Avimator released as open source

I decided to release Avimator as open source software today under the GNU General Public License.

I will put up directions for how to access the subversion repository soon. For now, grab the 0.4 snapshot on the site. I will also be adding more comments in the code and cleaning things up a bit.

To compile on windows, you will have to install MinGW (http://www.mingw.org). If someone wants to put together a Visual Studio project, I’ll add it to the source.

Also, if you want to donate some lindens to the cause, I’ll be happy to accept your money!

Thanks!

Mister Plunkett, you are the wing beneath my wings.

Or something.

The changes done for v 0.4 are very nice, Vince.

You've opened up a whole new world for many of us Essellians. For that you are a King of Men!

Thanks, mucho.

LOL... thanks guys.

Sheez! This is compound incredibliciousity!

Well could you describe what this is good for. I have poser do I want this too?

This is an alternative to Poser, RacerX, specially for people who cannot afford to pay US$250 for a multi-gigabyte program that does basically everything in terms of 3D modelling, but which you'll use about 0.1% — just the animations bit — and will discard the rest...

Poser is also a resource hog; specially on the Mac, where it tends to eat more CPU cycles than SL itself (not an easy accomplishment!); and it's prone to crashing, unless you really have a top-of-the-lline computer with unlimited RAM. Support is bad, patching comes once in a year (and rarely fixes what you need), and, well, let's face it — if you won't use it for anything else but doing animations for Second Life, it's simply not worth it. I would say that its redeeming feature has been the interface — very weird for someone used to different styles of applications, but strangely easy to learn from scratch.

Unfortunately, Poser was basically the only/best choice (alternative animation software needed lots of tweakings and conversions to export BVH files that SL "understood" — and they have a very hard learning curve for amateurs).

Enter Avimator. It's tiny, compact, ultra-fast, does not consume any resources, and the interface is so easy that a 3-year-old could do animations with it. It's available for Windows, Mac, Linux, thus covering nicely all platforms that SL runs on. It's obviously targeted for SL — it does what is required (animations!) and nothing else. It's an OpenGL application. Naturally, being so 'brand new', people keep asking for more features to make it 'compete' with Poser; speaking strictly for myself, and having used DAZ|Studio as an alternative for doing animations (which sadly still does not export BVH files... I have just checked on the latest version...), this one is not far ahead to Avimator — give it one or more extra feature, and Avimator will come very near to at least DAZ|Studio...

So! The big news of the day: Avimator is now open source. Congratulations, Vince — I understand that this is a very tough decision to make, and one that is almost impossible to "unmake". I have also read the thread on your forums, and fully understand the issues behind your hesitations. From one million or so open source projects that are around, I'd say very near to 99% are "single-person" efforts — some with enormous success, the others, well, as Vince mentioned, they became "open source" due to popular demand to have something for "free", but people did not really wish to contribute code to the software...

I have nothing against any sort of software distribution; what matters to me mostly is the quality of the product. Open source projects tend to go two ways: either they gather enough interest from a regular community — 10-20 core programmers that make the project go ahead very quickly, and a large host of people that can debug the code and make slight tweaks and give some ideas on how to improve it — or they tend to "die out" as the single core programmer tires easily, has no incentive to keep mantaining the software, and simply "lets it die". I would really be very, very sad if this happens to Avimator. Version 0.4 is perfectly usable — which is something that delights me — but of course, like so many others who use Avimator (even if a bit irregularly in my case!), I would much like to see it grow and expand, open source or not, and see it become a good alternative for doing animations for Second Life.

Vince, I definitely wish you good luck on your endeavours with Avimator, and hope that this "new phase" of Avimator will encourage its users to participate in the development (I wish I were a programmer to help you out...) and make the tool grow — while keeping it fast, simple to use, and small

Best of luck!

Gwyn, thank you! I couldn't have explained things any better. Like I said in my original post, Avimator is not really meant to be a replacement for Poser at all. In fact, you may want to keep both programs handy. I would use Poser in cases where you need to make a complex, or otherwise difficult animation, while Avimator is useful when all you need to do is whip out a quick pose or a simple, sparsely keyframed animation.

EDIT: Also, as Torley has mentioned before, it's also good for spontaneous animation generation when you want to bring a new gesture in-world and don't have much time to spend making it. Until in-world animation editing happens, this is the easiest way to go.

Avimator makes it easy to make animations for SL. It's open source.

Hey, Lindens, why don't you pick up the project and develop it (either thru in-house developers or funding external contractors to develop specific features and maintain it)? (IMHO) You should really make it part of the standard "SL toolset", like the design templates on the website or the LSL wiki.

I've got Poser and used it, and while I do some graphic work in it.. this is great. Thanks for doing something like this, and yes, the learning curve in Poser can be so steep. I look forward to using this.

