead that ridiculous tiny blue window) before you upload (and pay).

Thanks for your answer, Medhue

Maybe this will help: http://pastebin.com/f251ac81b
Throw out the rotations (or else you'll see the hovering pose I was in when I generated it), and you have the relative positions of all 123 valid joints and attachment points that can be animated (and the 124th, mRoot which is now broken)
The ones to be concerned with mostly start with the lowercase m

?

What's that?
Is that the shape of my avatar?
How did you do that?

Nono, it's essentially the lengths of the bones, which never change no matter what shape your avatar is
I wonder now if I misunderstood the question... but if you're looking for the correct bone lengths to use without deforming the avatar, those are what you'd be looking for. I used them to make an undeformer.
Hope that helps somehow

Also, Animeeple allows you to import your avatar, then you can test your animation on it. Maybe soon they will add in an animation editor to it. Emerald viewer allows for seeing the anim on your avatar before you upload it.

Any changes to the shape of the avatar will affect how the animation fits and looks. Not much we can do as animator but to tediously create different animations for different sizes and try to hit all of the most common sizes. Then hope LL doesn't break them all, lol.

Doris, are you intending to animate only for you?

if you create an animation for anyone to use you can only use approximates - everyone else will not have your shape - obviously.

You can change someone else's shape (to some degree) with deform animations, but that would be somewhat intrusive in my estimation.