Custom Handshapes/Facial Expression - Possible?

I am completely new to SL and animation. When I joined SL I was fasinated by all of the different poses, gestures and animations that could be created.

IRL I am a fluent American Sign Language user and was excited at the prospect of bringing that part of my life to SL.

I downloaded 2 free animation programs (DAZ & Avimator), but I kept reading abt. Poser, so I purchased Poser 5. I love the program and quickly created a test pose representing the letter "A" in sign language.

I went to upload the pose onto SL and it: 1st could not read the animation (probably did something wrong), 2nd asked me to designate a handshape and/or facial expersion.

Is it really the case that SL does not support custom handshapes and facial expressions or was i interpreting these prompts incorrectly?

Any help or input will be greatly appreciated.

Correct. It is unfortunate that you didn't ask this before purchasing Poser. Bones and morphing for hand and facial animation are currently too much to expect out of realtime 3D graphics. You know the 40 avatars per sim limitation? With hand and facial animation supported, it would be more like 4 avatars per sim.

You could create waldoes, that is, synthetic hands. They could be programmed to act out the ASL.

Not that this would be easy...

From what I understand is that BVH doesn't support fingers and facial expressions. Or it's just the SL uploading code that doesn't support it. I can't actually remember the 'explination' given. I'm pretty sure it doesn't have to do with lag, as if you think about it a rotation of a finger shouldn't be any more laggy then the rotation of the head. The laggyness of that many people didn't used to be that bad, but with high prim hair and accessories makes it how horrible it is today.

They are 'working' on something that will allow people to mod poses/animations in world that add facial expressions and finger movements. Code name Expressive Puppeteering. If and when that will happen is anyone's guess. Read More

From what I've read, the sl avatars use morphs, not bones for head and hand movement. I think bvh just doesn't support morphs.

well your both rite in a way.

SL avatars operate off of Morphs, this is prodominantly how we can edit the aperance of our avatars. The Face and Fingers of the Avatar are driven by these morphs more than any other parts of the body. it has little to do with the BHV files with the exception that the information for those particular parts of the body do not exsist on the SL skeleton, where you might have the information in them they cant be used.

Frankly Morphs are very expensive to run. they take a lot of memory and processing power but the process is sound... for highend 3d packages like Poser 3dS Max or Maya. It has been implimented well in SL but they stopped one step short of making the charactres animate well.

That's true if the only part of the av that moved was the finger, but the problem is that the more joints, the more of a processing hit. The processor hit from a single joint is no different between body parts, but they add up. Adding bones for fingers would be 30 more joints, over double the current load.


Admittedly I have yet to read that link, but I've seen several demos of Expressive Puppeteering (eg. LL was demoing it at SIGGRAPH) and it has nothing to do with facial animation. It's a way for people to drag body parts around to make poses in-world.

well if it was rigged really intensively there would be more than 30, fo base finger support you only really need the knuckle and a finger joint at the fist of second joint of the finger depending on the primary use of the animation, for gripping or simple animation gestures (which would be more than enough for SL) we would only need the base of the principal.

morphs take up more memory than bones do. if the hands and face didnt have morphs on them anymore that should leave enough room for more animatable parts.

Fine, 20 joints. That's still double the current skeleton.

The SL Avatar is a moderately efficient model, changing its skeleton wouldn’t affect the rendering cost that much. What really changes the load is topology, the more polygons you have being rendered the harder it is to render in real-time. When you consider the SL avatar 40 in a world would probably only need about maybe MAYBE 200 MB of memory including textures.

Running the world around them is what really kills your frame rate. Arguing the amount of data in the rigging of an avatar is a matter of less than 300kb even with the extra information, animations are just as negligible and since they are streamed they don’t require that much memory anyway. When you think about the amount of information on the rig which is about maybe 30 bones and your dealing with 2 sets of 3 values in the rotation translation matrix, compared to the volume of data in polygon topology the size difference is very clear.

If it came down to nickeling and dimeing for performance it should be something that can be turned off. The base Avatar model is one of the only things in the user client that is run locally so it wouldn’t hurt performance if it just didn’t use the slightly more involved model.

basicly the point i'm making is; yes, they would add up but even at the max level of Avatars in a sim the diffrence wouldnt make a substantial diffrence.