Vince, thanks so much for making such a useful application...and for your generosity in making it OpenSource!

i second the sentiment in this thread: you are the most generous individual i have ever met online, and possibly offline as well.

it's clearly time to abandon work on slat. if you can use any of the code, consider it my way of thanking you for your remarkable contributions to SL.

thanks,

rod

Vince, you're being modest. You might not believe this, but I'm using Avimator to fix old Poser-made animations that were wrong for some reason :)

Sure, there are limitations to Avimator. There are also limitations to Poser, to SL, to Windows (only Mac OS X is perfect — JUST JOKING :D ). I think I can live with the 'limitations' of Avimator, just because it's so easy to fix "things gone wrong".

Let me give you an example. Poser has 4 distinct ways of doing frame interpolation on each skeleton joint. When I for some reason forget to set them up correctly (and this happens way often), I need hours and hours to go back, joint by joint, to fix each and every one of those correctly. It's a real pain — especially when Poser crashes during that process several times in a row (I know — to use Poser, I should be using a Quad-Pentium Xeon at 4 GHz with 4 GB RAM or whatever Intel has in store these days, or a Quad-G5 Mac... but all I have is a humble PowerBook...).

Yesterday I got the hip's height wrong on Avimator, which I only found out about when uploading. It was as easy as to go back to Avimator, go to each keyframe, and drop/raise the hip to the correct height. And that was all! Took me perhaps 1 minute for a 60-frame animation :) Now, doing the same thing in Poser would probably take me half an hour or so — if I remembered to put all interpolation switches for each and every joint on the "correct" position. If I had missed just one — well, it would be easier to do it from scratch...

So, I understand that we won't have things like "walking paths", or creating dance animations under Avimator "soon". Who cares? :) I can live with what Avimator does now; and it does it quickly, efficiently, and works 99% of the time. What more could I ask for? :)

rod, I'm sorry that you're abandoning SLAT. I must admit I've used it only once, since there was just the Windows version available. I downloaded the source code to see if it was within my abilities to recompile it for the Mac. Unfortunately, it's waaaaay beyond me, which is rather a pity. I also liked the "techno"-stylish interface :) Ok, so perhaps it was not so "useful" for many, but I'm all for giving people multiple choices! I hope that at least you would feel encouraged to co-develop Avimator, since you've got more than the required know-how to do those things, and I'm quite sure Vince would love to get an extra pair of hands to help him out :)

Thank you for the detailed description, Gwyn! I'll have to give it a shot!

"the interface is so easy that a 3-year-old could do animations with it"
Maybe I will try to make an animation again.

rod, I really don't think you should stop working on slat. It has a lot of features still missing in Avimator. I think it may appeal to some of the more advanced animation developers. If you do decide to abandon that project, the offer that I made to you a while ago to join forces still stands. I think together we can move things along much quicker.

Gwyn, I agree. Although I think there is a quick way to do things like what you described in Poser, it is still hard to figure it out unless you know what you're doing...I certainly don't. Thanks for your detailed example.

I can't wait to try it. Thanks so much for making it available. =D

There are an aweful lot of things that can be downloaded from that site; which one do I actually need to compile AVMotion? The minGW packaging system is... not a system. As far as I can tell.

How about making it LGPL rather than GPL so that Linden Labs could potentially use it to make an in-world animation editor?

To answer the question about why you'd want this if you have Poser now:

Well, MAYBE you wouldn't, but I kinda doubt it.

Even if Poser is easier (or just as easy) to use (which I seriously doubt), it probably won't keep up for long if Avimator keeps improving--assuming it needs improving. It's almost always better to have an application with a very specific purpose rather than a general "one size fits all" application that tries to let you do everything including make your toast. (I wish the pathetic MORONS at Microsoft would realize this, gddammit!!!)

This or a similar thread should really really be a sticky by the way.

How sucky would it be for a new player to come along, not knowing about this shell out the cash for Poser, and then realize this is here?

Pretty sucky!

I tried it yesterday and found it useful for tweaking anims I initially made in Poser. Thus I find it useful for small "touch ups" to misalignments. As a gunmaker, this is especially important to me, for gunholds. Thanks for this tool Vince.

-RODION

It's easy, fun, free and it works. I wish all software could hit those marks.

Thanks, Vince.

I just finished a compilation guide, and have put it here:
http://avimator.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=48

Happy hacking!

Someone also posted a very brief notes/basic manual:
http://avimator.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=31

I just wanted to let everyone know that the documentation wiki is up at http://avimator.com/wiki. It's kind of sparse right now, but the pages should be filling up with content over the next few weeks. If you'd like to contribute, feel free!


LL already knows that the code is available for their use without restrictions (I've had some email communication with them about this). So, no worries there.

Also, thanks to everyone for all the kind words, and especially to Garoad for a HUGE donation (I'm not going to say how much it was, but it was big...) It's motivating me to make some more progress on this project.

And on top of that, the creator's a nice guy!

Winning combination? HELLO!